All is Lost: what to make of a film with just one actor?

After a collision with a shipping container at sea, a resourceful sailor finds himself, despite all efforts to the contrary, staring his mortality in the face. (IMDB)

Can you make a movie with just one actor? Will your audience care enough to follow him or her journey for a whole two hours or so? Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but it worked for me. I’m actually a bit too young to have swooned over Robert Redford in his ‘heartthrob’ days, so that’s most certainly not why I remained invested in his character’s struggles for the entire film. This is the first film I’ve seen that focuses solely on a person’s will to ‘never give up’—another film that comes to mind is 127 hours, though that was based on a true story—and I found that I do buy into and take something from these stories, even when they’re riddled errors that viewers like to pick up. Watching this one man rely on his wealth of knowledge and experience to try to salvage his yacht, and having failed there, struggle to survive on a little dinghy in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I was reminded of just how ignorant and inexperienced I am, about how my ‘booksmarts’ simply aren’t enough. It’s a sobering thought.