Open Water (2004) & Adrift (2018)

For all of civilization, humans have used the oceans as a means of food, travel and survival. But it remains a force of power that we have tried to tame at our own peril. For the 10th episode of the GMR, Jim and Kyle reckon with nature and how one survives as desperation sets in. If there's a will, there might be a way!

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Transcript

Open Water / Adrift

Lori: This is the GMR, The Generations Movie Review Podcast.

For centuries, humans have used the ocean as a means of food, travel, and survival. But it remains a force of power that we've tried to tame at our own peril. Today's films look at two different ocean survival scenarios with two decidedly different outcomes. Fair warning, the following conversation may reveal plot details.

I'm Lori Rollner. And these are your hosts, Kyle Krantz and James Rollner. 

Jim: So Kyle, have you ever pictured yourself in survival situations? How do you think you would react in a survival situation? 

Kyle: I think it's all too common to separate ourselves. And we kind of covered this on the Dawn of the Dead podcast.

It's all too common in our world where it seems like we're in the midst of civilization and everything seems to be going well To imagine what if things didn't go well now in the Dawn Of The Deads podcast. We thought of it on a larger scale where society was crumbling. What would we do in that situation?

But there are smaller scales to this. Ffor example, you could be, today, still lost in a jungle, lost in a national park. I forget exactly what the statistic is, but hundreds of people every year simply vanish, go missing in our national parks in the United States, big, vast, open places of land or at sea, large, barren.

It's technically a lot of the seas considered desert. There's nothing out there. Like if you were in those situations and didn't know how to get home and had a limited amount of resources, that's tough to judge. I like to think I'd be conservative with my supplies and smart with my decisions. And clearly not that emotional about everything.

You've got to stay focused. 

Jim: Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were uncertain as to when you would get home or if you would be able to get home or if you would...?

Kyle: This one night in college, I went to go to Boulder to party with some friends and I got separated from them at around 10 p. m. But I was pretty intoxicated at that point, so I didn't make it back home until 7 in the morning. And I didn't know where I was, so I was walking around a foreign city for about 9 hours. I fell in a bush, I lost my shoe, I was running out of, like, water, I didn't know where I was, my phone was dead.

Obviously that's incredibly detached from what a survival situation would be actually out in nature away from humanity. But those hours of the night, there was barely anyone out, there were some sketchy people walking around, uh, Thankfully a Starbucks opened at like 4 in the morning where I was able to go in, charge my phone, figure out how to get home.

What an example to bring up that is a testament to our modern society, right? So my one example of coming close to a situation like that was ironically in an urban center, just at weird hours of the night and under the influence of alcohol. And you found a Starbucks. And yes, Starbucks was the, uh, rescue party, if you will.

And what about you, Jim? Any time where you felt like you were in survival mode, had to conserve resources and look for help? 

Jim: Not at all. I've never been quite the outdoorsy type. I have been in the ocean. I've been in the forest. I've even been in a desert. But I've never been far away from others. I've never been the adventure spirited type that would want to separate myself from the others.

In fact, I'm the opposite. I've always felt like, Hey, you know... If given an option, I'd rather stay back at the hotel by the pool. It's interesting, as we talk about this, there was a Colorado man who recently went missing in the mountains here and this gentleman was found dead with his dog still alive after being missing for three weeks.

So, even though the gentleman most likely died from exposure to the elements, the dog. And not a big dog was able to survive and adhered to the authorities that found the body, that the dog had largely been staying by his owner's side. And it makes you wonder, what did the dog do to survive that period of time?

Eat the owner? No, no, no, no. Things he can't talk about. Well, yeah, it was a horrible thing. I could never describe it. 

Kyle: Yeah, the dog's gonna need a lot of therapy before we unpack 

Jim: three of these. They literally just reunited the dog with the family, with the surviving family. So, I would imagine the dog found some kind of food scraps on the ground.

Maybe found a place to stay warm. By or near the owner. 

Kyle: I've read a lot about ancient battles and modern battles and warfare. And there's the fight response to these situations, fight or flight, or just a freeze, fight, flight, freeze. My favorite story of survival has to be, I think sometime in the mid 20th century, a crew from some kind of ship.

Yeah, close to Antarctica, got stranded on one of the islands down there. And it was like some amount of men, like 10 or 15 men who had to survive for nine months on like some frozen island by rationing out the supplies of the ship and hunting animals and keeping warm. A lot of how they made it out of that situation was mental fortitude of just having the will to live.

So, perhaps in the beginning some of them had a fight or flight or freeze response to the entire situation. But the thing that pulled them through was an incredibly strong leader and just will to live. And the movies we'll speak about today, they both touch on this idea, this idea of like having a will to keep living.

But I think that's a giant determining factor in one's ability to stay alive. I'm also just now reminded of another story of a man who lived... Some, like, 20 or 30 years in some national park in the United States, like, in the woods somewhere. They finally caught up with him and got an interview with him.

And he always tried to stay hidden from, like, normal people, but... He said the only thing that kept him alive during those cold Northeastern winters was just a desire to stay alive. That's the only thing. Like, if you let go, nature's just gonna take you. The world's gonna take you. 

Jim: It's interesting that you talk about the mental fortitude.

The question would be, does that mental toughness exist? If you're isolated, if it's dark, if you're hungry, if you're on your own. And then another thing that occurs to me is thinking about settlers. In the old West where they take a wagon trail out as far as it goes, and then they go out beyond that and they say, okay, we're here, we're putting down the stakes.

And sure, there are other people out there that are surviving, but to these settlers, they have no idea where they're at. They have no idea if help is going to come. They have no idea how far out they are from the next settlement. They're just putting stakes down and making a go of it. 

Kyle: One of the most, uh, famous examples, and I think one of the coolest examples of what you just said is Newfoundland.

Newfoundland, uh, sailed to by Erik the Red of Iceland. He took, uh, some Vikings down into what is modern day Newfoundland Canada, and they established a little Viking settlement. I mean, could you imagine that they didn't even know the size of the continent they were landing on. This was a completely foreign land.

It wasn't like say, Marco Polo's adventure, where he was adventuring somewhere unknown, but there were people there and it was all kind of one continuous area with Europe. Some of those old voyages where they didn't know the size of the land they landed on and wasn't connected to their world. They're setting up there and they gotta survive now.

Those are incredible stories. 

Jim: They may not even realize the land that they're on is something entirely different than where they actually are. A la Christopher Columbus, who thought he was finding a passage to India and ended up being on a continent that he had no idea existed. 

Kyle: The idea of survival is fundamental to life.

It's like one of the two things that's programmed into all life. Survive and procreate. If you don't survive, you'll die. And if you don't procreate, your species will die. So survival is one of the oldest themes or motifs of humanity. Before we can develop culture or explore, we need to survive first. 

Jim: On today's GMR.

We're going to talk about two films that discuss the general theme of survival and specifically survival in the ocean. The first movie is Open Water, which was released theatrically in 2004. It was directed by... Chris Kentis and was produced by his wife Laura Lau stars Blanchard Ryan as Susan and Daniel Travis as Daniel and the general premise of the movie is a young couple decides to take a vacation to give themselves an opportunity to work on their relationship and it ends up Turning into a terrible bid for survival when they find themselves abandoned by the scuba diving boat that they've joined, and they're out trapped in the middle of the ocean in shark infested waters.

Kyle: The second movie we'll be discussing today is called Adrift. It's a story about two lovers who hit a storm at sea and have to survive. It came out in 2018. It was directed by Baltasar Karmaker. Written by Aaron Kendall, Jordan Kendall, and David Bronson Smith. It stars Shailene Woodley as Tammy Oldham and Sam Claflin as Richard Sharp.

Tammy and Richard were a couple that actually was stranded at sea. So this movie is based in some amount of truth. 

Jim: That's also the case. with Open Water, which is loosely based on the true story of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who were part of a scuba diving group, and they found themselves abandoned. Their bodies were never actually found, but their personal effects were discovered some time later, now presumed dead.

Starting with Open Water, I have to say that I found that movie to be one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen. Insofar as, as the movie marches along, the sense of dread continues to build. The couple begins on the mainland discussing their options for vacation. Then they arrive at their vacation locale and they make their plans to join the scuba diving boat.

The night before they have a little bit of an argument talking about where it's going to lead and what they're doing there and how they came to make the plans that they're now executing. They get on the boat and we meet a couple of the other divers. And the fact is, is that they're only going to be in the water for 35 minutes.

But Susan and Daniel had predetermined that they were going to separate themselves from the rest of the group as it's implied that they have a bit more experience than the average diver. They separate while they're swimming. One of the people on the boat tasked with counting the divers miscounts. And the boat takes off leaving Susan and Daniel in the water.

They have their scuba diving outfits on and their oxygen tanks, but they are otherwise completely alone in the water. When you were watching that movie, what was your sense of the danger? What was your sense of the experience of the characters? What was your general sense of How they were reacting to the situation they found themselves in.

Kyle: I kept thinking about this idea of a countdown timer to hopelessness, when the situation is sealed. There was a story that I read once about mechanics or something on an American battleship. In World War II in Japan, somewhere around there, where it was sunk, and the ship fell to the bottom of the sea, but there were like three crew members trapped in an air pocket under the sea, but everything was still on fire outside and no one knew they were down there, and um, When they were discovered a week later, they had died, they had suffocated, they were dehydrated.

It was like a crime scene when they opened it, piecing together at what point, cause you could see like, every day they had a scratch on the wall or something like that. And they were writing stuff down, and they were doing this thing or that, and it became clear at some point, like they lost... They're like, Oh, this situation is hopeless.

So I think this movie is an exercise in that. I think throughout the course of most people's life, we've been in a situation where, Oh, if a couple things go wrong in this situation, maybe I'm in a very, very bad situation. So like in this movie, vacation. Spend money, go on vacation, relax, have a good time.

Two incorrect decisions were made, which were made in real life, where they messed up the count on the list for some reason, and then no one on the ship remembered them, so just two steps and then they're gone. And now they're in a completely different world where as time goes on, things get more and more hopeless in that situation.

Like they're lost, they're stranded. So it was really an exercise in that and we go through the stages. So in the beginning they're like, Oh, well let's just stay here. And the beginning is like, we're not going to try to swim over towards that ship because what if our ship comes back to look for us and then we're not where we are.

Jim: Certainly they're going to realize we're missing. 

Kyle: Yeah. And then as the time wears on, you start to play with probabilities in your head of. Well, if they were going to come back for us, it's already nighttime, so they're probably not working, so they're probably not going to come back for us, because it's night.

You start playing with these probabilities, and you're like, oh, well, if they haven't come back for us yet, then there's a chance that they forgot about it. Okay, well, if they forgot about us, what are the chances that they're going to remember that we were on that ship, especially if they miscounted on the list, and no one really remembered who we were on that trip.

So I think the movie is just a slow confrontation with the true. Depth and reality of the situation. And that's something important to note about this movie is that, given that the characters died, we don't really know what happened for the latter two thirds of the movie. Like you said, afterwards some articles of clothing and belongings were found, but they weren't found.

All we have is what actually happened in leading up to them going missing and Some journal entries and that's where they get the kind of state of the marriage where it's not complete bliss It's not perfect, but they're trying to like recapture that we get that through I think the husband's journal entries that they found So what they're doing with that last two thirds is kind of imagining what that slow Come to terms with hopelessness is and how do they react to it?

Jim: There's a logic That they follow by staying in place at first, though, as the story goes on, you realize that any opportunity at survival was going to be entirely based on the energy level that they had, the longer they're in the water, the more energy that's being sucked out of their life, the more opportunities are slipping away, the farther out the current is taking them.

At the beginning they stay because they think certainly they're going to come back and find us. Certainly they've noticed that we're not there. Even though we later find out it's at least a day before the guides on the boat realize they're gone when they find their personal effects on the boat. Now another interesting foreshadowing from the very same guide At the beginning of the story is that he notes that you're gonna see some sharks because some of the Best views that you can get in the ocean are gonna be in an area Where there's gonna be a lot of sharks, but don't worry.

The sharks are fine. There's a lot of people here We've got the boat you're gonna be fine It turns out they're not gonna be fine. 

Kyle: It's easier Sitting down watching the movie, which by the way, it threw me off at first, especially considering the circumstances in which I watched this movie. So, I originally purchased it on YouTube and for whatever reason they didn't have English as an option for this English movie.

Not only was it, the video looked like it was like a found footage, like everything. Like, it never cut from the found footage, it was just, the movie has an effect of being a found footage film, which goes into the budget and what they were trying to do. You know, I'd never seen it before, and they were speaking in English, but German was coming out.

It was incredibly confusing, but, it took me a little while to get adjusted to that. It really makes you feel like an outsider to the situation, to see it in that kind of found footage, and to see the movie, like, oh, like, we found this, but, in the moment. It's like they made logical decisions every step of the way.

If the boat rowed away and I was on it, I would say the same thing. I wouldn't say, oh, try to swim after the boat. Or, oh, I think I see a dot in the distance that might be another boat. I'm going to swim all the way towards that boat. What they did there seems logical. Because, yeah, all those ships have lists on them.

It's a double form of security. People on the boat... Get to know you and know you're there, but in case no one remembers you from the boat, they keep a list. It's just there are those very rare circumstances where both things they rely on to make sure everyone's in the boat failed. 

Jim: They show the guy later when he discovers their personal effects in the movie.

He has a flash of recognition for the couple that were left behind and suddenly occurs to him, Uh oh, they're still out there. Now. as we were watching it. One of the things that I like best about movies like this is you find yourself shouting at the TV screen. You're second guessing every single decision that the characters make.

Not because you necessarily know better, but only because you can see the deterioration of the situation in a way that the people that are experiencing it may not realize throughout the dilemma. Susan and Daniel are constantly reassuring each other. It's going to be okay. This is going to be a funny story.

We're going to be able to get back to land and tell everybody about how we survived being lost out in the ocean. Though, when the movie ends, you realize the moment that situation occurs, the clock is ticking. They have a very limited amount of time to act before the situation becomes desperate. Before the situation becomes terminal.

Do you think the way they reacted was believable? 

Kyle: Yeah, it actually reminded me of the, uh, five stages of grief. When I was watching it. I didn't remember what all the stages were, but I remember it ends with acceptance. They finally just accept their fate. They deny it. Then they're angry at each other, depressed.

Jim: It becomes desperate when Daniel first discovers that there's like a little Barracuda or something chewing on susan's leg. That's bad But it becomes worse when one of the sharks actually takes a bite out of his leg and he starts bleeding profusely into the ocean That's the moment that I looked at.

Lori had said they're running out of time. Now they've got a bunch of blood in the water. They're out here completely on their own in shark infested waters. They need to start swimming. They need to start moving. The thing I kept coming back to as we were watching it was I would not want to sit and die.

I would want to die fighting. I would want to die trying to swim. I'd rather sink from exhaustion than. Keep kicking my legs hoping that somebody was gonna come back and serving myself up as the shark bait 

Kyle: It's like what would you do in that situation? We want to say well, I would swim the land It's easy to say I would try the fact is it's like what if there are 20 miles And I just started swimming recently, as you guys know, just as I expand my exercise horizons.

And, uh, yeah, there's a lot you learn when you start to swim. You know, how hard it is, you, one of the first things you figure out is, we're not meant to breathe underwater, and we're not meant to move through water. It's between 600 and 700 times more dense than air. So, if they're out in the water for that extended period of time, They're effectively powerless and if let's say it was 20 miles off the coast or something now, I don't think it was that far But it was certainly far enough to the point where they couldn't see the land Let's say one direction got them to land.

Well, the other three would have taken them farther away

Jim: I think you'd be hoping that you'd be swimming into one of the shipping lanes or something The goal would be to have somebody see you but as they discover they see other ships other boats out there And they're too small Insignificant in this vast amount of ocean to even be noticeable.

Kyle: Yeah, they don't have flares or anything like that, right? 

Jim: They're literally just waving arms at best and they can hardly be seen in the depths of those waters Now the three of us we've all been in the ocean together All three of us were in Hawaii a couple years ago, and we remember the bigness of the ocean and we were maybe 50 yards, no more than 100 yards off the coast, right off the beach, we could see the land, we could see our hotel room, we could see everything.

And it was scary. It was scary to be out there in that water, to realize that the ocean is like its own organism, like its own entity unto itself. And that's not even accounting for the various animals that live inside. And take your point. That's something we were talking about as we were watching it too, is that you're not supposed to be in there.

You're not built to swim the way a shark is, a fish is, a turtle is. Those animals are actually put together in a way that allows them to move easily through the water. Anything that a human being is doing in the water, it was comical in one sequence, Daniel pulls out a knife, like that's going to help him.

The best situation would be as if that shark was just about to take a bite out of you and you were looking at him right as he was about to take a bite out of you. And maybe you got that knife into his nose or something that might ward that one shark off. But it's probably also going to piss him off. 

Kyle: I don't know.

I mean, Kill Bill came out around that time, right? I mean, maybe he thought he was going to be Beatrix's kiddo and just start chopping up all these sharks. Save the day and then, you know. Their marriage was gonna be saved. That's my next point though, I mean. What I like most about these kinds of stories, and the one it made me think of was one starring Steve Carroll that came out in 2012 called Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

Yeah. Where the premise of the movie is, the ending's already set out in the beginning. The meteor is gonna hit the earth in three weeks. What do you do? In pending doom, you are going to die in three weeks. Now how do you act? There is no future. How do we act? What do we tell each other? What truth or information come out of that?

Jim: Well, that's part of what I mean with Daniel and Susan is it takes them a long time To realize there's no getting out of this situation. They keep reassuring themselves that everything's going to be okay, even though if we follow that countdown that you were talking about earlier, we are really knowing that that's not going to happen.

Kyle: Yeah, and if I told you it was like our last ten minutes together, would we get angry or mad at each other or say mean shit to each other? Probably not. But they don't know that it's that end time. So... So I thought about that, and then I thought about the fact that it's not like their marriage was failing, but it was like they weren't as connected as they perhaps used to have been.

And that's like, again, I think that's something they recovered with his journal or something like that, where it wasn't like he was incredibly happy with his life or his marriage or whatever. So I think they tried to write that into the script. 

Jim: Which makes sense, they have hours. Out there floating in the ocean and of course, it's not depicted.

This is actually a pretty short movie. It's only 79 minutes long But they give you a sense of the passage of time. You see the Sun passing over them in the sky. And in fact that Contributes to the sense of dread because at one point I looked at your mom and said it's After three o'clock in the afternoon.

They've been in that water for eight plus hours at this point If they haven't been eaten by sharks, the exposure is going to have a major impact on them. They're probably burnt to a crisp. They're tired. They've been kicking their legs. And now they have flippers on. That helps. But they're really at a desperation point and running out of time.

They're putting off making any kind of real decision because there's still hanging hope that the boat's going to come back for them. 

Kyle: The ancient. The irony of the ocean is that so many people have died on the ocean of dehydration. Surrounded by water, yet stranded on a raft or a boat and dying of dehydration.

So, it's speculated that that's how they could have died, by dehydration. 

Lori: Let me ask the both of you, so, if you were in the same situation, would you, do you think you would hold out hope that the boat would return? Thank you. Would you start swimming for land? 

Jim: I think the natural reaction would be to do what they did, to assume that it's going to be okay, that somebody's going to notice you're gone, they're going to come right back out and find you, and that it makes sense to stay at or around the area in which they would have left you.

That said, the current is... constantly moving. They're on top of the water. One of the things that you said when we were watching it was it would make more sense if they put their mask on and use their oxygen and went down under the water and maybe swam that direction for as long as the tanks were would last.

Now I imagine the oxygen tanks weren't going to last long. They're rentals from the boat and they probably really only have enough oxygen to last for the duration of the trip. But there was something left, and if they had done that, that might have helped get them going in the right direction. It certainly didn't help them to be on top of the water the way they were, getting dragged farther and farther away by the current.

As we were watching it, I found myself thinking if I'm ever in this situation, I'm just going to start swimming right off the bat. I'm just going to use every last bit of energy I have because at the very least I'm getting out of the way of all the sharks. They say that at the beginning you're in a shark infested area.

And as you pointed out, Kyle, at the beginning, the vast majority of the oceans at desert, there's probably miles and miles of space where there's nothing but water. And clearly, if I'm going to die out on the ocean, I'd rather be out in that part rather than the part where all the sharks are.

Kyle: I would clearly don a yellow tracksuit, get out my knife and, you know, snorkel down and chop up no fewer than a hundred sharks with my knife.

Jim: That's the obvious answer. Duh. Yeah.

Kyle: And then I'd, I'd put my wife in my arms and swim back to shore. Before dinner, 

Jim: open water was made on a budget of $120,000. It made 30 million in the United States and 55 plus million dollars all over the world. It was a pretty tremendous money maker for the filmmakers who are a husband and wife team, they were also experienced scuba divers, and they shot a lot of the film themselves as the cinematographers.

What's interesting to me is that even though it's a lower budget and the performances kind of reflect that at the beginning, the dialogue's a little clincy and the performances are a little uneven at the beginning. Once they're in the water, you entirely believe the desperation that they're feeling.

You feel that they're trying to make the best out of the worst possible situation. 

Kyle: My first note I took while watching this movie was, Oh, is this shot on a Motorola razor flip phone? I thought I had purchased the wrong movie. I was like, what is this? Is this like a knockoff movie? And I got used to it.

And when they were in the water, I was like, okay, i'm hooked. I get it.

Jim: The best thing that you can say about it is that despite its low budget It puts the bucks as they say on the screen When you see all of those sharks the most effective moment of filmmaking In the entire movie is when the camera is focused on Susan and the waves are Going up and down and when they go up you see all the sharks that are circling her under the water just for a fleeting moment that is Terrifying 

Kyle: well cuz that's how they would have seen it The small budget and the experience of the people who made the movie is where it really shines It's in its simplicity Imagine if James Cameron or Peter Jackson were given a budget of a hundred million dollars to make this movie.

Don't you think that would detract from the literal surface level interpretation of what's going on? The fact that you can't see what's going on in the water and you're seeing it from a found footage because they don't make it. Right, from my found footage, surface level interpretation of what's going on.

If you showed exactly the position of all the sharks and what was under there and where the ships were around them, the simplicity of this movie is you're just with them. You're stranded with them. And they don't know what's going on, so the audience doesn't know what's going on. That's the beauty of this movie.

And that's why that husband and wife sold it for 2. 5 million to the studios. Studios put a little bit of marketing into it, and it became a 55 million movie. What a brilliant business decision. What a simple, beautiful movie. 

Jim: And amazing that it's a pretty original idea. When this movie was released broadly in the United States, In August of 2004, Lori and I went and saw it downtown at the Denver Pavilion.

Yeah, it was only playing on one screen in the Denver metro area at the time because it was presented as something of an art film and what's awesome about our experience seeing it is. That Lori had no idea what the movie was about. In fact, she was kind of negative as I remember on going to see it.

Cause she thought, Oh, Jim's dragging me to one of his stupid art films again. And it had quite an impact on her. And in fact, we've seen it a few times since it came out and I've got to say it holds up fantastic.

Kyle: Would you say it holds water?

Jim: It literally is one of the most terrifying movies I've ever seen.

Kyle: Well, I didn't think it was terrifying in that sense. I thought it was interesting. And of course, when you also try to imagine yourself in that situation, it's interesting. I also had kind of an out there thought when I was watching the movie. I want your guys opinion on this. So, VR technology, AI, all that stuff.

Imagine 30 years from now. There's a whole different method where people do marriage counseling. One of those ways of marriage counseling is you both hook up and do a VR, but you don't know it maybe, or maybe they put you out and you don't know your VR. And let's say, 

Jim: this is called the shark treatment.

Kyle: It's like when you, uh, put two people in this kind of situation where it's just them and you know, there's probably no hope for a future and they're just together for hours, you know, in the end in a terrifying situation, let's say. Like, some miracle happened and Superman popped down and saved them like right at the end.

And both of them were okay. Do you think like their marriage benefited from this? Do you think anything changes? Are there any benefits to being in a situation like this with someone? 

Jim: Well, you know, you brought that in for a landing. I would say that their last moments alive. They probably had a much different perspective on their marriage.

Kyle: Perspective. Yep. Perspective. We're so caught up and we think that life is just going to go on and there are all these problems, but if you're confronted with the end right now, it puts things in a different perspective. Do you think a therapy like that could be useful in the future?

Lori: I think you have a 

good business model.

Kyle: Yeah. I'm starting to write the code now, actually. Yeah, definitely. Let's say you got to the end. And you're like, no, I still don't want to be with you. I mean, then you know, it's I'm swimming. 

Jim: I can't die next to you.

Kyle: I hope the shark there together. The water last five minutes. I can't do this. And then that's when you know the marriage isn't okay.

But if at the end, you're like, Whoa, actually, you're really important to me. I don't know. Cause that's what I was thinking about because we're not confronted with that most of the time in modern society where it's like two people and they might die and they're together and they're trying to survive, but they're kind of hopeless.

That's not a situation most people are in ever. Maybe people had those kinds of experiences in the past more and maybe it brought more perspective to their lives. 

Jim: You know, that's actually a really great idea around the theme of the movie there. It's about survival. It's about being against the elements.

But how do you resolve the unresolvable? How do you fix something that is about to come to an end? Their marriage, it may very well have helped that they were in the water together. What I did note when we were watching it, was when Daniel's... bitten by the shark. I told Lori here that in that situation, I would have said swim.

Leave me out here. I don't want you to get eaten. We're gonna get both killed now that I'm profusely bleeding. So you might as well start and go and see if you can find somebody or find some help or get yourself out of here at least. And That's kind of the takeaway I had. I also, as you're saying all that, I was imagining my parents in that situation and thinking that my mom's last words would be, Bradley, I told you I didn't want to do this trip.

Kyle: It'd be so interesting to see, now, I don't really want anyone to make this movie, but like, how would different couples react out there? For two days, like what would be that dialogue that's dialogue we'll never hear because situations like that have certainly happened throughout the course of humanity.

I wish we could go back in time and hear the dialogue, hear the dialogue of those people and the American destroyer and World War Two. You know, what were they saying the last five days? It's got to be some of the most real dialogue of all time. 

Jim: Consider another element here too, is the human technology.

They're carrying oxygen tanks. They've got water masks. They've got water suits on. They've got flippers yet. This isn't enough to help them. There isn't any way for them to swim back. There isn't any way for them to draw attention to themselves from any boats passing by. And that's part of the terror of the situation is.

Despite all of our human knowledge, we still can't defeat the sea. 

Kyle: We still don't know the true contents of the sea either. New sea creatures are being discovered all the time at varying depths. It's a veritable mystery. I mean, we roughly get it. But it's not, like, a discovered land. But that's still not the case with the ocean.

So, it's... You're right, no matter how advanced your flippers are, or how big your oxygen tank is, uh, it's still a big ol mystery down there. My favorite example is like the giant squid. The giant squid was just thought by intellectuals of old to just be a, a sailor's myth. But then they just started washing up on shore, and now we know that giant squids are real, they're just really deep.

The sea has a lot of mysteries to it. 

Jim: Is there a movie that you think relate a similar experience and how does this movie compare to those? 

Kyle: Yeah, so like I said, I'm seeking a friend for the end of the world. We always act a priori, thinking that I'll have some kind of future. I would have to go way out of my way to be like, Oh God, I'm in the middle of nowhere.

And I'm gonna die soon. Like, I would have to proactively go out and do like ten steps before that became a thing. So, the fact that this movie is just so incidental, the boat drives away, and now they're in this situation, I think that's a very gripping story. And the reason why it's so close to seeking a friend for the end of the world, because...

There's nothing they could do about it. They were in the water. There's nothing Steve Carell could do about it in that movie because it's a meteor. 

Lori: So you think they know from the beginning that it's the end? 

Kyle: I think they reach a certain point where they're like, okay, this is hopeless. Then there's dialogue there.

But, yeah, you're right. It's different in that way. Like, they don't know. 

Jim: Is the moment that that happens when Daniel gets the bite from the shark?

Kyle: Yeah, I think so. 

Jim: They do wrap his leg and find a way to stem the bleeding. So that creates an element of hope, but it's false. There's no chance of survival at this point.

Their only hope is if the boat comes right back to where they are. The odds of that are diminishing as the movie goes on. 

Kyle: Yeah, I mean, and I'm sure there are other movies. There was also one that came out called, uh, The Life of Pi. Where he hallucinates the animals and, uh, he's adrift at sea for a while.

In those kinds of movies, they have the tools to survive. He's above the water in a raft. There aren't going to be any fish nibbling at his feet. I think it's kind of tough, and I'm sure I'm missing a movie that might be very similar. Did this remind you of any other movies?

Lori: It didn't remind me of any other movie.

I think this is the first movie where I saw it was... It just seemed... So desperate the way it was shot where, yes, nobody could see them, but they really couldn't see anything either except for ocean. That's all they could see from their little heads bobbing up and down. They could see the sky and some clouds and ocean, so they wouldn't even know what way to go.

Kyle: Yeah, it was like shot like some invisible alien teenagers who had a Motorola flip phone. We're just watching this all happen just right, right above the water. You know?

Jim: Well, and it really shows you how violent the ocean is because even in a moderate storm, even in a situation where the waves aren't really that big, if you're two people tossed in, they're helpless.

They're basically at the whim of the water. 

Kyle: Speaking about being at the whim of the water, the second movie we'll be talking about is Adrift.

And I think this movie... It's incredibly similar. It's probably the one movie I know about that's most similar to Open Water. Jim, what were your thoughts on Adrift? 

Jim: Well, Adrift is similar, yet has its differences. The key difference being that Tammy's character is on a boat. The movie begins... With her waking up on a boat, she's injured, she's scared, she's wet, she has no immediate memory of what's happened and it takes her a few moments to kind of put it all together.

And when she puts it together, it's a pretty desperate situation. She's on a boat that if it isn't sinking, it's certainly filled with water and she's going to have to do something about that immediately. She needs to identify supplies. She's Lost her companion and the movie is told in a nonlinear non chronological manner in which they describe the relationship between Richard and Tammy as a series of flashbacks and One of the interesting points is that she actually finds Richard At the end of the first act of the film, which took me by surprise because I assumed he was gone.

How could he have possibly have survived? Which, in its own way, contributes to a bit of a twist at the end of the second act, which we'll get to in a moment. But, watching Adrift... It has its own kind of terror, because she's not quite the desperate situation that Susan and Daniel find themselves in in open water, but it's not much better.

If she doesn't find water, if she doesn't find food, the fact that she's on the water instead of in it isn't going to be of much consequence. 

Kyle: Yeah, the first note I have on this movie is just the brilliant exposition. Alright, that first act, where they're setting up the story. There's a theme in cinema where you could build up to the big dramatic event of the movie.

So for this movie, everything's going in one direction and fine. There's really no story to be told other than it's about two lovers exploring the world. Until... A storm comes and wrecks the boat. So that's the big moment. Now, there are some stories where you lead up and then the big moment happens. So there's exposition and then the big moment.

Or you can have a movie where it starts out with that big moment. And then you're piecing together the puzzle of what happened before and that looms over. So for example, In this movie, they show the boat crashing and then they go back in time and you're watching their love story come together knowing that in the future, it's going to be literally ripped apart at the boat.

Their whole life and situation is going to be thrown in a completely different direction. So I think that adds a lot of power to the storytelling. And plus, I mean, look, it's also just smart. The movie is called Adrift. So that kind of gives you a sense of what the movie's gonna be about. So instead of just leading up to the big moment, the movie's called Adrift, so they just start with the big moment, and then they let that loom there, and then you piece together the puzzle as you go along.

What was their relationship like? How is it going? And then how does that impact the future? Now you brought up the sort of twist, and I'm gonna bring that up right now because I think the nonlinear storytelling Really helps out with that. So, the non linear storytelling is essentially the boat crash and then you're figuring out their love story from where it starts.

But then, as you mentioned, when it cuts back to her on the boat, she finds Richard. Who we learn later on in the movie had proposed to her on this boat and she said yes. So again, marriage, huge life step that gets dramatically altered by the storm. Oh God, great. She finds her now husband or fiance. 

Jim: He's floating on a little boat that's top sized and she sees him in the distance from her.

Kyle: Oh yeah, and so she goes, finds him, brings him to the boat, and then they survive together. Well, what we learn in the last part of the movie is that that was just a hallucination. That he never really existed. She never really found him. And the thing is, throughout the whole movie, you're being, you're jumping back to the past and learning about their love story.

So, this non linear storytelling, you're seeing him alive and hallucinated. But we don't know it's hallucinated yet. It adds a sense of reality to the hallucination. Look, when it happened in the movie, she swims him all the way back from the debris to the boat. I was like, okay, having started swimming. Some women at the pool are really good swimmers, okay?

So I was like, okay, maybe she's just a really good swimmer. I don't know. 

Jim: I was joking to Lori as we were watching that scene, that she's dragging him back, and the whole way I've said, Uh, maybe you could kick your legs? I don't know, something here to help? This water's a little choppy. 

Kyle: Look, it's just all her traps.

She doesn't need her legs. It's just all her traps. They're like wings, you know, they're like fins. I wasn't expecting it at all. And I think part of the reason why is because we're not left too long on the boat with her and him. It keeps jumping back to where he's actually alive. So you're not left ruminating on the actual situation.

Jim: You're engaged in the development of the character. 

Kyle: I've been with her, because yeah, if you just play that 20 minutes or 30 minutes of those two on the boat, you'd be like, wait, this doesn't make sense. How did he hold on, but he had a broken foot? His ribs were all sh None of this is making sense. Titanic hadn't even come out yet, you know?

Like, how did he know that hanging on to Debris was a strategy? I mean, all these thoughts, the fact that they're splitting it up, And you're learning about them while the current action is going on was great to distract from that twist at the end. And it gave a lot more power to that twist.

Jim: It gave it a sense of tension that wouldn't otherwise have existed.

If you knew Richard had died during the storm. And I'll say that I was thrown off at first by the nonlinear storytelling because I felt like it was hurting the momentum. Because, you're right, the movie begins right after the accident has happened and she's first coming to consciousness. And then it jumps back.

Tammy and Richard, we learn how they meet, we learn why they're on this particular boat. What the situation is, they run into an older couple that Richard is familiar with, and they offer a sizable amount of money if Richard, and by extension Tammy, will take the boat and bring it back to San Diego. One of the character details we learn about Tammy is that she is originally from San Diego, and she had left home at 18 years old and has been...

Pretty much on the water ever since exploring the world, and it's now five or six years later, and she's coming back for the first time. She reacts negatively to Richard's idea of accepting this assignment at first, because as she says in the movie, I don't want to just be following you around on your adventure, because Tammy's on her own adventure.

She's been surviving on her own the whole time as well, for five years. So, all of that. is actually pretty compelling. But, at first, when we first finished watching the movie, I was a little underwhelmed. And in part, it was because I didn't get the emotional element. It took a moment for the emotional element to sink in.

In fact, it took probably overnight before I really started to feel the impact of the way the story was told. Because when you tell it in that non linear fashion, to me anyways, it kind of hurt the impact of the realization that he wasn't alive. Even though it was a twist in the story, it wasn't something that I was necessarily expecting.

It also didn't have the emotional resonance that it might have had if you told the story chronologically, at least not at first. 

Kyle: Well, she's hallucinating, but she's also holding on to the memories. Those memories, those flashbacks that we're seeing, she's seeing those in real time too. They're keeping her going.

Those emotions about the past are so strong, she literally hallucinates someone for days. Now... In the actual story, and look, I've never seen a movie that's been completely historically accurate when it's based on true events, like this movie is. You always have to take some kind of creative liberty to tell the story like you would in a movie.

One of those liberties was, the original Tammy didn't hallucinate Richard visually. She just heard a stern voice that wasn't hers three separate times. One of the creative liberties that this film took was visualizing what those voices meant to Tammy. And when they interviewed her after everything happened, I actually think she wrote a book too.

Jim: Based on her book, Red Sky and Mourning, A True Story of Love, loss, and Survival at Sea. 

Kyle: The voices she heard, or the voice she heard three different times, was one that was trying to keep her alive. Literally. Trying to keep her alive at one point. She had a gun in her mouth Not in the movie, but in the real story You know, there's been two three weeks at sea and she's like, okay and the voice told her not to Keep going.

So what the film does Brilliantly with that hallucination is that it's like a visualization of that voice her fiance is keeping her alive Something interesting about hallucinations, and I had to do a little research after I watched this movie, was evolutionarily speaking, are there any benefits of psychosis or hallucinating?

Typically, it's understood that it's probably a protective mechanism. So, her hallucinations, or in real life, her auditory hallucinations, were exactly that. A clear example of that being the case. I know I brought up the life of Pi earlier. Where, spoiler alert, they're not animals, they're actually people, but he goes through a psychosis and hallucinates them as animals so he can better process it.

And it's also a mechanism for people to deal with trauma, but... The fact that it is a hallucination, but she is remembering the whole time, and it does help her survive. All these things fit together perfectly for me. The hallucination isn't out of place. And the fact that it keeps digging back in the past to these memories, it's not one coherent story, it's just scene after scene after scene.

That's kind of how we remember things from the past. We don't remember an entire day. We remember this scene, and then this scene. Especially if it's with someone you really care about, it's like a strung together sequence of scenes. Those callbacks to the past, the non linear storytelling, I kind of took it as like her memories while in the present she's hallucinating that guy.

And that's the only thing keeping her alive. We spoke earlier about the will to live. That is her will to live. 

Jim: Not to mention she's day after day alone on this boat. So. It makes sense that her mind would wander that she would be creating images in her head that she would be hearing Voices because she's literally out on the ocean all by herself.

Yeah, nothing else to do. Nobody else to talk to and No clear sign 

that she's gonna make it. 

Kyle: Yeah when I spoke about the evolutionary benefits of psychosis earlier psychosis Tends to develop in people who are socially isolated as kids. So people hypothesize that when you hallucinate things or the psychosis, it's filling in those voids.

It's like a response to dealing with some kind of trauma. It worked perfectly. It's weird because we typically don't associate psychosis with, Oh, that's something working as it should and it helped. It's usually a result of something bad. But in this case, it's the thing that got her through it. In fact, she gets hit in the head early in the movie.

Well, in real life that happened and she couldn't read for six years. It was that bad. So imagine that. So the whole movie you see a gash on her head. Well, you can't feel a movie. But imagine getting hit in the head so hard you just can't read books for like six years.

Jim: It's a pretty ugly gash though.

Kyle: You're hit so hard that you just... The words jump off your page. When I read that, it brought on kind of a whole new meaning to what she had done throughout the movie, like, wow. Sometimes when I'm really tired, I'm just, I feel like a completely different person or a zombie or I can't do this. Can you imagine getting in the head that hard that you can't read and you gotta survive for 41 days?

Out on the ocean on your own? And she did it. The point I was making though is that even after all this, she went back to sailing and spent the rest of her life being a sailor. 

Jim: A key difference between this movie and Open Water is that we have Tammy's first hand account of what happened because she survived, because she's still alive today, whereas in Open Water, we're speculating about what actually happened because no survivors were found.

And that makes for also a pretty compelling survival story because she actually does survive. Because she actually made it, despite all the odds. And it's a bit of a breath of fresh air at the end of the movie. It's like a great release of tension when she's finally found and you know she's gonna be okay.

Were you familiar with the work of the actor Shailene Woodley before this film? 

Kyle: I was familiar with none of the actors. I had never heard the story before. I don't even remember this movie coming out. Do you guys remember this movie coming out? 

Jim: Yeah, I remember hearing about it and it was something of a minor hit, uh, made about 60 million at the box office.

It had a budget of about 35 million, which is impressive. I can see the budget. They obviously were traveling. They obviously were out on the ocean at different points. They had some really nice prop boats or yacht as it were. But You know, Shailene Woodley, to me, was best known for the Divergent series.

And, in a way, it took me about half an hour to adjust. Because I kept feeling like her characterization at the beginning of the movie was a bit like a young adult book. It was popular in the mid 2010s. It was hard to take her performance out of the young adult genre for a minute for me. 

Kyle: It's funny that you say that about like a young teenager girl kind of genre, because at the beginning, essentially Tammy is a vagabond at sea and she's just taking menial jobs wherever she can.

She even says that at one point. Island hopping and then out of nowhere, all of a sudden. Handsome, charming guy who's single, who owns a boat, who's older, who's mature, who takes an interest in Tammy, picks her up and sweeps her away. That feels like teenage girl romance stories or the beginning of a horror movie.

Seriously, that was the hurdle I had to get over because I thought, oh, this guy's a serial killer just from, you know, watching so many horror movies. How couldn't you think that what weird body part are you going to cut off? And, you know, like what's going on here. So it's like, yeah, once I got over those hurdles about halfway through the movie, I was fully set in to everything that was going on.

I also did it. I just assumed this movie took place relatively recently. But it felt kind of timeless because it happened in the eighties. They filmed it like it was in the eighties now that I think back, but it didn't strike me as belonging to any specific era in time. 

Jim: I noted a couple of dialogue anachronisms, but you're right.

There's no cell phones, obviously. There's no computers or internet that she can find a way to use. It's all 80s style communications that she's faced with, but. You're right. It effectively is a timeless story, much like open water. Is it believable? It's absolutely believable because again, the characters are taking on the vastness of the ocean and aren't equipped to take that challenge.

Kyle: Well, actually, now that I think about it. With Starlink and Elon Musk being able to just have internet in the whole world, stories like this almost can't be timeless at some point. Unless every single, like, phone or smart piece of technology on there just gets destroyed. Because think about it, if there's internet everywhere in the world and you're in the middle of the ocean, and this has never happened before in human history, in theory you could message someone on Facebook and be like, you're never gonna believe what happened.

Jim: Tell somebody I'm out in the middle of the ocean and I need some help right now. 

Kyle: Yeah. Can you imagine messaging someone in Colorado on Facebook? Hey, uh, can you get like the Coast Guard or something? I'm in the middle of the ocean. 

Jim: Tell them to bring some Arby's too. I'm starving to have any. 

Kyle: Yeah, actually I also got a DoorDash. We'll see who gets here first. 

Jim: It's, it's a very, it's a very good film. 

Kyle: Final note on Adrift is... The tool that Tammy used in real life and in the movie to get home is something called a sextant. It's like an older navigational instrument and it measures the angle of the sun. But the whole time I was watching this movie, I was thinking, okay, this happened in the 1980s and it's an incredible feat of survival.

But then, hop back a thousand years in time and consider the Polynesians were exploring this entire area, made it all the way out there. Thousands of islands just by looking at the stars at night. Blows my mind. Navigated this water, through the ocean, on their rafts. I just, I had that thought and it blew my mind.

What a clear and present danger to someone whose technology doesn't work anymore. But because she makes it to Hawaii at the end.

Jim: Well, and let me jump in and say it's entirely believable that her character knows what she knows. Her and Richard spent some time together. She. Knows the basics of operating a boat when they meet and she learns a few things from him, but she teaches him a few things as well.

It's not like she doesn't know what she's doing. She's been traveling the world by herself for five years. I would say she's got a handle on it as well as anybody else is going to. 

Kyle: Oh yeah. That's completely believable. 

Jim: So let's compare and contrast open water and adrift for a moment. How do they compare and Which one did you like?

Kyle: They're fundamentally, like, they have the same theme, they're just, they're fundamentally different, I think. One has hope, the other has virtually no hope. They have different tones. Agree, totally. Whether or not the couple in Open Water have hope or not, that does not matter. Does not get them through the situation.

The difference is, in Adrift, She has the tools to potentially make it out. Whether it's 1%, whether it's a thousandth of a percent, there's still a possibility that she's gonna make it out given the tools she has. And a lot of those kinds of situations, like I said in the beginning, the biggest enemy is yourself.

It appears to be that your willpower is what determines those non zero chances of you living. The people that make it out of those just didn't give up. That theme, for me, kind of governs Adrift, where she just didn't give up. And even in real life, she almost killed herself and didn't. Whereas in the other movie, it's just going downwards the entire time.

There's no spike up, there's no realization. We're just watching two people slowly die 

Jim: to me. Like you say, the themes are very similar, but the challenges are very different because Susan and Daniel are in the water themselves and they're not just in any water. They're in shark infested waters intentionally.

They've been brought here intentionally and then left behind. Whereas it takes. Tammy a little bit of time to figure out even where she is and where she's going to go, but she's not faced With that sort of challenge. She's at least got the boat. She's at least got some supplies. She's got Shelter, you can see from Tammy's perspective, she's thinking in terms of days, she's thinking in terms of, okay, I've got X amount of time, I've got X amount of food, I've got X amount of water.

If it rains, which it does at some point, I can harvest some more water and that will extend my time. Susan and Daniel aren't thinking in those terms at all. Susan and Daniel are thinking of the immediacy of the moment that we're running out of time right now. These animals are surrounding us right now.

Kyle: Even if they didn't have the sharks around them, I mean, they're still, they don't have any water. So the clock is going from the beginning. 

Jim: Yeah. There's no option. There's no opportunity. There's no chance for them. And as much as they profess the hope, as much as they keep kind of trying to boost each other up, trying to keep each other activated and moving towards a solution, there is none.

Now, interestingly, as a side note, there is actually a sequel to Open Water. Interestingly enough entitled open water to adrift and the premise of that movie. It's almost like halfway between these two movies because the plot of open water to adrift features a group of friends going out on a yacht out into the middle of the ocean and they all end up jumping out of the boat.

Without putting the ladder down. So they're all trapped outside of the boat Literally safety just inches away, but they can't quite get themselves back up on the boat and They slowly start meeting their fate in the ocean The sharks aren't as big of a factor in that second film The elements are a much bigger threat.

They don't have any equipment. They're hardly dressed. And in fact, they're having to take off their swimsuits at one point and tie them all together to try and get themselves back onto the boat, which doesn't work. So they're literally naked and afraid in the water, just outside of the boat that has everything they need to get back to land.

Lori: They only have one life vest. 

Jim: One person's wearing a life vest. Everybody else is literally kicking and swimming to keep themselves above water. Now, I mention this not because it's a comparable film. It's not. It's actually quite poor. Every character in that movie makes exactly the wrong decision and is the very definition of Roger Ebert's idiot plot.

That the only way this movie keeps going is if everybody keeps making exactly the wrong decision at the wrong time. And that's what happens in this movie. But it was amusing and interesting to watch and to realize that This is almost exactly in the middle between the two movies that we're watching. 

Kyle: No boat, boat, but can't get in boat, on boat.

There's levels to everything, ladies and gentlemen. 

Jim: Any last comments about performances, plot twists, writing, directing, any technical aspects that you'd like to highlight? 

Kyle: I think these movies are straightforward. There are plot twists in other movies where it's like, Oh! Wow, I want to go tell everyone about this.

This was less of a plot twist like that, whereas the big showstopper that I'm gonna go tell all my friends about. It was just kind of emotional, like, validation, because we see their love story. And it, it ends cause he dies, but it continues through her and it's visualized through the movie in a perfect way.

So it's not one of those plot twists where I went, no, oh my God, what the hell? It was just like, oh, oh. It was more subtle. Oh, she's, she's still in love with him. It was, it was more emotional. I will admit I did tear up a little bit at the ends when you see the older real version of her sailing. And they filmed that?

Yeah. You know, it really does kind of remind me of Titanic. Cause I, I didn't do any more research to see if she ever remarried again. But it does kind of feel like that, I found the love of my life, he's a guy at sea, and then he died at sea. Now he's always gonna have a place in my heart kind of thing.

This movie felt like a, a much more realistic portrayal of that tale. Whereas to me it was like Titanic, oh they knew each other for like three or four days. Didn't seem as like their love was as real. It just kind of felt like a teenager fling. Whereas this movie, it felt like, Oh, you get to see them actually fall in real love and then he's gone.

And you know, for a fact, he's going to be with her literally after he dies. But then also for life.