Adrift

I went to see Adrift during a Thursday preview and I thought it was a pretty good, if typical, survival story.  Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) is a free spirit who is working odd jobs in order to travel the world.  While working at a marina in Tahiti she meets and falls in love with Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin), a yacht owner sailing around the world.  He asks her to join him but first the two of them take a job sailing a luxury yacht from Tahiti to San Diego and on the way they run into Hurricane Raymond.  The movie begins when Tami wakes up in the wreckage of the yacht after the storm and can't find Richard.  When she sees him floating, severely injured, on a dinghy in the distance, she makes repairs to the yacht as best she can and sails towards him to rescue him.  The action moves back and forth between their romance on Tahiti and their intense struggle to survive with a plot twist that I didn't see coming but should have.  The cinematography is stunning and the wide shots of the tiny yacht in the middle of the ocean are incredibly effective in conveying their isolation and the camera work is very immersive, so much so that there were many times when I found myself holding my head up to keep above the water.  The storm sequences are absolutely thrilling.  Shailene Woodley is hit or miss with me but she gives a fantastic and believable physical performance here as a woman determined to survive and Claflin is always nice to look at.  I think the flashbacks in the narrative take away the tension and the sense of peril at times but I liked this movie and would recommend it.