A ChucksConnection Film Review

 

Lisa Delamar wears black high top Converse “Chuck Taylor” All Stars in the film.

Survive

 

by Hal Peterson

 

Julia, Ben, and Cassie must travel several days on the dried up ocean floor to save themselves.

 

As Survive opens, we meet an international nuclear family. Tom (Andreas Pietschmann), the father, is a German oceanographer who is in residence at an American university. The mother Julia (Émilie Dequenne), is a French doctor. Cassie (Lisa Delamar), their older teenaged daughter and thirteen-year-old son Ben (Lucas Ebel), are Americans, born in the USA while their parents are in residency there. They are traveling on their small yacht Orca (shades of Jaws, a bad omen?) in the Caribbean Ocean to celebrate Ben’s birthday. Things seems pleasant and happy. Tom and Julia are still quite in love and affectionate with each other, Ben is learning skills from his dad, like how to deep sea fish, and Cassie is preoccupied with her boyfriend back in Miami whom she constantly contacts on her phone through texting and FaceTime. They have the usual brother-sister conflicts but nothing is serious. That evening, Ben is gifted with a laptop computer and a cake with candles for his birthday. But outside forces begin to intervene on their serene vacation.

 

An exhausted Cassie sits down near the top of a hill.

Julia first notices this when she dives into the ocean for a swim earlier in the day, but gets trapped in a whirlpool that has suddenly formed around her. Luckily her screams for help are heard and she is rescued. But there are other troubling developments. Their navigational compass starts going haywire, with its directional pointer flipping all around as if north was south. There are disturbing undersea developments as a pod of whales crashes into their ship and causes the steering mechanisms to fail. Fiery meteorites fall from the sky. Cassie is cut off from a FaceTime conversation with her boyfriend, after she notices a threatening storm forming in the Miami sky. The storm hits the Orca and Tom issues “Mayday” calls while the family seals up the boat as best they can from the storm. In the morning, they discover that their boat is damaged and docked on dry land, now the floor of what used to be the ocean. Tom is finally able to get in radio contact with another survivor, Nao (Olivier Ho Hio Hen) who survived the storm in his ocean submersible. Nao explains to Tom that the oceans and land have switched polarities, so the ocean is now dry and the lands are flooded. He further explains that this polar switch is only temporary and will revert back again to what what was normal in a few more days. Tom now realizes that their only hope for survival is to go to the submersible which he estimates is several days away.

 

Cassie, Julia, and Ben take refuge in the rusted hull of a crashed airplane.

 

The family starts to prepare packs of supplies and food for the long journey ahead, but another horrible event happens. A lone stranger with a dog and a harpoon is seen approaching their boat. Tom goes out to greet the man and offers him water to drink. The man drinks the water then inexplicably attacks Tom with the harpoon, killing him. The rest of the family must now fight him off, which they are eventually able to do, but he still is a threat to them. They must deal with their grief over Tom’s murder and at the same time undertake the long journey to the submersible. The long and arduous journey and the events that happen on the way make up the balance of the film.

 

Ben suffers from an attack of heat exhaustion.

 

Survive is an unusual film in a number of ways. Made on what is considered to be a shoestring budge of about 5.3 million dollars, the producers and writers used a number of clever techniques to avoid the extravagant pyro-techniques one would expect in a survivalist film. Even though there aren’t a lot of CGI special effects, the film is beautifully shot in Morocco by cinematographer Pierre Aïm. Another interesting feature of the film is that the dialogue is bilingual, some in English and some in French. This would make the need for subtitles compelling, but it is pretty easy to figure out what is going on. As of this review there is no current streaming deal or DVD, although at least the former is most likely eminent. The small cast of characters is well cast and believable with the possible exception of the man with the harpoon. How does a psychotic killer with an attack dog emerge out of the ocean floor literally the next day after the profound disaster portrayed in the film? Quite puzzling. After the disturbing scenes of the beginning, the film settles into a survival trek for the remaining members of the family. Here the acting skills of Lisa Delamar and Lucas Ebel come to the fore. They don’t overplay their roles, responding like you would expect teenagers to do, sometimes with bravery, sometimes with anger, or sometimes with frustration. Even more difficult is the role of their mother portrayed by Émilie Dequenne, burdened with the loss of her husband, while trying to lead her children to safety, and fight off the man with the harpoon, things she has no experience with. Her performance makes things seem realistic by not always doing the logical thing, but does show incredible passion and bravery trying to protect her children from the many dangers that face them. And kudos to director Frédéric Jardin for keeping the action moving throughout the film.

Best Chucks Scene

 

Cassie voices her opinion about things to Julia and Ben.

 

Lisa Delamar (Cassie) wears black high top chucks during the entire last two thirds of the film, when she, her mom, and younger brother must flee from the wreckage of their grounded boat, and walk several days through the dried out sea floor to seek the grounded submarine that will provide a safe passage when the water returns to the ocean beds. Throughout our hundreds of film reviews, we have seen how chucks have been an effective shoe to wear in all kinds of extreme environments. Hiking on the dried out ocean floor is no exception, and Cassie's chucks hold up well during their journey. One of the best scenes showing this is when the family reaches the top of a cliff on the first day of their journey and Cassie vents her opinions about things. A second scene features an aerial shot of the the family as they regroup by some storage containers after surviving an attack by a huge cluster of sea crabs.

 

Aerial view after they arrived at storage containers from a ship.

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