“I need the waves, man. I need the movement. The open ocean. I used to … as a kid I used to wander down to the Sonoran Desert, outside of Gilbert. It was terrifying, man. Just nothin’. But nothin’ everywhere I looked. And I just felt it out there, all of it. You know, whatever it is. Just felt it. And I get the same exact shit whenever I’m out on the water. I just know it when I feel it. It’s there. It feels like I’m at peace, you know? It feels like home.”
I know exactly what the guy is talking about here. I inherited a love of the sea from my father, who lived and breathed salt air. So I approached the film feeling a certain connection. The film is also based on events that happened here in the Tampa area. While this was filmed in Malta, the events happened in February of 2009 off the coast of Clearwater, Florida. It’s the spring training home of the Phillies and also home to Upcomingdiscs. It’s nice to go into a film with some connections, and that’s exactly what I felt preparing to watch Not Without Hope now out on DVD. The film is based on firsthand accounts of the event from the lone survivor, Nick Schuyler, in a book he co-wrote with Jere Longman a year later in 2010.
The film bounced around a bit before it was finally released. Rupert Wainwright was set to direct the film as a vehicle for Dwayne Johnson. The Rock’s schedule gets filled up fast, so the lead then fell to Miles Teller, but along came COVID-19, and a lot of plans like these got delayed. Here it was delayed to the point that both director and star had to drop out. There’s really no worries about spoilers here, because the event was given a great deal of attention. The three guys who did not survive were all NFL players, so the media was all over it. If you’re checking this one out, it is not to find out what happened. We all know how it ended. It was a tragic event, so the job of director Joe Carnahan is to make the story compelling enough to hold your attention without the luxury of suspense. Ron Howard proved all of that possible with the film Apollo 13. Now Carnahan didn’t have that kind of a budget, but he still put together a compelling enough film.
The story is a very simple one. Zachary Levi plays Nick Schuyler. He is a professional trainer and worked with the football program at Tampa’s University Of South Florida, where this writer got his own degree. His job brought him in contact with professional athletes, and some of those contacts turned into friendships. And that’s where this story begins. Four guys are planning a fishing trip out in the Gulf Of Mexico in a 20-foot boat, and the characters are the heart of that story. We meet them having a BBQ the night before their planned trip. Marquis Cooper, played by Quenten Plair, owns the boat and has a “secret” fishing spot about 70 miles off-shore. In the film he’s about to leave the Bay area for Oakland to play for the Raiders, who are now in Vegas. So for him this is a last night out before he moves. In reality he had already started his tenure with the Raiders, but his impending departure makes for a good reason for this day out with his buddies.
Corey Smith, played by Terrence Terrell, was a player for the Tampa Bay Bucs and met Nick and the others while playing college football at USF. The other passenger was Will Bleakley, played by Marshall Cook. He also played at USF. His football career didn’t go as well, and he was now a financial advisor. He’s here to play that obligatory character who feels like something isn’t quite safe here and moans about the size of the boat.
So the guys head out on the waters to do some male bonding and fishing. They failed to check the weather report before they left. It’s something we’re quickly reminded through the supporting cast of women who worry about the guys. There’s a big bad cold front headed their way, and it’s going to bring strong storms. While what happened is tragic, not checking the weather was a huge mistake. My pop ended up being something of an amateur meteorologist because he was obsessed with knowing the marine conditions every time we headed out. The second mistake was also a foolish one. When they realize the weather is turning bad, they decide to head home. The anchor got stuck and they couldn’t pull it up. Cooper was determined not to lose a “second” anchor in one week, and he decides to fire up the motor and try to pull the anchor free. One of the first things they teach you in marine safety classes, at least it was in the 70’s when I took mine, was that a boat is not like your car or truck. There is no such thing as traction on the water, and so physics took its course and the stunt ended up capsizing the boat. The weather turns to crap, and the four friends are left struggling to hang on and survive.
The film itself makes a huge mistake here. As we watch weather reports on television as the family are keeping an eye on the conditions, the radar on the screen gives us a cyclonic storm typical of our tropical storms and hurricanes. One news person calls it a Cat 2 storm. We just don’t get those kinds of storms in Florida in February. The weather we get comes from cold front lines. They’re straight and move north to south. They can absolutely kick up some horrible conditions out on the water, as actually happened for these guys in 2009, but the television reports here describe something you only see here in warm waters. In fact, the biggest danger to these guys wasn’t the storm, but the cold waters of the time that quickly lead to hypothermia. In case we’re not aware, we’re given a detailed explanation of that danger from Josh Duhamel, who played Captain Timothy Close, the Coast Guard guy in charge of the search and rescue.
Zachary Levi has always been an underrated actor. I loved the series Chuck, where he played the title character, and I saw him move on to roles in Thor and eventually playing Shazam for two films in the DCU. He serves as a great core emotional center for the friends. He was once their trainer and tries to use the same kind of drive to keep them focused on survival. He had developed a mantra for the team, basically saying “I get strong. You get strong. We get strong.” He does a good job of keeping them alive, but because of the weather conditions there was no luck in finding them until they’d been capsized at sea for over 40 hours. By that time only Nick had survived.
The cinematography suffers from the conditions they are attempting to depict as well as the audio presentation. I had to turn on the closed captions to catch the dialog because of the wind and waves crashing over them. It’s also dark, and the same conditions that made it impossible to find them make it really hard to see any detail of what you’re watching. DVD bitrates just don’t have the kind of bandwidth to offer strong shadow definition, and it’s a very difficult film to actually watch. It’s certainly realistic, but perhaps too much so to be able to really immerse yourself in the story.
The cast give us an emotional entry into the story, but they can’t carry the weight on their own. It’s just not an easy film to watch. I suspect streaming is even harder. I would have liked to have seen an effort made for the box office, but the film was given only a limited release. It’s a good story, and I’m glad the film has brought that story some attention, but I don’t suspect it’s going to hold up down the line with better home theater equipment than the film can provide. I don’t know if it’s available on Blu-ray. If it is, that might be the better road to take. We were sent the DVD. The problem here is being realistic or providing a better audio/visual presentation. After all, “You can’t bench press the ocean.”
