183 - The Blue Lagoon

    A pair of 7-year-olds grow up on a secluded island, and eventually fall in love.
    In Top Secret! there’s a fantastic parody of this movie, and for most of my life, this is all I knew of it.  Now that Netflix finally has it, I’ve watched it.
    It has a terrible reputation, and I understand why.  Because the kids are marooned when they’re so young, they never really develop beyond that.  They develop their sexuality, and their priorities shift, but they remain roughly as annoying as they ever were.  It’s difficult to treat this as anything other than a bad script or bad acting.  But it’s neither.  It’s accurate… but that doesn’t mean that it’s pleasant.
    There is some beautiful photography.  I think there might be a touch of stock footage used for some of the sea life shots.
    What is much more pleasant is how frankly sexuality is portrayed.  There’s plenty of nudity, none of it erotic.  The approach to this probably would be difficult to get away with now, but it’s kind of refreshing.  It brings a sense of realism to a movie that really needs it.
    The realism is weird.  The movie plays fast and loose with some basic ideas - like the stone fish that the girl steps on would have killed her.  There seem to be no problems with illness.  For some reason, their clothes stay freshly white most of the time.  They don’t get sunburned.  (Some tanning happens later in the movie)
    There’s something that I don’t like about the ending.  I don’t know exactly what it is.
    The last half hour of the movie is mostly taken up with family bliss, after they have a baby, they spend their time goofing off, teaching the baby things, and having a good time.
    Maybe that’s the problem.  There isn’t much focus on the difficulty.  When I read an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe as a kid, I remember there being a long time spent on establishing a routine, as well as methods of getting everything he needed to survive.  Here, the island just seems to provide everything without much work.
    It’s actually a good story, and well photographed, but it’s so annoying to listen to characters that never learned how to talk like adults.  I doubt I’d watch this again.