February 2025
Survive (Not Rated)
13/02/25 22:09 Filed in: 2025
Starring: Emilie Dequenne
January 2025
Warning! This is NOT a movie review. This is a critique of the film. Intended to initiate a dialogue, the following analysis explores various aspects of the film and may contain spoilers. For concerns over objectionable content, please first refer to one of the many parental movie guide websites. Ratings are based on a four star system. Happy reading!
A family of four enjoys a vacation aboard a yacht in Caribbean waters near Puerto Rico. After an incident where the mother almost drowns, the family celebrates the son’s birthday and takes a family photo. The peaceful moment is soon shattered by a violent sea storm that rocks the boat and knocks the family unconscious.
When the family rouses the next morning, they realize their lives have been turned upside down…literally. The boat now sits atop a cliff overlooking an expansive desert. Calling for help on the marine radio, the family reaches a scientist who tells them the Earth’s poles have reversed, and will reverse back in a matter of days.
Embarking on a perilous journey to find the scientist’s submersible craft, the family soon discovers that this new Earth is as strange, and deadly, as an alien planet.
Okay, I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them, but the nitpick alarm was blaring in the back of my head for much of the movie. First of all, what family takes their pre-teen son out on a boat in the middle of the ocean for his birthday? Maybe consider a backyard barbecue instead? Or Chuck E. Cheese?
Second, what would it do to human physiology if the Earth’s poles were suddenly reversed? At the very least, wouldn’t it throw off the equilibrium? Produce headaches? Nausea? The characters in the movie carry on as if functioning in a reversed polarity world was an everyday occurrence.
Most egregiously, from a scientific standpoint, the characters assume that because the Earth’s polarity was reversed, landmasses and oceans also traded places. I’m no science expert, but this concept is utterly daft. How can there be an even swap of land to water and vice versa when the Earth is roughly 70% water and 30% land? If I called my science geek buddy and told him this plot element, I’d bet all my money I’d get at least a snicker out of him, if not an outright guffaw.
Further stretching the film’s credulity is the large crabs, which pursue the survivors like a swarm of earth-bound locusts (for Stargate SG-1 fans, the crabs rapidly advance like an army of Replicators). Is this behavior scientifically accurate? No idea. But, like the rest of the movie, the creepy crabs seem contrived; deposited into the story merely to create dramatic tension.
So, what kind of movie is Survive? Well, as can be inferred from the title, it’s a survival movie…as well as a disaster movie. It’s a family adventure flick with shades of TVs Land of the Lost, sans dinos. It also has fantasy/sci-fi elements. Strangely, Survive has a slasher film subplot. Also, there are a few callbacks to Jaws (1975), including an underwater shot of a woman swimming in the ocean and the name of the boat, Orca. The final shot of the demolished city recalls similar tableaus in a myriad post-apocalyptic movies ranging from the Divergent series (2014-2016) to The Day After Tomorrow (2004).
Though the story deals with polarity shifts, its plot is riddled with bizarre tonality shifts. It’s like the movie can’t make up its mind what it wants to be. Or, perhaps it seeks to attract a wider audience by mashing up elements from many genres into its narrative potpourri. But, like the movie’s main plot device, this strategy achieves an opposite effect than desired, leaving the audience out to sea.
Produced by several French companies, Survive noticeably lacks the sheen of a major Hollywood release. Its production elements are wildly uneven. Major debits include the subpar music and use of fade to black edits when transitioning from one scene to another, which makes Survive feel like a TV movie. To its credit, the movie boasts gorgeous desert locations and excellent cinematography.
The acting is also hit or miss. As would be expected, the adults turn in better performances than the kids; but they’re all forced to make the most of the script’s remedial dialog. Oddly, the characters mostly speak English in the first half of the film, but mostly speak French in the second half of the film. Maybe the effects of the polarity switch finally caught up with them.
It’s extremely disappointing that this ostensibly family film is pervaded with profanities. The movie is Not Rated, which probably has to do with its foreign production. However, judging by U.S. standards, this almost certainly would be an R-rated film.
There are several bloody and gory scenes in the movie, including a protracted sequence where one man stabs another in the chest and then in the throat, causing blood to overflow his mouth. The same man brutally attacks a woman, who survives the encounter and later gets her revenge in an uber-bloody sequence where she viciously stabs the man several dozen times—spatters of blood gush into the air with each thrust. The next morning, we glimpse a trail of entrails leading to the fly-ridden corpse. To complete the macabre scene, a crab skitters out of the man’s face, a la the scarab crawling out of Imhotep’s face in The Mummy (1999). Not recommended for those with a weak stomach.
The movie’s views on science are evident from the start: we’re told that there have been five mass extinctions in Earth’s history and that the sixth is about to begin. This teases the movie’s close adherence to Darwin’s theory of “natural selection.”
When we first learn that Earth’s poles have been reversed, the father quips that the conspiracy theory nuts were actually right. The captain of the submersible vehicle confirms this, saying, “Maybe the Earth has decided to eliminate men before they destroy it.” This is a similar sentiment to what Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) espoused in Jurassic Park (1993), “Dinosaurs had their shot and nature selected them for extinction.”
This presupposes that Mother Nature has the power to wipe out entire species, or all life on Earth, at a whim (the recent, tragic, fires in Los Angeles would seem to be further evidence of this). Though the threat of natural disasters is always present, and bad things happen to people all the time, should we live in fear of Mother Nature’s wrath? If it’s our time to go, there’s nothing we can do to stop it, so might as well live each day as if it’s the last, right?
While on the topic of Mother Nature, Survive slyly weaves an environmental message into its narrative. As the movie opens, the camera frames a discarded sandal at the bottom of the ocean. Later, when the ocean floor becomes a desert, we’re shown various ways humanity has impacted nature: we see a large dump of toxic waste, a crashed plane, cargo containers surrounded by strewn items, and sections of the desert littered with empty water bottles, kids’ desk chairs (strangely without legs), and toilet bowls. The latter is a clever reminder that the movie’s post-apocalyptic world has literally gone to pot.
The movie also makes commentary on how ill-prepared we—particularly our screen-bound young people—are as a society to deal with the exigencies of survival situations. In two instances, a teen girl, who is listening to music with her headphones, is completely oblivious to life-and-death emergencies happening nearby. Later, she forgets to tighten the lid on the canteen, depleting the family’s supply of drinking water. This forces her younger brother to drink water out of a brackish pool, which makes him sick. At one point, the young woman loses hope and repeatedly yells, “We’re all going to die!” These examples beg the question, how well would civilization function in a post-apocalyptic world without Siri to provide practical guidance?
For the most part, the movie exhibits good parenting. A father patiently teaches his son how to cast the line from a fishing pole. The idolizing son expresses confidence in his father’s ability to get them out of their predicament. He quotes one of his dad’s favorite sayings, “Every problem has a solution.”
The mother’s unwavering focus is the safety of her kids. On several occasions, she proves her willingness to sacrifice herself for them. In a movie bereft of meaning, this heartening example of maternal love serves as its saving grace.
The most merciful aspect of this movie is its ninety-minute runtime. Adding another half hour to this predictable, irredeemable mess would’ve been a special form of torture.
So, what does the film accomplish? In its attempt at cramming tropes from many different genres into its story, the movie ends up saying nothing. Due to its incessant profanities and graphic elements, it isn’t even an enjoyable popcorn flick. It’s the type of substandard story that gives B-movies a bad name. In fact, it’s more like a C-movie (C for Crabs).
It’s a shame to think of all the good movies out there that never get made because of financing when a meaningless piece of schlock like this film gets released. Maybe Darwin’s theories also work backwards in a reverse-polarity world. As this movie proves—in terms of its characters, story, and overall production—there is such a thing as “survival of the unfittest.”
Rating: 1½ out of 4