NavList:

Alan, you wrote:
"I suppose that Hollywood's response would or might be, "it's only a movie"."

It's a movie (and fictional), certainly, and not a documentary, and I would also say it's a "very good" movie. I wouldn't call it "great" by any means as some of the reviewers have. And to remind you, there's a large collection of reviews here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/all_is_lost_2013/. Read some of them. They'll give you some insights from people who have seen lots of movies. And even among these overwhelmingly positive reviews, you'll find many misgivings, including the complaint that the film can be pretty boring.

I had previously suggested that you should see this on the big screen, rather than waiting for it to come out "on DVD" (or streaming online). My advice was based in part on being able to view it as a film rather than having the "living room freedom" to yell at the mistakes, pause for breaks, turn off the sound, and in general modify it from its original style of presentation. Gary suggests that you should skip the big screen and wait for the DVD so that you can enjoy yelling at the mistakes in your living room. :) So how could you combine those two suggestions? Let's use math...
1) Add and subtract: watch the first half of the movie in the theater, then leave in a huff. Wait three months until it's available online (or on DVD) and then watch the second half.
2) Combine the two sets of advice by a set "intersection" (a bitwise 'and'): in other words, do NOT see it in the theater and do NOT see it on DVD. You'll save a lot of money, and you can enjoy the vicarious nitpicking by reading the Cliff Notes (a.k.a. the Wikipedia summary).
3) Combine the two sets of advice by a set "union" (a bitwise 'or'): so you go see it in the theater as a big-screen film, and then you see it AGAIN when it's ready for the small-screen and enjoy the pleasure of the inevitable nitpicking. A somewhat more expensive option, but it's really the option that maximizes your viewing and nitpicking pleasure. :) I recommend it.

Among the complaints that I've seen about the movie, a fair number seem to be from people who are making a basic assumption about the character "our man" for which there is no evidence at all: the assumption is that he is an expert ocean sailor making rational choices. He's on the ocean. He's sailing. Therefore... Well, therefore nothing. About the only thing that you can conclude is that he has some modest amount of money (and maybe not a lot) and the courage or foolishness to sail alone. For example, while his boat is clearly about to sink, he stays tied by a line from his lifeboat. This is not rational. This is not intelligent ...as a number of commenters elsewhere have complained. But who said he's rational or intelligent? And even if he's normally rational, how would a normally rational person behave in such a situation? A character's bad choices are not the same thing as technical errors. There's definitely some technical laziness in the film --details that could have been fixed easily with a modest amount of effort. But there are also "errors" which are only errors if you view this story as a survival documentary, which, of course, it is not.

-FER
PS: The more I think about the implied celestial navigation in the movie, the more I think it would have been better if they had showed him making some huge errors, for example, taking a Sun sight and then plotting an X in the middle of Kazakhstan.

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