The excuse "It's a Lifetime movie, what do you expect?" is not good enough. My biggest critique of the 1980 film was that it held back a lot despite seeming to want to be edgier. This film has that even worse.
Blue Lagoon: The Awakening? What exactly is being awoken in this film? A title like that would be more appropriate for the 1980 film than this one since there's no real character arc for either of the two main characters. They aren't transformed by their experience being stranded on an island for months. Once they go back to their old lives, it's like nothing ever happened.
The acting is bad. The line delivery on the lifeboat, especially, was so unnatural it felt more like a play being put on by inexperienced school kids than an actual film. It was almost like they filmed too little of that sequence and had lines dubbed over after the fact and it feels incredibly sloppy. The reactions of the parents after the two come back from being rescued are extremely subdued and unrealistic. Underacting at its finest, it seems. Your kids are presumed dead and have been for months and then you find out they're actually still alive and have been rescued and the best you can react is as if they are coming from year long study abroad program in Europe or something?
All of the meaningful social commentary present, even in passing, in the 1980 film are completely absent from this one, replaced by the concerns of high school social politics and worries of social implications of certain decisions, most notably, who you end up dating. It's incredibly shallow and either operates on a fundamental lack of understanding on what the original story was trying to say, or was purposefully watered down so that it could conform to the conventional Hollywood drama with all the fixings of a young adult fiction.
The drama and tension are all manufactured nonsense. There don't seem to be any real stakes in this film and any possibility of conflict or tension in the film is passed up in favor of something ridiculous, unrelated, and out of the blue. There is a question of whether or not Emma was pregnant but I believe the film when Emma says "Nope." We can't have underage teen pregnancy, what would the audience think? Any possible tension that sort of issue would imply is instantaneously evaporated in favor of putting in a ridiculous chase scene involving a panther on an island..?
One of the positive aspects of the 1980 adaptation that I complimented was that it did have nice visuals, especially with the swimming sequences. This film tries to do the same thing but can't quite recreate it and ends up looking like a cheap knockoff.
This adaptation of Blue Lagoon relies too much on its soundtrack to heighten any sense of drama or tension and the soundtrack, itself, relies too much on indie pop tunes to convey any emotion. Since there really isn't any chemistry between the two leads, the film makers seemed to decide on forcing emotion with a cheap soundtrack. At any standard, this film's soundtrack feels like an afterthought and more of a supplemental tool than anything else.
Blue Lagoon: The Awakening is bad. If Lifetime really had reservations about the original story enough to change it so dramatically, then maybe they shouldn't have made it in the first place. This film is an intensely watered down truncated vision of the story tainted with all the worst elements of the most cliche teen/young adult fiction tropes one can imagine. I cannot recommend this to anyone. The 1980 version is no masterpiece, but this is straight junk.
Blue Lagoon: The Awakening? What exactly is being awoken in this film? A title like that would be more appropriate for the 1980 film than this one since there's no real character arc for either of the two main characters. They aren't transformed by their experience being stranded on an island for months. Once they go back to their old lives, it's like nothing ever happened.
The acting is bad. The line delivery on the lifeboat, especially, was so unnatural it felt more like a play being put on by inexperienced school kids than an actual film. It was almost like they filmed too little of that sequence and had lines dubbed over after the fact and it feels incredibly sloppy. The reactions of the parents after the two come back from being rescued are extremely subdued and unrealistic. Underacting at its finest, it seems. Your kids are presumed dead and have been for months and then you find out they're actually still alive and have been rescued and the best you can react is as if they are coming from year long study abroad program in Europe or something?
All of the meaningful social commentary present, even in passing, in the 1980 film are completely absent from this one, replaced by the concerns of high school social politics and worries of social implications of certain decisions, most notably, who you end up dating. It's incredibly shallow and either operates on a fundamental lack of understanding on what the original story was trying to say, or was purposefully watered down so that it could conform to the conventional Hollywood drama with all the fixings of a young adult fiction.
The drama and tension are all manufactured nonsense. There don't seem to be any real stakes in this film and any possibility of conflict or tension in the film is passed up in favor of something ridiculous, unrelated, and out of the blue. There is a question of whether or not Emma was pregnant but I believe the film when Emma says "Nope." We can't have underage teen pregnancy, what would the audience think? Any possible tension that sort of issue would imply is instantaneously evaporated in favor of putting in a ridiculous chase scene involving a panther on an island..?
One of the positive aspects of the 1980 adaptation that I complimented was that it did have nice visuals, especially with the swimming sequences. This film tries to do the same thing but can't quite recreate it and ends up looking like a cheap knockoff.
This adaptation of Blue Lagoon relies too much on its soundtrack to heighten any sense of drama or tension and the soundtrack, itself, relies too much on indie pop tunes to convey any emotion. Since there really isn't any chemistry between the two leads, the film makers seemed to decide on forcing emotion with a cheap soundtrack. At any standard, this film's soundtrack feels like an afterthought and more of a supplemental tool than anything else.
Blue Lagoon: The Awakening is bad. If Lifetime really had reservations about the original story enough to change it so dramatically, then maybe they shouldn't have made it in the first place. This film is an intensely watered down truncated vision of the story tainted with all the worst elements of the most cliche teen/young adult fiction tropes one can imagine. I cannot recommend this to anyone. The 1980 version is no masterpiece, but this is straight junk.