Imagine waking up alone on a sinking boat, lost and adrift somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. While this nightmare scenario sounds ripped from a paperback novel, for young adventurer Tami Oldham, it really did happen. Adrift’s director Baltasar Kormákur takes Oldham’s real-life survival story and gives it the Hollywood treatment. Kormákur adds sumptuous visuals, a pulse-pounding score, and some visceral thrills to make the story worthy of the silver screen.

Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) is a young woman with a restless spirit. The moment she graduated high-school she blazed out of her hometown of San Diego and she’s been exploring the world ever since. One morning she crosses paths with Richard (Sam Claflin), a handsome, charming, and worldly older man who lives to sail across the ocean. Soon after, they fall in love and set off together, exploring the Pacific Ocean. They randomly run into Richard’s old friends who offer to pay a lot of money if Richard will sail their boat back to California. The offer is high enough to fund Richard and Tami’s adventures, so they say yes. But a level-five storm strikes during the trip, damaging the boat, wrecking their equipment, and hurtling Richard out of the ship.

Three screenwriters received credit for writing Adrift’s script (Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell David Branson Smith). They tell the story through a choppy flashback/flashforward style much like an episode of Lost. The film begins with Tami lost and alone on the open sea before jumping back to before she meets Richard. This breaks up the uneventful story about a woman drifting across the ocean for weeks. The script does some Christopher Nolan-level time-fiddling to turn the catastrophic storm into the movie’s climax. Kormákur spends the most time focusing on the love story as he teases out the survival scenes.

Woodley is one of the best young actresses working today. Last year, in Big Little Lies, she held her own against two heavyweights, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, which is no easy feat. She has an unassuming charm that makes her characters so damn likeable. So, I’m surprised to say that her performance in Adrift left me wanting.

I wasn’t interested in Tami or invested in her romance with Richard. And I barely rooted for her to turn things around and make it back to civilization. The young couple’s love affair is so by-the-numbers that it feels fake and robotic. If I’m not rooting for their love, then I need to root for them as people. I’m not a fan of Matt Damon but I love his survival movie, The Martian. I still fist-pump as everything comes together, and he makes his way back to earth. And I know how the film ends! While I wouldn’t call Adrift boring, it received zero percent of my emotional investment.

Adrift doesn’t feature those “A-ha” moments that great survival movies, like The Martian have. I’m talking about MacGyver moments when the situation is dire, and the heroine figures something out right in the nick of time. These moments create tension and then a cathartic release for the audience. They make us feel like the heroine is adapting to her harsh environment. Tami learns to spearfish, fix sails, and read nautical charts but these advances aren’t played for suspense. With Tami, it feels more of a waiting game where she bides her time until things work out. This may be how Tami’s real-life story happened but it’s not cinematic.

While I didn’t like Tami, I did buy her as a sailor. Woodley conveys a grittiness and toughness below her every-woman exterior. I believed in Tami as she braved tropical winds and threw her weight into navigating sharp turns. Even at Tami’s lowest – dehydrated, lips chapped, knees scrapped – Woodley’s eyes conveyed the resilience and inner fire that kept Tami going.

Volker Bertelmann’s powerful score elevates Adrift’s most intense moments. At times, the sparse piano keys and sombre violins emphasize Tami’s feelings of loneliness and isolation out on the water. And when the action intensifies, Bertelmann goes to a hyperbolic score that wouldn’t feel out of place in a superhero movie. If a tropical storm with 30-foot waves wasn’t scary enough, imagine staring it down while deep, bone-rattling bass-hits rock the theatre’s sound system.

We spend most of Adrift staring at a broken-down boat out on the ocean. But that doesn’t prevent Kormákur and his DP from finding stunning ways to capture the action. There are some breathtaking shots where the camera comes in tight behind from sea level. Gliding behind the boat, the camera captures a red sunset illuminating the pink and red sky. It’s a shot made for travel brochures, calendars, and screensavers. Kormákur also proves he can invoke feelings of despair. When Tami is at her lowest, the camera pulls out, further and further, until her boat is a small dot in the frame. Pictures speak a thousand words, and nothing speaks to Tami’s hopelessness like seeing her lost in the vast ocean.

Adrift wants to be a survival movie and a love story but doesn’t succeed at either. I never felt any heat radiating off of Tami and Richard’s sweet-as-pie romance. And Tami’s battle for survival often plays out more like an irksome tussle. If you have a soft spot for love stories Adrift may win you over, but I suggest setting sail in search of a higher calibre of survival movies. Try starting with Gravity (2013), Cast Away (2000), and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965).