Crew
Director – Frederic Jardin, Screenplay – Matt Alexander, Producers – Jean-Yves Robin, Marc-Etienne Schwarz & Marc Stanimrovic, Photography – Pierre Aïm, Music – Nicolas Errera, Visual Effects Supervisor – Alain Carsoux & Jean-Francois Michelas, Visual Effects – Benuts (Supervisor – Nicolas Corson) & Compagnie Générale des Effets Visuels (Supervisor – Alain Carsoux), Special Effects Supervisor – Vincent Saety, Makeup Effects Supervisors – Denis Gastou, Fabrice Herbet, Pierre-Paul Jayne & Jean-Christophe Spadaccini, Production Design – Pierre Queffelean. Production Company – M.E.S. Productions/Monkey Pack Films/UMedia/UFund/Canal+/Cine+/CB/KMBO/Federation Studios/WTFilms/Wallimage/Palatine Etoile 20/Centre National di Cinema et de l’Image Animee.
Cast
Emile Dequenne (Julia), Andreas Pietschmann (Tom), Lisa Delamar (Cassie), Lucas Ebel (Ben), Arben Bajraktaraj (The Man with the Harpoon), Olivier Ho Hio Hen (Nao)
Plot
Husband Tom, a German oceanographer working in Miami, and his French wife Julia, a doctor, go out on their boat off the coast of Puerto Rico with their children Cassie and Ben for Ben’s thirteenth birthday. They see satellites fall from the sky and the boat is then struck by a wave. They come around to find that they are stranded in the middle of a desert. They theorise that the Earth’s poles have reversed, leaving what was ocean now desert. They put out a mayday call and this is answered by Nao, a scientist in a stranded submersible. He warns that the poles are going to reverse in a matter of days and that the area will be swept by massive waves. He agrees to give shelter in his submersible but only has room for the two children. They are then approached by a man who abruptly attacks Tom and pursues Julia, during the course of which the boat is set on fire. Julia and the children set out on foot across the desert to try and make it to the submersible while pursued by the man.
In recent years, France has started to make an unusual series of Catastrophe films. Abandoning Disaster Movie melodrama, these feature individuals or tight-knit groups dealing with overwhelming events as in Acid (2023) and The Animal Kingdom (2023). Survive joins what may well be a new trend.
First of all, I had a major issue with the basic premise of Survive – that a reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles occurring would result in a catastrophic shift of water and land where oceans are emptied out. The reversal of the magnetic poles has occurred in the past and is possible again in the future. As we do see happen, this would disrupt GPS navigation ie compasses would no longer point north – although wouldn’t actually cause satellites to come crashing down.
The one thing a shift of the earth’s magnetic poles would not cause is some kind of disaster movie scenario. What the film seems to mistake happening is the difference between a flipping of the magnetic poles and a reversal of the Earth’s entire axis. If the latter did occur, it would be a massive catastrophic event, probably on the order an extinction level event where the ensuing tsunamis and earthquakes would obliterate most life and structures, except maybe those well inland or in high altitudes. While we see the oceans emptied out here, what we don’t see is how the vast tsunamis would have swept across continents and taken out entire cities. There would probably be little to no civilisation left to go back to afterwards.
The other plausibility issue is that the ocean floor with all of water taken out would not look like a desert (at least a matter of hours later). It would be rocky, filled with still damp silt and you would expect to see a lot more dead marine life than we do – we get nothing more than a single hammerhead shark and some malevolent crabs. Moreover though, the Caribbean, where we are told we are, ranges in depth from an average of 7200 feet to the Cayman Trench (25,000 feet). Emptied out, a lot of it would be more like mountainous terrain having been inverted ie. going downwards instead of up. What that would mean would be that you would end up with deep pools where the water would probably form lakes. Desert terrain (like we see) implies the absence of water for long periods of time. Rather than dry desert with a lot of sand, most of the terrain that used to be ocean bed would be rocky, covered in silt and still very wet from all the residual water that has been left behind.
Survive is a fundamentally implausible scenario. That said, not long into it, Frederic Jardin propels us into the midst of action from the abrupt and shocking moment where Arben Bajraktaraj (who also played a Death Eater in the Harry Potter films) abruptly attacks Andreas Pietschmann and the boat becomes a precarious survival shelter with Emile Dequenne trying to hide in and around it as Arben comes pursuing, determined to kill her. His pursuit forms quite a bit of the film, although he is later replaced by killer crabs. In these scenes, Frederic Jardin generates a reasonable degree of survival tension and keeps it going for much of the film. Enough to distract us from the absurdity of the premise until you sit down afterwards and think about it.
Survive was the fifth film from French director Frederic Jardin who had previously made the non-genre likes of Loose Screws (1994), The Sister Brothers (2000), Cravate Club (2002) and Sleepless Night (2011).
Trailer here