Originally published: Sept. 2, 1980
Every year, it seems, a movie is released that should never have been made.
Last year, it was The Amityville Horror; the year before, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This year, it’s Columbia’s remake of The Blue Lagoon.
The Blue Lagoon is totally useless. The plot (what little there is) muddles along at a pitifully slow pace. Too much time is spent on Wild Kingdom-like scenery. We see chirping birds, slithering snakes, swimming squids, and turned-on turtles. Basically what you might see on the television show.
The Blue Lagoon ends up about one-and-a-quarter hours too long. It moves along fairly well at the very beginning and at the very end, but in between, the story pokes along unmercifully.
Though the plot touches on some philosophical views of religion, it simply mentions them with no attempt made to explore them.
Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins (who play stranded Emmeline and Richard) turn in much less than Academy Award-winning performances. Shields’ acting has matured very little from the silly, but cute, little girl in Just You and Me, Kid, despite her previous film experience.
The less said the better about Atkins’ film debut. His acting skills must have gone down with the ship.
You would expect the cinematography to contribute to the storytelling. The Blue Lagoon is a beautiful film, but the lovely tropical locales have only postcard-like quality. Take Stanley Kubrick’s recent The Shining, which is quite a different movie, but one whose cinematography added to the excitement. The Blue Lagoon’s visual beauty does little to further the story.
There’s an adage that remakes and sequels are never as good as the originals, and The Blue Lagoon proves the point. Columbia Pictures should have left the world with only one film production of The Blue Lagoon.
Commentary Track: Here we are 43 years later still talking about The Blue Lagoon, not because it’s being re-evaluated as a classic (absolutely not), but because it was one of the many examples of Brooke Shields being sexually exploited as a child. This was a brief review since there wasn’t much more I could say about the movie. I still stand by what I wrote in 1980: This movie should never have been made.