BEFORE: When this little chain is over, I estimate that I will have seen 33 films with Nicole Kidman in them. That may seem like a lot, but I doubt that it's a record for any actor or actress, and anyway, there are still films with her in them that I have not seen, like "Birth" and "Dogville" and "Margot at the Wedding", but those just don't seem to be any sort of priority for me. Plus, this raises the question about which actor or actress I have seen the most times, at least in the last 10 years. Honestly, I have no idea. I could use IMDB's search function to figure this out, but it would require doing one search for every possible actor, and I don't have that kind of time. Anyway that search function is somewhat unreliable, because it tends to include people who get thanked in the credits without appearing, and also people like Justin Timberlake when a film uses one of his songs, which doesn't count as an acting appearance. Unfortunately there's no way to exclude these things, so I may never know.
Robert De Niro's name pops up 47 times in the last 10 years of movie-watching, but 5 of those are for producer credits, so I've seen him as an actor 42 times. Meryl Streep has 40 appearances, Tom Hanks has 27, Tom Cruise has 25 and I have no idea who to search on next. Brad Pitt has 36, Clint Eastwood 32 (once I take away his directing-only credits), Jack Nicholson 29. Schwarzenegger and Stallone are tied with 22 each, and I'm OK with that. Woody Allen only makes it to 22 appearances, too, because at some point he stopped appearing in his own films. Now I don't know if I should be checking older actors with long careers, like Cary Grant (31 films) or character actors like Richard Jenkins (29) who pop up everywhere. I'll have to think about this some more, but I've got to table it for now.
Kidman carries over again from "Before I Go to Sleep".
THE PLOT: After a tragedy, a naval officer and his wife are spending some time isolated at sea when they come across a stranger who has abandoned a sinking ship.
AFTER: I'm flashing back to the late 1980's for this one, to the earlier part of Kidman's career - but with so few actors in this one the only way to make the connections was to hide it between two more recent films. Here she plays Rae, a young wife whose young child recently died, and that's been something of a recurring theme this year - and very specifically, several films in which Nicole Kidman played a mother whose child has died. At least twice this year, maybe three times.
So when her husband John gets out of the Royal Navy (I'm not sure if his service ended, or if he was just on leave, that's unclear) naturally they want to get away on a boating trip in the middle of nowhere. Let's assume it's somewhere in the South Pacific, since this was filmed near the Great Barrier Reef and everyone has something of an accent.
After a few days in this tranquil ocean, a strange ship appears, which seems to be adrift and lifeless, until a man is seen rowing furiously away from it, headed toward their boat. He claims that the other ship is sinking, the engine is out and everyone else aboard is dead from food poisoning. But his story seems to have more holes in it than a fishing net, so while he sleeps, the husband rows to the other ship to check it out, and learns that it was apparently some kind of swingers' cruise for 6 people, five of whom were killed violently, leaving only the guy from the rowboat with his false story.
Unfortunately this sort of makes the mystery man into something of a stereotypical character, bordering on a cartoon. We never learn his motivations, so without this he's a killer because he's insane and he's insane because he's a killer. Not knowing the why of things is very confounding, but once he wakes up he begins bullying Rae, and then sails away on the working ship with her, leaving husband John on the not-previously-sinking but now currently-genuinely-sinking vessel. Fortunately this Navy man has a lot of experience in engine and boat repair, but still the ship seems doomed, and things get worse when an accident locks him below deck. I'm not sure if it qualifies as a NITPICK POINT that the troubled vessel had sails in addition to its engine, but perhaps they were nonfunctional and just for decoration, or perhaps since he chose to focus on the engine he just never got around to unfurling them?
Anyway, it falls on Rae to seduce the mystery man to gain his trust and to re-gain control of their vessel. But this comes at a cost, and it's a violent struggle once the killer realizes that her affections were not sincere.
This film is based on a novel from 1963, and it's one that Orson Welles tried to make into a film, he spent several years in the late 1960's doing that, and some scenes were filmed before the project was abandoned. Only two work prints survive, that original negative has been lost. Many story elements were changed when the 1989 version was filmed, such as the story was narrowed down to just three main characters, and the motivation for the killings was completely dropped. I just wish the filmmakers here had chosen to replace it with something, anything.
I'd probably have a ton more NITPICK POINTS today if I knew anything about sailing or navigation. Like the fact that John makes a lot of measurements and calculations before setting a course, and Rae just doesn't. She prefers to choose a direction by random chance, apparently, and I know that the sea is so very, very big that this doesn't seem like it could possibly be successful. There are 360 degrees in a circle, after all, so what are the odds of picking the right course without navigational tools? But again, I'm not an expert.
Also starring Sam Neill (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Billy Zane (last heard in "Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World"), Rod Mullinar, Joshua Tilden, George Shevtsov, Michael Long.
RATING: 4 out of 10 harpoons
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