The Raft movie review & film summary (2019)

That's also one of the most frustrating things about "The Raft": director Marcus Lindeen seems to let the six surviving members of Genoves' experiment tell their stories in their own respective ways. It sounds great (and sometimes is), but Lindeen's hands-off approach—he mostly lets the Acalians interrogate each other—starts to wear thin whenever his subjects try to explain their complex feelings of resentment, skepticism, and nostalgia about what happened during the Acali's journey. There's consequently a weird circular logic to Lindeen's presentation: he seems reluctant to super-impose an artificial narrative onto the group's experiences—since Genoves already tried and failed to do that in his journals and notes—but he doesn't ask his subjects enough follow-up questions to get worthwhile, memorable answers from them. In "The Raft," less authorial control doesn't necessarily make for a better story.

Lindeen must organize and comment on his subjects' experiences, if only for the sake of establishing a timeline of events. He invites the six surviving Acali crew members (minus the late Genoves, whose thoughts are narrated by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho) to gather and talk inside a life-sized replica of the ship. Lindeen's subjects are generally mild-mannered, but tension inevitably arises whenever they talk about Genoves. Some Acalites are still uncomfortable with Reves' demands of them, especially his obsession with making his subjects pair off and have sex, ostensibly for scientific purposes (in his notes, Genoves admits that he sought out "sexually attractive" participants). Alaskan engineer Fe Seymour remembers that Genoves wanted her and Catholic priest Bernardo (now deceased) to have sex just because they are both black. 

Lindeen obviously has a low opinion of Genoves based on edited selections from Genoves' posthumously narrated writings: over the course of the Acali's 101-day tour, Genoves became the kind of toxically aggressive personality that he set out to study. There are blatant undercurrents of passive-aggression in his notes about the trip's inconclusive results ("Instead of supporting me, they behave like a bunch of little children"). Genoves' frustration was also noticed and is guardedly commented upon by the Acali's survivors, most of whom have adopted a live-and-let-live attitude. 

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