Starring Shailene Woodley. Rated PG

On the surface, Adrift is a fact-based romantic adventure, starring Big Little Lies’ Shailene Woodley, who also helped produce, as Tami Oldham, who in 1983 met full-time sailor Richard Sharp in Tahiti, after bumming around on boats in the South Pacific. But it’s really about an unusual subject for movies: intelligence. 

Woodley’s 23-year-old Californian is instantly smitten by the soft-spoken Brit played by The Hunger Games’ Sam Claflin, who has a Roger-Daltrey-played-by-the-young-Hugh-Grant vibe. (Woodley’s Divergent series costar Miles Teller was originally slated for this role, but that’s pretty hard to picture now.) He warns her of starvation, disorientation, and even hallucinations coming with life at sea, but she signs on anyway.

They’re only in his self-made 36-foot sailboat a few months before another couple offers them a wad of cash to sail their 44-footer back to San Diego—Tami’s hometown, which she’s not anxious to see again. That won’t be her biggest problem. Once under way, they run into a massive hurricane, and Richard is swept overboard, with the injured Tami left to fend for herself.

This happens right at the start of the 90-minute effort, although the whole story is broken up into bite-size flashbacks by outdoorsy Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who previously delved into the life aquatic in films like The Sea and The Deep. (His breakthrough 101 Reykjavik was more about the Drink.) The screenplay is mostly by Hawaiian-born twin brothers Aaron and Jordan Kandell, and their dialogue is unusually bland—not unrealistic, but nothing very lyrical or amusing, either. (The orchestral score is also pretty dull.) Of course, language isn’t a crucial element of this survival story, which largely consists of Tami figuring out how to stay alive and get the banged-up yacht moving again, without the aid of a working engine or electronic equipment.

Once she finds the seriously battered Richard clinging to a dingy and patches him up, she gets occasional nuggets of nautical wisdom from him. But for the most part she has to improvise, based on an old sextant, some charts, and bits of material literally floating around the cabin. She manages to pump out the bilge, rig a hunk of sail, and turn north toward Hawaii. The most interesting stuff in Adrift involves the amazingly resourceful particulars of her long-shot survival, and viewers can argue about how much has been changed from real events, considering it says “A true story” right on-screen. Oddly, there’s no credit for Oldham’s own memoir. Or maybe that was just a draft.