THE RAFT no stars

This documentary, made now by Marcus Lindeen, but dealing with events that happened in 1973, ought to be hugely exciting, (given the subject matter), but is, in fact, quite boring. It shows and describes a journey across the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to Mexico by six men and five women on a raft as part of a sociological experiment on, amongst other things, aggression by the anthropologist Santiago Genoves.

A good deal of the film is actual footage shot on the raft at the time while in the present those still left alive look back and analyze the experience and it is this part of the film that drags it down. It's like a not very good play in which ancient actors act at playing younger versions of themselves while even the events that happened on the raft turn out to be more than a bit ho-hum. It's really like an intellectual version of "Big Brother", set at sea, and you know how boring that turned out to be. Anyone looking for a bit of titillation is bound to be disappointed.