[Reaper16]

I just watched a great film from 1971 called Walkabout. It is essentially LOST: the movie. A teenage girl and her little brother are taken out to the Australian outback by their father who attempts to kill them. They escape and dad commits suicide. The two are not having a good show of surviving alone on the wilderness when an Aborigine boy, on his rite of passage known as the Walkabout, finds them and helps them survive. This is not a happy movie, though. The lack of communication between them ends up ensuring that, while together, the white kids and the Aborigine kid end up more lost in their lives than ever before. Simple story of desperation and sadness. But the thematic parallels to Lost are many in number: daddy issues, the failure to communicate with the people you're with, surviving in the wilderness together vs dying in it alone, nature as something to protect, hunting as metaphor,fear of the Others, the question of whether or not man is inherently savage, the pitfalls of life in modernity and the possibility of finding yourself out in the wilderness, the desperate need to go "home." Even time; the movie is perhaps not shown in exact chronological order and some scenes might be imagined, even. There are numerous motifs that the film and the show share: a toy airplane, mysterious radio brodcasts, numbers, a team of scientists out in the wild.

I'd recommend this film to everyone, as it is quite good (a part of the Criterion collection and available on Netflix streaming), but especially to fans of Lost.