"Perception" in modern day Liberty Valence story

Rating: 6/10 (1 July 2015)

This can be viewed as a modern day Liberty Valance film, and I don't think that is specific enough to be a spoiler.
It's also a story of "perception".
It's a slow paced film, which usually only works when the characters are credible.
The characters aren't "credible" here, but that might work because all but two of the characters are told from the point of view of a sole ship wreck survivor.
The trouble is that the second of the two characters not told from his point of view, a writer, is not credible. We learn this at the end when he immediately has a revelation of truth that could only come from piecing a puzzle together.
The writer character is poorly written for this reason. His immediate understanding of a puzzle is like a man reading a cryptogram and not even looking at all the letters, but solving it immediately, the first letter, then second, and so forth, in a normal cryptogram puzzle.
Despite this, the story itself has its merits. Another problem is that we sit too long through the two characters droning on in a very dull way. Not that they're dull, but just that they aren't interesting. And it takes too long to get to the "story" part.
I understand that a background is set up for the "point of view" of the sole survivor of a ship wreck, but this background part fails, or at least gets a "D" grade, for being overly long, when it could be just as well described in seconds by a good writer. Also, the character of the story teller doesn't seem credible for his background.
The story teller explains himself in an Agnostic way, and a way that questions everything he sees. And we get this effect in the first story he tells. In the second story, however, he questions nothing, and his description of at least one character looks suspiciously made up.
The dynamic part of the story could also have been better. There are some good cinematic touches, but this is very slow paced.
What does bring this film up a level is the psychology of "survivor" stories. If one ever reads accounts by survivors of battles, wars, disasters, one sees pretty much a common element. The survivor almost never describes himself as nice, and in fact, almost all survivors try to describe themselves as harsh, tough, and a survivor because of natural selection.
We do see that in the survival story here, in a good allegorical way. We also see that the survival story is told in such a way that we feel the survivor does perceive the events in "flash photo" form, which affects his perception of reality. Those aspects are well done.
It's too bad that is about all that was done well. It's a good idea, but just not well written.