Blue Lagoon - The Awakening

Don’t ask me how I came to be watching Blue Lagoon: The Awakening (2012) as I am not entirely sure myself. I was looking for the original for some good old fashioned nostalgia but had to know what they had done for a 2012 version. Well they did some contrived sap but I didn’t hate it.

Emma (Emmaline, yes just like the original) is a popular senior at high school who has a friend who cares way too much about the quarterback (Jake from Glee) potentially liking and de-virginating her. Anyway you may ask how does this high school setting suddenly end up on a deserted island? Well via a contrived party boat for Carnivale. You see, the students head to the Caribbean to help build houses (including a nice cameo for Christopher Atkins as a teacher, the original Richard in The Blue Lagoon, he of the so blonde-almost-white curls), and on their last night, Emma is persuaded by her friends to board this party boat. Dean, who for some reason is an outsider who thinks his father doesn’t love him or something is also on this boat. Whilst partying away (and seeing the quarterback kissing another girl), Emma falls off the boat, while a police boat is nearing the party boat and escorts the party boat back to shore. Dean is the only one who notices and jumps in after her, they get into a lifeboat and stay quiet. You see Dean, who previously got in trouble for dangling a knife not at all menacingly on a cafeteria table, does not want to get into trouble again and so he says they will follow the police boat back in a minute. But then the boat doesn’t have a motor. And only one paddle. So they end up on a deserted island. So completely plausible I guess.

There’s a lot of slow motion beachy type activity happening here, similar to the original but with a lot less nudity. It is after all, a TV movie. The two eventually fall in love, working through his issues about his mother dying and him being the freak of the school and her the supposed prom queen. The leads are likeable enough and coincidentally both Australian and had roles on the Australian soap, Home and Away which is set in a beach side town.

There's also a truly random big cat storyline, I guess this version has to have the 'scary unknown' aspect like the original

In the end though I don’t know why they remade it (Which is really all it is, albeit set in present day not in the early 20^th century), except perhaps to market it to the teen set who haven’t seen the original.

 

And it ended with this, a deviation from the original.