Beautiful young people starring in a beautifully shot, silly movie. This won't win any award, but I know it holds a special place in the teenage hearts of lots women of a certain age.

Imagine being stranded on an island with one other person as a junior high age kid. This happens to a boy and a girl when they are with a crew sailing on a smaller vessel and it wrecks. The boy and girl along with an old jolly fellow make it to shore. Stranded, they learn to live on an island as he takes care of them. The old timer dies when the kids are pre-teen age. All alone on the island, the boy and girl survive and grow up without any guidance while navigating puberty together. That makes for some interesting and awkward situations as they have no knowledge of what to expect as they grow older. Almost like living as a cave man/woman without parents.

Often while watching this movie I asked myself, How would filmmakers tackle this or that scene today, 25 years later? And while I am certainly not going to applaud 'The Blue Lagoon' as an overlooked masterpiece, CERTAINLY not!, it is still a far cry better than the standard teenage soft-porn that is on offer today.

Basically, 'The Blue Lagoon' is about two horny teenagers finding their own path towards sexual fulfillment and adulthood, and it strives to point the way for its multitudes of teenage audiences with some dignity and even fearlessness. Today footage of completely naked infants as well as pre-teens and teens would simply never be realized or even permitted in mainstream OR art cinema, God forbid! Brooke Shields' frank alluding to Christopher Atkins' masturbatory habits could, in a movie today, only be filmed amidst a sea of giggles, whereas in 1980 they did it very deadpan and honestly.

The film is full of quite touching scenes and gently, if not exactly marvelously acted. I liked Atkins' prayer that the sick Shields be saved, and he doesn't remember how a prayer goes: "Our Father who art in Heaven ... Kingdom come ... Liberty and justice for all. Amen". They don't lead terribly eventful lives on that desert island, but their everyday rituals are beautifully filmed, and the underwater sequences are memorable.