How come they got left behind in the first place?
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DizzyLizard444 — 14 years ago(July 23, 2011 12:51 AM)
In the story that inspired this the company found the missing couple's things but didn't say anything for 2 days after and even sent their transportation away. Seems like complete irresponsibility and laziness to me.
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CCRider01 — 14 years ago(August 02, 2011 04:50 PM)
OP, you do realize this film was based off a real story, they WERE left behind because of a faulty head count and the boating company did not realize their error until too late. They were missing for 2 days before the boat skipper discovered their personal belongings back at the companies office, and then phoned the hostel where the couple were staying and found out they had not returned.
The skipper Geoffrey Nairn was charged with manslaughter though later acquitted, and the boat company pled guilty to negligence and was fined.
No one knows exactly what happened to the couple (how and when they died), but the rest of the film is pretty much accurate. -
saahlhok — 14 years ago(October 15, 2011 11:41 AM)
- Counting instead of using the divers names for verification.
- The switch up w/ the lady diver returning & her partner, partnering w/ hairy guy.
- The couple was reserved & to themselves, not memorable.
- Between the three of them..Davis, Junior & Linda are brain deadalong with the other divers.
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puirt-a-beul — 10 years ago(November 06, 2015 09:13 AM)
OP, you do realize this film was based off a real story
I saw a recent 20/20 episode about the real-life story (
) just tonight, which led me to watch the movie again. I think the most poignant part of the real-life event for me was that, a couple of years after the disappearance, some fishermen found a diver's slate washed up in shoreline scrub, that contained a sad final note from the Lonergans. It said something along the lines of "we're abandoned, and adrift, somebody please help us or we're going to die", and then their names. They'd apparently written it and let the tide take it from them, in some last, desperate hope that someone might find it in time.
Mind you, the story isn't without controversy. I'm in fact Australian, and I remember when all this happened, and there are still people who feel that some of the evidence points to them faking the whole thing. In fact, around the same time there was another bloke who had something similar happen to him in New Zealand, except he managed to sneak aboard another dive boat and get back to shore before he was discovered
and he turned out to have been from the same church congregation as the Lonergans
. If that's a coincidence, it's eyebrow-raising. The question was: did they in fact plan this between them?
Then, there was also the fact that several separate pieces of their dive equipment washed ashore
all of it on the same beach
. That seems fairly unlikely, unless a) they were fairly close to shore when they died or lost the equipment, and b) the current was strongly in that direction. Stranger things have happened though, I suppose. And if they'd made it that close to safety, it's heartbreaking if they didn't actually manage to save themselves. And if they
did
save themselves I wonder where they went?
Another one of those stories, like
The Perfect Storm
, where we'll probably never know the finer details of what really happened.
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment. -
KingCobra686 — 9 years ago(April 18, 2016 06:39 PM)
How would they have faked it though? The whole disappearance relies on the boat company failing to notice that they didnt come back onboard. They either hid in the water and got lucky that they made such a stupid mistake, or they bribed the company to go along with it. Since its basically manslaughter, I doubt that second option is likely.
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puirt-a-beul — 9 years ago(April 19, 2016 09:43 AM)
Yeah, good points. The third possibility, of course, is that if they were planning a disappearance, and got the idea from the experience of their friend in New Zealand, it wouldn't be hard to find a company with lax procedures. In real life, this incident prompted a formal commission of inquiry into the industry Australia-wide, not just over the Barrier Reef, which revealed an endemic problem with safety procedures and resulted in a massive tightening of regulations.
I'm not advocating the theory of the video I referred to (which seems to be inaccessible now, unfortunately; from my log-in it just brings up a "this video is private" error, whatever that actually means). I just find it interesting when stories like this one have aspects that don't fit easily with the accepted narrative, and they make me curious.
I think it has to raise eyebrows that such a similar thing happened to someone the Lonergans personally knew, from the same church congregation, in similar circumstances in New Zealand. And that they'd heard about it before leaving on their own trip. The video did suggest they had demonstrable reasons to want to vanish a failing business and mounting debts, for instance.
One other sad possibility that occurs to me is that they might have engineered a "disappearance", maybe expecting there would be other boats around for them to be rescued by, as with their friend in New Zealand, but that it didn't pan out that way. That's kinda tragic. But either way, I suspect they died a sad and lonely death similar to what the film shows.
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment. -
jim-85613 — 9 years ago(January 06, 2017 06:42 PM)
The controversy was because the beep defense team tried to get the jerk off skipper off a manslaughter charge. The young couples character was assassinated by the defense attorney and the stupid jury bought into it. Australians can't count and will obviously fall for any BS fed to them.
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BigEasy1203 — 13 years ago(April 24, 2012 07:42 AM)
Ultimately blame would rest on the diving company that took them out. There's absolutely no excuse to leave two people behind. Having a piece of notebook paper with a dude counting people as they climb back on the boat is absurd. Doing that, I would not be surprised if people got left behind on a weekly basis. It would be too easy to miss someone, or someone being counted twice, etc.
Simply take a head count on the way there, and do another one after the dive with everyone back on board. You could call out a list of passenger names and have them respond "present" or whatever. -
irunnfunn — 9 years ago(January 09, 2017 06:24 PM)
A couple go ONTO the boat. So 2 people were counted. That same couple went BACK INTO the water. Butthe 2 people were still counted on the sheet. They were NOT crossed off when they went back in. Because it was a tour boat with strangers no one knew the couple who was left behind. They did check their time and were gone the 1 1/2 they had to scuba dive.