The Blue Lagoon is a 1980 American coming-of-age romantic survival drama film directed by Randal Kleiser from a screenplay written by Douglas Day Stewart based on the 1908 novel of the same name by Henry De Vere Stacpoole.

But without either the guidance or the restrictions of society, emotional and physical changes arise as they reach puberty, go skinny dipping in the ocean, fall in love, and end up having a child.

In the late Victorian period, two cousins, nine-year-old Richard and seven-year-old Emmeline Lestrange, and galley cook Paddy Button, are shipwrecked on a lush tropical island in the South Pacific.

Paddy cares for the children and forbids them "by law" from going to the other side of the island, where he finds an altar with bloody remains from human sacrifices.

Having reached puberty, the two go skinny dipping in the ocean, but Emmeline is uncomfortable with her sexual attraction to Richard and declines to share her "funny" thoughts with him.

Associating the blood with Christ's crucifixion, she concludes that the altar is God and tries to persuade Richard to go to the other side of the island to pray with her.

Neither recognizes what is happening when Emmeline becomes pregnant, and they are stunned to feel the baby move inside her abdomen, assuming her stomach is causing the movements.

Visiting their original homesite, Richard searches for bananas while Paddy, unnoticed, brings a branch of the scarlet berries into the boat with Emmeline.

He hired Douglas Day Stewart, who had written The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976), to write the script and met up with Richard Franklin, the Australian director, who was looking for work in Hollywood.

Herpetologist John Gibbons had just discovered said iguana on nearby Yadua Tabu, but word from an associate who had watched the film and spotted a strange lizard confirmed the existence of a second population.

The website's critical consensus reads: "A piece of lovely dreck, The Blue Lagoon is a naughty fantasy that's also too chaste to be truly entertaining".

[16] Among the more common criticisms were the ludicrously idyllic portrayal of how children would develop outside of civilized society,[9][17][18][19] the unfulfilled buildup of the island's natives as a climactic threat[9][17][20][21] and how the film, while teasing a prurient appeal, conspicuously obscures all sexual activities.

It's a wildly idealized romance, in which the kids live in a hut that looks like a Club Med honeymoon cottage, while restless natives commit human sacrifice on the other side of the island".

[23] Time Out commented that the film "was hyped as being about 'natural love'; but apart from 'doing it in the open air', there is nothing natural about two kids (unfettered by the bonds of society from their early years) subscribing to marriage and traditional role-playing".

"[19] Gary Arnold, also of The Washington Post, similarly called the film "a picturesque rhapsody to Learning Skills, Playing House, Going Swimming, Enjoying the Scenery and Starting to Feel Sexy in tropical seclusion".

[24] Janet Maslin of The New York Times commented that the film is "more serene" than Kleiser’s previous effort Grease, "but it also has a nonsensical glaze that contributes to the inadvertent merriment" and "it tends to be enjoyably silly".

Both are quite adequate to the movie's requirements, and neither has much acting to do--Miss Shields's hardest job, for instance, is to pretend she is giving birth to a baby without ever having wondered why she's put on so much weight.

"[22] In a retrospective review for RogerEbert.com, critic Abbey Bender wrote: "When it comes to the depiction of burgeoning sexuality, 'The Blue Lagoon' wants to have it both ways ... with puberty making itself known through rather obvious dialogue.

[8] The film was the twelfth-biggest box office hit of 1980 in North America according to The Numbers,[25] grossing US$58,853,106 in the United States and Canada[26] on a $4.5 million budget.

Its special features include the theatrical trailer, a behind-the-scenes featurette called An Adventure in Filmmaking: The Making of The Blue Lagoon, a personal photo album by Brooke Shields, audio commentary by Randal Kleiser and Christopher Atkins, and another commentary by Kleiser, Shields, and Douglas Day Stewart.

[38] The Blu-ray includes an isolated score track and three original teasers, in addition to the special features ported from the 1999 DVD release.