BEFORE: I'm hitting some deep cuts here at the end of October - nobody I know has even heard of "Infinity Pool", for example, and I work with a bunch of cinemaphiles. Actually, two bunches. We sit around and talk about what horror movies we've seen in common, and we recommend them or trash them. One co-worker's list only got as dark as "Hocus Pocus" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and I had to call her out - like COME ON, I just watched flesh-eating zombies take over all of Las Vegas, and you're going to hit me with Disney channel movies? But I was forced to admit I have not even seen "Hocus Pocus", however it is on my list. Now I have to seriously consider it for next year if I want to keep that conversation going.
But I'm trying to make a statement here, serial killers are roaming the subways, and killing film crews down in Texas in 1979. They're also wiping out whole dorms of female students on Christmas Eve, and playing ruthless games of Hide and Seek with innocent young brides! What's worse, sea monsters are ruling the oceans and giant apes are living deep in the middle of the planet! Killlers and suicide prophets are also interrupting people's vacations, we are drawing ever closer to the apocalypse, and you're going to suggest "Hocus Pocus" with Bette Midler? Give me a break, I'm trying to get serious over here. The end of everything could come at any time!
Mark O'Brien carries over from "Ready or Not".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Rover" (Movie #4,817)
THE PLOT: In the midst of an apocalypse, a man struggles to reach his pregnant fiancée, who is thousands of miles away.
AFTER: There are (at least) two movies titled "How It Ends", both about the end of the world. I watched the one that's more of a comedy back in April 2022 (just before "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), that film came out in 2021. Tonight's film, which is much less of a comedy, actually was released first, in 2018, and I'm just getting to it now. Hey, sometimes it takes me one year to link to a movie, and sometimes it takes six, that's just how these things go.
You have to wonder, if this was someone's 2018 vision of how the world might end, whether those filmmakers felt a little disappointed when the pandemic hit, like maybe they felt a little cheated, or that they fell short by relying on the old tropes of earthquakes or nuclear blasts and just didn't see a worldwide health crisis coming. Also, whoever directed "Contagion" in 2011 - and it was Steven Soderbergh - maybe felt very smart for predicting it, or maybe he wished that he hadn't, I don't know. Soderbergh probably wins the prediction prize, and maybe he shares it with Mike Judge, who made "Idiocracy" years before we all realized how stupid and gullible most American voters are. I'm still hoping that they won't both get usurped by whoever directed "The Purge: Election Year" - it could still happen.
But let's focus on the apocalypse, again. In this film, it's never completely revealed what the initial destructive event is, the preliminary news reports say that it's some kind of seismic event off the West Coast, which could be an undersea earthquake, which could have then caused tsunamis, but it's all left a bit unclear, because the power grid then goes out in half of the country, leaving millions in the dark both literally and metaphorically. This happens while Will Younger is visiting his fiancée's parents in Chicago, and his pregnant girlfriend is in Seattle, and after their call during the disaster, he's unable to contact her. All planes are grounded, and Will's future father-in-law, Tom, who he's frequently at odds with, decides to drive west to find his daughter, and Tom naturally goes along too. The two men have to learn to put their differences aside and work together to cross the country, fighting traffic, road closures, and military operations of some kind that suggest that perhaps there's more going on than a natural disaster, only what?
American society is immediately transformed, within days the country has reverted to a cash-only system, gasoline is a valuable commodity and without regular deliveries food could soon be scarce, and logically guns and ammo are suddenly important, because they'll help people get those other things by force if needed. Will and Tom are pulled over by a police car, but it's not the police at all, it's a maniac with a shotgun who just stole a police car. They're forced to find a mechanic in a small town who wants to start over in California, and they have to pay her for her time, but she's willing to ride with them and repair their car again if necessary.
It takes days for this unlikely trio to travel across the Rocky Mountain states, and another fight over their gasoline causes the young mechanic to seek her own path, then another fight with a motorcycle gang causes an injury to Tom, and they're very far from any medical services, so, well, the outlook's not good. Eventually the car breaks down and it's just Will on foot, hitchhiking to Seattle. A family does pick him up and he directs them to his estranged father's home in Idaho, where he makes a deal with the family, they can stay in his father's well-stocked house until they're ready to drive to Canada in the car that's in the garage, while Will takes THEIR car and finishes the drive to Seattle.
He reaches his apartment building, but his fiancée isn't there, she was forced to evacuate with a male neighbor, but they left the address of the cabin they fled to, so Will heads there. It's not clear what the deal was with the neighbor, but it seems he was maybe trying to get into a relationship with Samantha, perhaps by convincing her that Will was dead or would never be able to find her again, so Will showing up probably threw a monkey wrench into his plans. It's clear that in the post-apocalypse U.S., nobody does anything without a reason, everyone thinks of their own interests first, and everything is in short supply, especially girlfriends. The neighbor, Jeremiah, is convinced that the ecological disasters around them are not natural, but part of a coordinated attack. You know, Jewish space lasers controlling the weather and such.
But Will is now capable of fighting for what's his, he's not the same guy who wouldn't stand up to his future father-in-law, and he's been through some things, making his way across the country in the middle of an apocalypse or whatever. So, yeah, sorry, Jeremiah, better luck next time, thanks for saving Samantha and everything but you don't get to be with her any more, maybe next apocalypse. You're just a paranoid nut-job anyway.
Will and Samantha keep driving north, because things are apparently better in Canada - which makes me think this whole film was some kind of metaphor for the country under Trump's presidency, it was released in 2018 after all. But then there's a massive volcanic eruption (Washington State and Canada DO have volcanoes, after all) and their fate at the end of the film is, you guessed it, quite unclear. Really, it just feels like somebody couldn't come up with a good solid ending - perhaps appropriate since the world was literally falling apart, but still, downright disappointing.
One theory is that since the film showed compasses spinning like crazy, the disaster depicted here is a shift in the earth's magnetic field, or the poles changing places, which apparently does happen every few thousand years or so. This would explain some of the climate-change stuff but perhaps not the earthquakes and volcanoes, but who really knows? Perhaps it was a giant meteorite that crashed into the Pacific, that could cause the earthquakes and tidal waves. and maybe even the ash falling from the sky. The theory is that the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs maybe did so by creating debris that blocked out the sun. The same thing could happen to us, and we could have very little time to prepare for it.
Also starring Theo James (last seen in "Allegiant"), Forest Whitaker (last seen in "Species"), Kat Graham, Nicole Ari Parker (last seen in "Remember the Titans"), Grace Dove (last seen in "The Revenant"), Kerry Bishé (last seen in "Motherhood"), Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Nancy Sorel, J.J. Ramberg, Ron Verwymeren, RJ Fetherstonhaugh (last seen in "The Predator"), Aaron Hughes, Lane McAuley, Josh Cruddas (last seen in "Moonfall"), Aidan Ritchie, Rick Skene (last seen in "Flag Day"), Storm Greyeyes, Pat Harris, Haig Sutherland (last seen in "The BFG"), Cory Chetyrbok, David James Lewis (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Charis Ann Wiens, Juliette Hitchcock, Jeff Wahl (last seen in "Goon")
RATING: 4 out of 10 ham radio operators
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