I hadn’t heard of this before. It’s a film about the end of the world, or the end of the USA. It’s canny good but it’s really ‘almost good’ which is annoying. I’ll probably get onto that. It felt like they had a lot of ideas but didn’t really finish any of them. I think that it’s formatted, it’s really annoying, like that WWZ one, I bet that they had the material there and it’s a great book, but because it’s a Netflix film it just has this stuff in that is like TV used to be where they are not doing it as well as they can, because they know that it’ll do well if they just keep it kind of safe.
The plot is that this posh family in New York on a whim decide to go out to the countryside and rent a nice house for the weekend. They arrive on the Friday, the internet stops working and the TV doesn’t work but it seems like nothing. On the saturday they go to the beach and are having a great time and then an oil tanker crashes into the beach.
I’ll not type out the whole plot, basically everything falls to pieces and as things get worse and worse they realise that the world is ending. It is well done but it’s not a particularly brilliant plot and they don’t really explain it properly. The main point is that everything could fall apart really easily which is my big fear. Especially for me because I live in Vietnam right now and barely know any Vietnamese, if they switched off the internet and electricity I would be unable to even communicate, and I don’t even have much in my fridge lol.
I should’nt criticise because I tried to write a novel once and it was just a mess, but it was just a load of things that didn’t really tie together. The things were cool and I’ll go through the bits that I thought were cool, but overall it felt a bit pointless.
It also has that annoying thing with all of these prestige films where the people are not relatable. The main family are this hot rich couple who are well off New York people who don’t really know anything about life outside of the city, are very charming and level headed, and the famiy who turn up, the dad is a stock market expert who does have some idea of what is going on, and is also switched on like he knows how to use a gun and seems to have some kind of plan in place.
I want to see a film about the lads from Trainspotting in the apocalypse or something. I mean, at the end they just find an empty bunker where some family had prepared for the apocalypse, but they weren’t there so either they had been stuck in the city or they had gotten away from everything.
Im going to pop out and then when I come back I’ll write about the bits that I liked in the film.
Friends
There’s a motif in the film where the daughter is about to watch the finale of Friends, but then the internet goes down so she can’t and throughout the film she really wants to see it.
There’s probably a point about the actual story, I was never really into Friends so I don’t know the specifics, but the big thing is about how Friends is this idealised version of the USA that never really existed, but resonates with young people today because they are modern people but there’s no cellphones and no financial crisis etc.
One of the characters notices her obsession and says it’s ‘nostalgia for a time that never existed’ , which is kind of all nostalgia, but yes, a nice if trite and common observation about this imaginary world that Friends represents. Kind of ties into the bollocks that I wrote about The Matrix on here, the late 90s is this weird time when westerners really didn’t have much serious to scare us.
TESLA
This is just a scene in the film where the family tries to leave the house and cross the city to get to their family. They get to the highway and there is this huge line of about 100 TESLA sportscars, the dad goes to investigate and finds out that they have all turned on their autopilot and crashed into each other. Then another TESLA comes bombing along and crashes into the line up. This starts a really rubbish action scene when they have to escape while dodging a load of TESLA cars also bombing along into the back of this pile up.
I just liked it because it is one of those things about how everyone is gone/dead but there are still these electronic things which are still functioning and don’t know what to do anymore. Do cars commit suicide if they have nobody to drive them? No, no they don’t lol
Animals
Another motif in the film is that the animals are confused by all of the human stuff breaking down and start acting in a weird way. They see weird formations of birds and for some reason a bunch of flamingoes land in their swimming pool which probably has some symbolism.
There is a culmination where the deer, who are now roaming around in a huge herd, corner the women in the forest and are being kind of menacing. The women just start yelling and waving their arms and scare them away, which apparently does work on wild animals sometimes because they just don’t know what to do, but that’s kind of rubbish.
What I liked about it was that it reminded me of something that I listened to recently about how if we really destroy nature, at a point the animals will just turn feral because there is no habitat or food for them, so we probably will start getting attacked by birds and so on if we go outside. You already hear of these things like in Texas because they didn’t look after pigs properly there are wild pigs everywhere which are quite dangerous. Thinking about it the guy who I listened to might have gotten the idea from this film. It is this interesting thing to think about, like at a point the planet will just attack us and get rid of us if we don’t sort it out.
Before industrial society nature was this dangerous thing that we feared, then because we felt like we got out of it, it became this romantic thing that we loved, it’s maybe coming back around where nature is something to be afraid of.
They don’t tell you
This was one of the main criticisms that I read in the other reviews of the film, and it does tie into the main problem it’s lot of cool ideas, but they don’t develop any of them properly, but I quite liked it. The characters (and we) never find out what is actually going on.
There is one bit when the dad is outside on his own and a drone drops this leaflet which has ‘Death to America’ in Arabic, and then they meet this guy who said he saw a leaflet in the west coast in Korean saying Death to America, so it’s misinformation. And one of the dad’s is an investment guy and he has this super rich friend who apparently had switched him on to something that his super rich client knew about, but they never tell us what is really going on, and of course because all of the communication being out, they don’t have any idea what is going on at all.
I liked that, that is what it would be like, if someone does destroy the world, or destroy your country, you wouldn’t know what the hell was going on, even with the internet you wouldn’t be able to get good information.
So overall it’s a decent film, quite frustrating because there are a lot of good ideas and bits, but none of it really pays off it just kind of leaves it all there. It was produced by the Obamas apparently, so there’s a joke in there about promising a lot
Overall, a rip-roaring rollercoaster of a movie! 5/5
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