You know how it is: you sit down after a long day and some disappointing news about how much fixing your air conditioner is going to cost, and you just want to be transported from worrying about the cares of your life and instead would like to worry about the cares of someone else’s life for a while. It could be that I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to watch the Netflix original movie How It Ends, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t good under any circumstances.
It had so much going for it! My brother, sister-in-law and I initially gave it a look because Netflix shoved it in our faces as we logged on, but it has Forest Whitaker! It has Theo James, who wasn’t even the weakest link of the Divergent movies! It has some absolutely stunning cinematography!
You know what else it has? A whirlwind look at a country under collapse. Absolutely no explanation of what the event was that caused the devastation. (Uh, spoilers?) And the most lackluster ending I’ve ever seen captured on film.
The film, released on Netflix on July 13, 2018, starts with a young attorney, Will (Theo James), who flies from where he lives with Sam, his newly pregnant wife, in Seattle to a business meeting in Chicago. In Chicago, he has dinner with Sam’s mother, who is perfectly pleasant and bland, and Sam’s father (Forest Whitaker), who pretty much hates his guts because he believes that Will sank the father’s boat six (or so) years ago. The next morning, while facetiming with Sam about dinner the night before, “the event” happens, the phones cut out, and over the next few hours the power goes out across the country. Will and Tom start out on a cross-country trip in Tom’s Caddy to find Sam.
So it’s a road trip movie, an apocalypse movie, a father-in-law bonding with his son-in-law movie, and a love story between this husband and wife. So at the outset, this movie lacked focus. Movies can be about many things, and if any of these things had been done particularly well, there wouldn’t be a problem here. But pretty much the only thing that was done well was a single scene between Will and Tom where they finally come to terms with each other, share some laughs, and Tom tells Will he’s gonna be a good father while Will manfully tears up. That scene was golden. I felt a lot of things.
I don’t ask to be pandered to in movies, but I like to think that movie makers don’t think I lack the ability to navigate my way out of a bag of potato chips. So many moments in this movie lacked credibility. At the beginning, an entire chase scene is dedicated to the fact that Will has never even touched a gun. He doesn’t know how to load it, he doesn’t know how to turn the safety off, he flinches as he shoots at a moving vehicle out of the backseat of an entirely different moving vehicle. In an apocalypse scenario, Will takes the time to get peevish at Tom for not telling him that Tom had brought a gun on their adventure. This, while Will watched him pack hunting knives into a backpack. Okay, Will.
So imagine my shock and awe at the end of the movie when Will is on a bridge performing perfect bootlegger turns without, like, going off the side of the bridge while shooting a gun out the window and actually hitting his targets AT NIGHT. Like, it is DARK OUTSIDE. And this movie contained ZERO training montages on the proper care and handling of guns.
My brother, who knows cars better than I do, would probably also appreciate if I mentioned that there’s no way Tom’s Cadillac couldn’t have outrun the cop car in the beginning of the film. The fact that Will and Tom both never used the Cadillac’s bulk and weight to ram other cars and motorcycles off the road is another crime against credibility.
The same movie that asks that I abandon all critical thinking when it comes to car chase scenes leaves me to extrapolate from clues what happened to the world. Will sees Northern Lights at a cabin in Washington state, there’s a super storm that all three characters in the car at the time call the weirdest storm they’ve ever seen. There’s an ash cloud that chases the characters down a road at some point. The compass spins aimlessly. And like, sure, I could take to reddit to debate whether it was a super volcano or a pole shift or some man-made disaster like several of my fellow internet nerds, but wouldn’t it be simpler to tell us in the text?
In conclusion: Don’t be duped. My sister-in-law is normally in bed at 9 pm but really wanted to know how this tire fire ended, and I don’t think anyone in the history of the world has ever been as mad at the end of a movie as she was at the end of this one. If you’re looking for a good disaster movie, watch literally anything else. You know what you should watch? San Andreas. All of the disaster AND you also get The Rock!
OH MAN THIS MOVIE. Just watched it and could not stop ranting about how annoying it was! If it wasn’t already up here as a Sound Off! I was going to absolutely roast it in a review! I couldn’t even get behind the “reconciliation” between the dad and Will (which was funny because I was commenting to my own sister and brother-in-law about “I’m surprised we haven’t had a chat between these two by now about their differences and them making up about it,” RIGHT before it happened). We never even got into Will’s backstory and the dad already knew everything about Sam and the baby and all so it was basically settled before it even started. Boo!
I’m a huge fan of good apocalypse-type movies for the journey and the scenery and all sorts of stuff but this just annoyed the crap out of me. I’d still be semi-okay with not knowing what “the event” was if they didn’t pick out natural disaster-looking things and still try and make it weird or supernatural-ish. That is a pyroclastic flow at the end! You are NOT outrunning that! Also that’s all due to a volcanic explosion! Yet if the “event” were a volcano, it’s not EMPing everything into Chicago or across the world or WHATEVER. Ok, I’m going to stop before I really start ranting again. But if you want a quality movie with this sort of concept but with far better writing and a solid resolution, go dig up the Australian film These Final Hours. And bring a box of tissues because you’ll need it.