Saw These Final Hours (thanks, Lea!) It was an apocalypse film where the earth had been hit by a meteor and a wave of destruction was speeding around the globe. Everyone is going nuts because they have hours left to live. Like It Follows, this is another film that's more of a thought exercise than a narrative. What would you do if not only you but all humans were about to die? Some folks kill themselves, some folks kill others, some folks just get high and party.
Our main character, a muscular dude who prefers sleeveless shirts, is one of the partying type. We first see him abandoning his girlfriend to go party with his other, rich girlfriend and her/her brother's mansion. He quickly runs into an adorable girl who has been separated from her family. He decides that partying is too vacuous a pursuit and over the course of the film realizes that human contact and selfless support is the only thing that matters now, in these final hours.
I like the philosophical bent of the film. It's an existentialist point of view forced on the characters by the imminent end of everything. In our lives too, we are all ultimately doomed. None of us are getting out of here alive, but others will continue after us, so it's important to be kind, to leave things behind. This is a thought-experiment movie, but one I enjoy thinking about.
Now here's what I didn't like: I thought the adorable little girl moppet was a little badly written. I haven't spent a lot of time around kids but I felt she was sometimes too chill about things and freaked out about things I don't think kids would freak out about. She existed not to be a character but to teach the protagonist a lesson however, so whatever. I also liked and didn't like how dismal the film was at times. There's a scene where the main character drives through a suburb and someone's just hanging from a street light. It's very morbid and makes me feel feelings, but it's so dismal that the following emotional gut-punches feel a bit weak. I feel that some people would be all murdery, sure, but I think most folks are not a disaster away from serial killing. I hope not any way.
I also felt the main character's lesson was not truly learned. He comes off as too much of a douche-bag party-boy and although he embraces his humanity, I feel that if it were not the end of the world, this lesson would fade pretty soon. But the world is ending, so even if he only learns his lesson for a few hours, then that's enough and maybe that's how it is for all of us: we don't need to learn our lessons and be saints forever, just for the rest of our lives.
The film is fairly dismal, but it has its moments. There's the montage of chaos the film starts with and the final disaster is spectacular to behold. There's other moments of too-edgy-for-me realness involving rape and murder and such, which feels lazy and perhaps not unrealistic but just exaggerated to me. The main character was kind of a douche-bag (who has two girlfriends and ditches one to go party with the other?) but he was muscly and nice to look at at least. This film was alright, but I don't think I'll recommend it to any of my friends any time soon.
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