Saw Leave the World Behind (2023). It was a frustrating movie. It follows a family of husband & wife & son & daughter as they drive out of New York City into the wilds of Long Island for a little impromptu vacation. Alas, during the vacation something goes terribly terribly wrong in the outside world and all cellphones and TVs go dead. The exact nature of the disaster never really gets clearly spelled out, but it certainly evokes the early days of the coronavirus pandemic or the shocked chaos of Jan 6th or the bleakest predictions of climate change. The film is very timely and clearly has big things on its mind.
The frustrating bit is that it's also sort of dumb. There's scenes where it intercuts many unfolding disasters at the same time to mutually heighten the multiple climaxes of the various plot lines but both times this happens at least one of the so-called "climaxes" is just a non-event, like someone being freaked out by a herd of deer or a kid telling a scary story. The film is 150 minutes long. Couldn't we just cut that bit? And I'm going to be mean for a minute here, but at one point the dad of the family is going to drive out to town looking for some news about what's going on. He encounters a plane that's dropping leaflets. Stumbling and clumsy in his abject terror, he drives his car as fast as it will drive away from the … information he was … going out to find … ?
Anyway, but the characters in the film say a lot of the right things. They talk about how we all collectively tend to turn a blind eye to developing disasters until it's too late, how we kid ourselves that we can just buy the right things and somehow spend our way to a more perfect world. This is rightly called out as the willful ignorance that it is. Similarly, there's a paraphrase of Alan Moore's insight into conspiracy theories (ie: "The truth is far more frightening: nobody is in control.") which is useful to keep in mind.
There's also some nice work done to symbolically tie the main characters to urban civilization: they always wear blue which is a color which doesn't occur much in nature. The wife also works in PR and the husband is a professor of Media Studies, and their kids are always on their devices. At one point they literally say they cannot do anything useful without a cellphone in their hands. (I kept thinking of boomer memes about how kids can't use analog clocks or read cursive.)
But I don't know, the movie just frustrated me. It seemed unrealistic and clumsy but also like it was trying very hard to be worldly and clear-eyed and grounded. It came off like a conversation with a teenager whose heart is in the right place, but who is more filled with passion than plans. It's clearly got things on its mind, but it's not clear how those genuinely interesting things connect to the wild imagery and mounting excitement that's driving it. I couldn't make it cohere anyway, maybe you'll have better luck.
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