THESE FINAL HOURS (2014) is a terrific Australian film that transposes the demise of humanity with the redemption of a single individual.

A redemption story. Yeah, yeah. We’ve seen that Hollywood formula a thousand times. But this isn’t a Hollywood film.

The film begins as an asteroid breaks Earth’s atmosphere and strikes the mid-Atlantic. Within hours, the spreading firestorm wipes out the Eastern U.S. and most of Europe. It’s spreading, one by one eliminating the continents, countries, cities and people as if they never existed. Earth is being scrubbed clean by fire.

Within 12 hours, the apocalypse will reach Australia. How would you spend your final hours?

In Perth, James has sex with his lover, who tells him she’s carrying his child. He can’t handle it. When the end comes, he knows it’s going to be horrific and painful, and he doesn’t want to feel it. When the end comes, he wants to be blissfully unaware.

He takes off, heading to a party to end all parties. Along the way, he rescues a young girl kidnapped from her father. He keeps trying to get rid of her. The last thing he needs is some obligation and wasted time when obligations no longer have meaning, and every minute is precious.

Besides that, James is a bit of a bastard. The woman he impregnated is not his girlfriend. He’s estranged from his mother. He flees the woman he loves because he’s scared. He only cares about himself.

Along his journey to the party, everywhere, it seems, people are reacting to their last day in a state of wild catharsis. Many are killing themselves. Many are murdering and raping others. Many are partying like it’s the end of the world, soaking themselves in drugs, alcohol and orgies.

James decides what’s really meaningless is all of that. He decides to help Rose, and in so doing, he realizes what’s truly important in life. How he wants to die. What it means to love and have empathy for another person. And in so doing, he gives us, the viewer, a powerful glimpse at a single shining moment of real humanity–making us realize, should the end come for the human race, it really would be a shame after all.

Terrific film that strikes a new path in a genre well trod by the same old themes. Highly recommended.

THE ROVER, starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson (of TWILIGHT fame), is an Australian dystopian film set 10 years after a global economic collapse. The collapse has eliminated government services, reduced the population to barely subsistent poverty, and virtually destroyed law and order. The only visible signs of a functioning government are small military units that patrol trying to save whatever law and order is left.

The film starts off with Eric (played with a smoldering intensity by Pearce), a former soldier and farmer who’s lost everything but remembers, with endless regret and rage, how things were before everything went to shit. He roams the poor towns and the desolation in between.

When he stops at one town, his car is stolen by a group of men who’d committed some crime and gotten their truck stuck on some debris. Eric sets out in pursuit but is beaten on the road and left by the men. Then he comes across one of the men’s brother, a young man named Rey (effectively but sometimes a bit gratingly played by Pattinson) with a somewhat feeble mind, who was left behind, gutshot. Eric gets him patched up and off they go in pursuit to retrieve Eric’s car and deliver his own justice.

This is an interesting film on a lot of levels. It’s a slow burn, sometimes a very slow burn, but it does very well at maintaining its tension, and the random violence that occurs in such a harsh world is realistic and sudden. The soundtrack excellently heightens the tension as if betraying the seething state of Eric’s bitter mind. That being said, while the film has been compared to MAD MAX, don’t expect breathless car chases and action sequences. This is a character driven film, and Pearce is doing the driving. He plays Eric with an amazing level of barely restrained ferocity. He’s our hero, but he doesn’t owe you a damn thing. Just the way he stares at times makes you believe anything can happen, and it often does. Eric is a dark, violent and brooding anti-hero, haunted by his crimes for which there would be no punishment, and enraged by his lack of punishment–living in a world where such a thing was now possible–more than the bad things he actually did in the past. Over time, his growing bond and trust with Rey softens him a bit (even the music softens and surprisingly turns to a pop hit on the radio, again echoing his state of mind, as if he’s slowly being pulled back into the man he once was). Though sadly, he appears to be using Rey, however reluctantly by the end. His only major moment of humanization comes in the final scene, when we finally find out why he wanted his car back so badly. Rather than MAD MAX (though I see the resemblance), this film is more like a noirish Western set in a dystopian future.

The dystopia itself is an interesting element in the film. Everybody’s selling something, including themselves, and there are even some shops selling dirty wares while protecting themselves with shotguns. Australian money is almost worthless now, and many shops want U.S. dollars, hard to come by, for premium items such as gasoline. Justice is frontier justice. The military has been severely reduced and appears to be accomplishing little to maintain law and order. Everything is broken down. Mercenaries, presumably hired by corporations, ride as guards on commercial freight trains like something out of the Wild West. Overall, the world of THE ROVER is fairly realistic of what we could expect in such a collapse–the world would go on, people would survive, but they would do so in extreme poverty, with a subsistence economy. And with little policing and a dying government, violence would often be a matter of necessity to survive. Not something people want to do, but have to do, and over time it becomes the easy answer.

I highly recommend THE ROVER if you’re into post-apocalyptic film and looking for something that is a little offbeat, frighteningly realistic and strongly character-driven.

Check out the trailer here.
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In the near future, an alien species invades Earth and spreads out across Europe. After a major victory led by Special Forces soldier Rita Vrataski, Earth recruits a massive army, equipped with the latest combat enhancement technology, to invade Europe and destroy the aliens. But it’s a trap.

Major William Cage, played by Tom Cruise, is a public relations officer who played the media to drum up support and recruitment. After irritating the commanding general, he ends up sent in with the invasion force as a private and dies within minutes during a catastrophic battle in which humanity loses everything. His death, however, triggers a time loop in which he is forced to fight the same battle again and again. Each time, he learns more about how to fight the aliens, and, teaming up with Vrataski, Cage tries to defeat them.

The action scenes were terrific, the alien life form interesting and challenging, and the time loop stuff didn’t present any glaring plot holes other than the ending, which was a bit “have your cake and eat it too.” The characterization is simplistic–Cage transforms from coward into potential savior of the world–for a simple action film, it works. (Though it would have been interesting to see the psychological toll repeatedly dying has on him. Plus why don’t they bring tanks and jet fighters on the invasion?) It didn’t have the depth that demanded repeated viewings like movies such as CHILDREN OF MEN, but again, it’s a simple action film, and compared to most other science fiction fare, it’s very entertaining. Overall, I’d rate it 3.5 or 4 out of 5 stars.

Today, I’d like to talk about another apocalyptic classic, SOYLENT GREEN, one of my favorite movies of all time. If you’re a fan of apocalyptic or dystopian movies and haven’t seen it yet, you’ve really got to watch it. Produced in 1973 and starring Charlton Heston in the lead role, it still holds up as more prescient, horrible and exciting than most movies like it being made today.

In SOYLENT GREEN, a New York City Police Department detective Frank Thorn, played by Heston, is called to investigate the murder of a rich and powerful man (William R. Simonson, played by Joseph Cotten) who, though he’s not in government, is connected to the ruling elite that makes the decisions. During the case, he connects with Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), Simonson’s concubine, and clashes with Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors), Simonson’s bodyguard. He is aided by his “book,” Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson in his 101st and final film), an old man who remembers what the world was like before it all went to hell.

This mystery plays out against the oppressive backdrop of an overpopulated, overpolluted world in which the majority of people live like animals in the streets. The year is 2022, and the population of New York is 40 million. Housing is overcrowded and falling apart; homeless people are everywhere; only half the workforce is employed while the other half is barely making it; most people are illiterate; few factories are producing anything; trees are protected in zoolike buildings; and food is increasingly scarce. The world now relies on food produced by the Soylent Corporation, made from ocean plankton.

Simonson was a member of the board of the Soylent Corporation, taking Thorn’s investigation too close to powerful interests, which push back against him. Isolated and hunted, he perseveres toward the end to discover the secret of Soylent Green and the secret Simonson was murdered to protect.

The film might best be described as dystopian. The people in the film are all struggling and consider themselves good, but they are creatures of their environment; everybody’s hustling, everybody’s on the take, everybody’s trying to get a tiny taste of the good life while the world is dying. Thorn is a principled cop who’s willing to fight to get at the truth, though not entirely honest and above stealing everything he can get his hands on at the murder scene; even after he’s shot at one point in the film, he keeps going back to work, because if he takes days off, he might get fired. All of the characters in the film–Thorn, Rothman, Simonson, Shirl, even Fielding–are all trapped by their world and its circumstances.

But SOYLENT GREEN is also an apocalyptic film. The dramas that play out at the center of the film are constantly overshadowed by the hot, filthy, poor and starving world. There’s a scene where Thorn sees a film played for the dying at a euthanasia center. The short film simply presents animals and trees and beautiful landscapes, everything that was lost. It’s the world that’s gone, that’s already dead. After being immersed in the overcrowded and stinking sewer New York has become, seeing the landscapes is heartbreaking, particularly for Thorn, who’d grown up in this world and never truly knew until this moment what humanity had lost. There’s another scene where a food riot gets out of control, and the police must send in bulldozers to scoop up the rioters and dump them into trucks like garbage.

For me, this is the kind of apocalypse that might really happen, that is already happening, though too slowly for us to really see it. The compelling storytelling, excellent acting, strong action and the realistically portrayed backdrop of a dying, overpopulated world combine to make SOYLENT GREEN a classic apocalyptic film and definitely worth a watch.

Trailer:

Short documentary about how the film was made:

All I have to say is it’s a good thing I moved out of New York.