How It Ends review - a post-apocalyptic, ultra-macho road-trip that's more worthwhile than you think [National Student archive]

~~~THIS ARTICLE was originally written for THE NATIONAL STUDENT it has been archived on my personal blog anticipating the TERMINATION of that VENERABLE ESTABLISHMENT~~~

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Verdict: This post-apocalyptic Netflix film is a surprising departure from genre expectations and an enjoyable watch, despite a disappointing ending. 

How It Ends (2018) is a post-apocalyptic road-trip movie released straight to Netflix. The first thing a British audience will notice is that it’s as American as apple pie – or rather, as American as absurdly long car journeys and Call of Duty. It certainly has the same gritty, muted colour palette as the latter, with the browns and grey-blues, and orange washes to show unnatural heat. It’s orange and blue, orange and blue, like Michael Bay with less explosions. You might not think it from the look of it, but the film has more going on than its aesthetic and its premise would suggest.

The film is actually quite good at establishing the awkwardness of the relationship between the two main characters, Will (Theo James) and his father-in-law-to-be, Tom (Forest Whitaker), who will end up going on an epic cross-country odyssey together to save Will’s fiancée from some kind of disaster, which has also caused the collapse of the American state.

In contrast to the achingly awkward prosaicness of the opening dinner scene, the film’s good at showing the gradual but sudden descent into anarchy – like a frog not realising it’s in a pan of boiling water until far too late. The distant disaster is kept obscure enough with a weird mixture of “showing” and “telling”, that a steady trickle of the accoutrements of modern life slipping away is very effective. It’s not everything going out at once, it’s mobile phones, then planes, then the news, and then finally electricity.

[Image probably copyrighted, author too lazy to check.] 

In terms of this showing-telling, the background extra tapping his phone at the 12:50 mark is a personal favourite. But Will bribing a taxi with $200 is undeniably unsettling – the first act of the film presents enough occurrences just outside the normal everyday range to keep you on edge. 

Once this unsubtle but effective prelude is out of the way, the disaster-road-trip can commence. While Will and his fiancée have token chemistry, they’re more of an abstract representation of a couple, and she’s definitely a damsel – the real relationship here is between Will and Tom. 

They have good chemistry, and to begin with stupendous awkwardness, which make the inevitable flourishing touching. Ricki (Grace Dove), who gets introduced later, is an alright character. The group has an effective dynamic – it’s just interesting enough to sustain this kind of group survival-travel thing, and there’s good heart-to-heart between Will and Tom which is built up to fairly admirably.

Will is too much of a blank-canvas dumbass compared to Tom (a veteran of some arm of the US armed forces) given the situation, probably just to give status to Tom and to create a self-insert character for the audience.

Whitaker, in contrast, has the gravitas of the patriarch and demands respect. The value system to which he appeals is certainly reflected in the threat of the film lying not in the sci-fi elements but in the other people, in the anarchic state Will and Tom travel through.

It’s a brutally macho and libertarian, primitive, zero-sum world, which like the decay of society is also brought in as a trickle, like the early shot of the guy absent-mindedly stowing a golf club in his car. Tom’s approach to the world is quickly vindicated, and a world is established in which others aren’t to be trusted, as any interaction could end with you being robbed or killed – and thus sets most of the tension of the film, which is by no means ineffective. The first introduction of a gun, not long into the film, is a big paradigm-shift; strangely, it would seem, for an American movie.

Though it isn’t really what the film is about, there’s some good action in it: the first car-chase is very tense, particularly by mobilising how inept a civilian Will is. For the most part though, the film’s about tension more than encounter, which actually works to its advantage as the film’s duration (113 minutes) is matched by the epic length of their journey.

It boggles the British mind, but Chicago to Seattle is a 31-hour, 2,000 mile journey equivalent to London to Edinburgh about 8 times. Every mile feels earned, in the film’s duration and in the characters’ toil, and, true to the scale of America, every new state you reach feels like an achievement – an achievement which could easily be snatched from our characters by misfortune or marauders.

The slow boil of the film is unusual within its genre and subgenre, and it’s good to see Netflix playing with formal expectations now that it has its own distribution platform with which to experiment. It’s a shame then that they didn’t find a good way to conclude, and the film somehow manages to fizzle out despite reaching a resolution. Ultimately, I’d be happy for more films to play around with distance and time in order to recreate the sense of a long journey whilst still being enjoyable, but the problem with the conclusion is something that needs to be experimented with. But then again – maybe it isn’t about the destination, but the friends you make along the way.

How It Ends is available to stream on Netflix.