| RATING: | 40% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Depressing movie about what Whites really think about themselves and their culture.
This would-be comedy pretends Whites are so inherently-depraved and emotionally-repressed that their real natures would surface given the loss of a viable future. This means Whites believe their cultural experience is no more than deferred gratification wherein individual character is less important (& even unimportant altogether) than doing something, anything - no matter what. To suggest that one’s culture and civilization could completely collapse is to tacitly admit that one’s culture is essentially uncivilized.
Leopards do not change their spots so it is unlikely people would change their behavior or personality. Like being drunk, either your real personality emerges or you remain the same. This fundamental issue is not explored here in a welter of self-indulgent self-pity. People here realize their lives are meaningless and that without a future there is no chance that that situation would ever change. But this is no different from a real world without Armageddon where people live without meaning; hoping for a fleeting moment of happiness to make their lives at least appear purposeful.
Like Von Trier’s Melancholia, this film refuses to admit its essential emptiness; while pretending to analyze the situation it sets up - especially the choice to survive at all costs by renouncing one’s humanity that is implied here.
Keira KNIGHTLEY is as wooden as always - not helped by writing that fails to bring her character alive. Steve CARELL offers a performance indicating a desire for better, more serious acting work in the future, but without much evidence of the necessary wherewithal of acting talent. The plot takes us nowhere since it lacks the imagination to explore its own premiss effectively.
A fulfillment fantasy that is as idiotic as most of the characters here who wish to escape reality by pretending people are something they are not. Despite the fact of the end of the world, the characters here remain firmly locked in their self-delusions from which they lack the courage to escape. The philosophy of this film is essentially negative: You do not know what you have not got until you no longer have an opportunity to get it. The strong sense of regret here could have been better explored without the unnecessary end-of-days background.
Worse than anything else, the movie does not define love because of the writer’s lack of experience of it. The ending cops out by pretending that love is an asylum from the often unpleasant facts of reality rather than a defense against bad people - as well as a means of knowing who the good are. The central characters simply evade the issue of their loneliness by sharing their loneliness.
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