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jsbell
Reviews
After Darkness (2014)
what you find depends on what you're looking for
Probably really should've given this one star, but I gave it two for borrowing from Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. Can't remember the episode title, but it's the one where the earth is getting hotter and hotter, then it's twisted at the end to be really about the earth getting colder and colder. After Darkness, on one interpretation, does exactly the opposite. The sun rather suddenly goes out (I agree, this is not how I would imagine it would really happen), a super dysfunctional family struggles to survive, then at the last minute, the sun supposedly reignites, and all is well again, EXCEPT for that very last shot, where it kind of looks like maybe it's getting too hot, too bright, too fast. As in supernova? So, like any great horror flick, the monster isn't dead after all, it just takes on a new and terrifying form in the last few seconds, guaranteeing the 'heroes' will in fact all die, and all the personal growth they experienced is utterly wasted.
So, the philosophy of the film is totally bleak. Yes, the dad is a caricature and a narcissist but he's also 'right' about survival being important. He just sucks at being a leader who might actually help his family survive, because he lives in denial of the harsh reality of a sunless world. But the bleakness comes from the fact that it doesn't matter that he sucks, or that his black sheep son is really the strong one. It doesn't matter that the baby is born and all the 'nice' people can appreciate it but the dad keeps on being an operatic jerk. Because everyone dies anyway.
As for the heaven theory, I'm not buying it. I get the impression the mom is only telling the young daughter about heaven to make it easier for her to die. Logically, what sense would heaven make in a scenario where the whole planet dies? An event that final would contradict every religion I know of that has a heaven. So that's why I look at the ending as a classic horror flick double-cross, a supernova wipes them all out anyway, so even their brief moment of hope and renewed family unity and redemption is a complete illusion.
So, understood that way, the philosophy of this film is completely and cruelly nihilistic. I think nihilistic films in general are inherently disappointing for a lot of people, because human nature demands stories that teach us something useful about living life, i.e., surviving, and when we don't get that from a story, we tend not to like it.
And when you add to that the film's total reliance on disintegrating family dynamics, carried almost entirely by dialogue, with virtually no other plot infrastructure, this is why the film seems so boring to so many viewers. It isn't going anywhere, and it's taking the less interesting road to get there.
BTW, Melancholia was equally nihilistic, but the acting was stellar (pun somewhat intended), the ending was unambiguous, and there was never, to my mind, any false promise of redemption. It was all just, we humans are the only sentient life, and we got wiped out, and now the universe is completely void of meaning. After Darkness was an inferior telling of almost the same story.
As for the acting, directing, etc., I have seen worse. Much worse. The script was more likely the problem than the actors. It lacked organic flow. The writer wanted to paint these vignettes of the dysfunctional family, but the progression didn't feel natural, real. I kept falling out of the 'story immersion' and saying to myself, really?
Anyway, contrary to what many have said, I think you can find some value in it if you understand the premise is not really about science or action or even the apocalypse, but about how human weakness can lead each of us to our own individualized version of the apocalypse.
Night Zero (2018)
More convincing work done by middle schoolers
I'm sorry, but from my perspective, the beeping through the whole movie is the only mystery really worth solving (spoiler alert: apparently a malfunctioning smoke alarm?). We actually thought it was intentional at the beginning, something to build the tension. Though tension gave way to laughter at the shakey-camera-as-a-substitute-for-action during a very, very weak moment of zombie fighting. Eventually, the acting started to wear us out with the non-stop melodramatic navel-gazing dialogue-as-a-substitute-for-action, and I began to suspect the beeping was, like everything else in this film, just an accident, which nobody cared to fix, because heck, they were all going to die anyway, right? But of course, if nihilism is the message, then yeah, do anything you like, cuz it really doesn't matter, especially to me.
The Twilight Zone: The Midnight Sun (1961)
Twilight Zone's Midnight Sun: What's Old is New Again
"Midnight Sun" really does capture some of our deepest imagined fears. We rely unthinkingly on the stability of our natural environment. When that stability is challenged at the deepest levels, a profound and primitive fear wells up within us, taking us into the realm of nightmare.
The great irony of this episode is that those who purport to "warn" us of global warming are tapping into that same fear. It is tempting to think it is a deliberate trick, designed to accomplish a political rather than an altruistic objective. People act irrationally when motivated by fear, as the episode, and life experience, demonstrates. But the most amazing irony is that, just as in the episode, we may well awaken from the illusion of global warming just in time to see our civilization seized by a new ice age. As with the episode, the Sun is the culprit, for its now prolonged failure to produce sunspots, thus giving us colder winters and cooler summers, and more turbulent weather due to sharper contrasts of warm and cold air colliding on a jet stream running further south.
Rod Serling is not to be blamed for his failure to predict this in these exact terms. As far as I know, he never claimed to be a prophet. But the manner in which the more general sense of this episode has been fulfilled by recent events is stunning. One can only hope that at the end of the day, we will learn one of Mr. Serling's most profound lessons: If you would live a life without regret, do not be governed by your fears. Fears are the stuff of nightmares, but the awakened must live by reason and by faith.