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How It Ends (2018) starring Theo James, Forest Whitaker, Kat Graham, Grace Dove and Nicole Ari Parker, in a thriller about a mysterious disaster that turned most of the country into a post-apocalyptic war zone.
Will Younger (James), an up-and-coming lawyer, and Tom Sutherland (Whitaker), his soon-to-be wealthy father-in-law, have to travel from Chicago to West Coast Seattle to find his pregnant fiancée (Graham).
At first, How It Ends begins with the promise of being different from other disaster movies that have hit screens before. Maybe this wouldn’t be your typical movie where two disagreeing people go on a road trip to reunite with a loved one in dire straits. I held out hope until the two men, seemingly polar opposites, set out on a road trip, driving through the worst parts of the unknown, encountering one cliffhanger after another, and a plot breaks here and there along the way. to save a loved one.
The action begins when Samantha calls Will to inform him that he overslept and was about to miss his flight. As the conversation progresses, they discuss the results of last night’s dinner with their soon-to-be in-laws which turns out to be their own disaster. Samantha suddenly notices that something is not right and loud noises are heard, the call ends. Will rushes to the airport.
Will arrives at the airport in time to see flights in and out of the airport being quickly and systematically cancelled.
Breaking news on a big screen in a terminal bar, and they talk about a record heat wave that is causing deaths in Europe. You never really have a clear idea of what the actual disaster was or what caused it, just that it started off the coast of Southern California and cascaded with the power grid across the country.
Desperate, Will returns to Samantha’s parents’ building and approaches Sutherland, who has a strong military background and is apparently already packing for the road trip. F-22 Raptors buzz in his attic.
The road trip begins and they have their first encounter with three local misfits at a gas station. Sutherland arrives and uses gun diplomacy to send the idiots off the road running into the woods. Will complains that Sutherland has a gun, Sutherland then lectures Will about being too nice in the post-world era. He was right, if the car was stolen, what would they do next? It wouldn’t be like a normal carjacking, they would just have been stranded at a gas station on the outskirts of Chicago without a cab home or police help.
The road trip continues and they have another encounter, this time with a crazed criminal in a stolen patrol car. Sutherland intervenes again.
They meet Ricki, a young Native American woman who runs a garage and reluctantly decides to help repair her damaged vehicle after seeing it get towed away by the police cruiser. She fixes her car and they somehow convince her to come with them. The trio continue on their way to the state of Washington.
You get incident snippets that provide clues as to what happened as the movie and road trip progresses. Ricki’s compass spinning crazy and not pointing true north, a crazy thunderstorm like no other, a crashed military transport, a crashed military train, and random radio reports and vague eyewitness accounts. It’s like finding some key pieces of a puzzle, but still missing enough pieces that you don’t have a clear picture.
Whitaker has his usual good performance. Most of the rest of the cast also gave a good performance. The problem for me wasn’t the talent on screen, it wasn’t the cinematography or the special effects, it wasn’t the editing, all of those elements were top notch in my opinion.
It was story execution in some key areas of the film. Will learned a lesson and his character adapted from a nice guy, a preppy young lawyer to a person who had to survive by any means necessary, but still maintain his humanity, which he shows when he meets a family that travel north.
He was a bit confused by the part of a conversation at the campfire that Will had with one of the later characters who gave his theory about what had happened to cause the disaster. The character’s ideas could have been taken as another conspiracy theory, but Will got angry instead of just brushing it off as mere misinformation. He could attribute his reaction to a general mistrust of this character, a mistrust that he justified shortly afterwards.
My biggest problem with this movie was the fact that it didn’t wrap up like most feature films, it didn’t end with an open question or an unexpected change in fate, it just went out of production, almost like the director said, “Okay, I’ve Had enough. Shut everything down.”
Bottom line: How It Ends is an interesting and watchable disaster movie, watchable until you can’t watch it anymore. The movie disappoints you at the end because it just dies down, leaving you with a lot of unanswered questions, the biggest one being “Why?”
How It Ends is on Netflix as of July 13, 2018.