How It Ends (2018) stars 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), a promising lawyer, and Tom Sutherland (Whitaker), his wealthy future father-in-law, have to travel from Chicago to the West Coast, Seattle, to find their pregnant fiancee (Graham).
At first, How It Ends begins with many promises to be different from other disaster movies that have appeared on screens before. Perhaps this is not the typical type of movie in which two people, who disagree with each other, go on a road trip to reunite with a loved one in dire straits. I was hopeful until the two men, who are seemingly polar opposites, go on a road trip, drive through the worst parts of the unknown, encounter one tense situation after another, and a plot with holes here and there in the way to save a loved one.
The action begins when Samantha calls Will to inform him that he has fallen asleep and was about to miss his flight. As the conversation progresses, they talk about the results of last night’s dinner with their future in-laws that turn out to be their own disaster. Samantha suddenly realizes 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 that flights in and out of the airport are quickly and consistently canceled.
Breaking news on a big screen in a terminal bar, and they talk about a record heat wave that has caused fatalities in Europe. You never really have a clear idea or idea of what the actual disaster was or what caused it, only that it started off the coast of Southern California and triggered a waterfall effect with the power grid across the country.
Desperate, Will returns to Samantha’s parents’ building and approaches Sutherland, who has a solid military background and is apparently already packing his bags 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 road idiots running into the woods. Will complains that Sutherland has a gun, Sutherland then lectures Will on being too nice in the post-world era. He was right, if the car was stolen, what would they do next? It would not be like a normal carjacking, they would have simply been stranded at a gas station outside of Chicago with no taxi ride home or help from the police.
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 who runs a garage and who reluctantly decides to help repair her damaged vehicle after seeing them tow it away with the police patrol car. She fixes her car and they somehow convince her to accompany them. The trio continues on their way to Washington state.
You get incident snippets that hint at what happened as the movie and road trip progresses. Ricki’s compass was spinning madly and not pointing to 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 a few key pieces of a puzzle, but you still have enough puzzle pieces missing to give you a clear picture.
Whitaker has his usual good performance. Most of the rest of the cast also did a good job. The problem for me wasn’t the onscreen talent, 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 the execution of the story in some key areas of the film. Will learned a lesson and his character was adapted from a nice guy, a preppie young lawyer to a person who had to survive by all means necessary, but still maintains his humanity, which he shows when he meets a family traveling north. .
He was a bit confused by the part of a campfire conversation that Will had with one of the later characters that 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 ignoring it as mere misinformation. He could attribute his reaction to a general distrust of this character, a distrust that was justified shortly afterwards.
My biggest problem with this movie was the fact that it didn’t end like most feature films do, it didn’t end with an open question or an unexpected change in fate, it just stopped producing, almost like the director said, “okay. I’ve had enough. Turn everything off. “
Bottom line: How It Ends is an interesting, see-can-see, can-see disaster movie until you can’t see it anymore. The movie disappoints you in the end because it just shuts down, leaving you with a ton of unanswered questions, the most important of which is, “Why?”
How It Ends is on Netflix as of July 13, 2018.
