Wicked, it ain’t. God help the poor soul who makes it to this dystopia. Geez, in The Hunger Games, at least you get a chance to fight back. Here, they just sing you to death … blandly.
For two-and-a-half-hours, The End played to an audience of exactly one, me. The theater capacity was 153. I dunno where the other 152 were hiding, but they made the better choice, whatever choice they made. The End is a dull and tedious experience that left me hoping for the salvation of a group suicide; that’s the only thing that could have saved this film. And in the end, I didn’t get what I wanted, which describes almost all the people on the screen as well.
Dystopias tend to be “make your own fun” places. And this one is in an underground bunker … forever.
I neither know nor care what year it is in this film. Doesn’t really matter where the people are, either, aside from the fact that they’re underground, far underground, while the few remaining scavengers in the dead world above fight for the few remaining scraps. (We imagine this; our entire world is in this damn bunker.) The nuclear family here are survivors Mother (Tilda Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), and their Son (George MacKay), a young adult who has never seen sunlight, from what I understand.
There are a handful of other people in this bleak museum world decorated by Mother’s pilfered art and it’s embarrassing how little they matter. Seriously. Civilization might be down to seven people and there’s still a pecking order. You guys suck.
Every once in a while, a character will break into song for no reason apparent to me. Almost all of the songs describe current existential status. It’s as if nobody in particular asked, “How’s it goin’ today?” and a character decided to answer in song. And it’s not that any of them have bad voices. Nobody in the cast is summoning the evil of Russell Crowe in Les Miz or Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia! However, once the Girl (Moses Ingram) shows up and starts singing about her day, we realize exactly how better her voice is than that of every other cast member.
This is the entire controversy of 148 worth of film, btw. One outsider, Girl, shows up and the group decides whether or not she can stay. I give you PLOT POINT! If they had sung
about this being the only point in the film, I might have appreciated the action more. Alas, they did not.
This is one of those films where you gotta amuse yourself somehow because nothing on screen is ginna do it for you. It’s not that the film tried a few things and they didn’t work out. The film pretty much tried nothing and let the three major characters in turn sing about survivor’s guilt. Of course, Father was (perhaps accidentally) one of the main architects of the apocalypse, so we feel less about their fate. If they live in a dystopian Hellscape where they sing about what 5:43 PM is like, well, that’s kinda on them, huh?
The End is not a mess. It’s very structured and organized and dull. It knows exactly what its doing; it just didn’t do anything, like the turtle that refuses to come out of its shell. For a while, I was midlly excited about Michael Shannon singing; his career has sure taken a turn, huh? But the novelty grows painfully old over 148 minutes so I started wondering how many egregiously boring Tilda Swinton performances I would see in my lifetime. Add one more to the stack.
There was once a small family who found
They’d survived when Earth perished all around
Life went on, it would seem
Without a thing to redeem
For all capital was spent underground
Not Rated, 148 Minutes
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Writer: Rasmus Heisterberg, Joshua Oppenheimer
Genre: Our screwed future
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: You gotta really, really, really like musicals
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “If I lived in this group at this time, I’d kill myself”
