These Final Hours (2014)

** ½ out of ****

For some reason I have always had a fascination with “end of the world” movies. I can even remember when that fascination started. One day when I was about 10 years old I turned on the TV after school and a local channel was showing “The Omega Man” with Charlton Heston. Not the world's greatest movie, but still one of my personal favorites and definitely the best attempt to bring Richard Matheson's “I Am Legend” to the big screen.  Heston's "last man on earth" was at the same time frightening and exciting, and I have loved the genre ever since.

So every time there is an “end of the world” movie, I check it out. Over the years I have seen some great ones; “This Quiet Earth”, “Mad Max”, “12 Monkeys”, “The Stand”.... more recently “The Road”, “The Book of Eli”, “This is the End”, “Interstellar”. So watching “These Final Hours” was a no-brainer for me, and I have to admit I quite like it – it reminded me in many ways of “Last Night”, a Canadian end-of-the-worlder from 15 or so years ago.

Set in and around Perth, Australia, a giant meteor has hit the earth (somewhere between Europe and North America) and gives us 12 hours before the shockwave wipes out Australia. The film follows James, who leaves his girlfriend behind at their home to go to a "this is the end" debauchery party. He tells her that all he wants is to be “fucked up” at the end so he won't feel or notice the end of the world. Upon hitting the road he is almost immediately relieved of his car by a machete-wielding maniac, and you see the depravity that Armageddon is loosing upon the world. James finds a little nobility when he rescues a young girl from a pair of child molesters, but this screws up his plans as he now has someone to be responsible for. The girl, Rose, wants him to take her to her Aunt Janice's to reunite with her father for the bitter end, which would keep James from his great party. What to do, what to do...... in many ways the film is simply about retaining humanity under inhuman conditions.

What I liked most about it is that it didn't try to offer big, meaningful statements about what it is to be kind or what it means maintain your decency even when it doesn't matter. James was a flawed guy that came to several crossroads where he had to decide between the “right thing” and the selfish thing. At one point he comes across a family of four where the father asks James to shoot them all to spare them the terror of the oncoming firestorm. Without showing it as a big moral dilemma, James simply has to decide what he can or can't do based on his deepest personal needs.

The ending felt a bit of a rip off, torn directly from the pages of “Deep Impact”, but other than that this re-treads much of the genre's old ground without feeling like a waste of effort. It isn't ground-breaking or particularly insightful, but is an enjoyable time despite the grim setting. Most critics are giving it a very high score – I don't think it's quite that great, but surely worth a watch.