After Darkness

I watched this movie try so hard - and I wanted it to succeed - but it didn't. It felt like a Lifetime Movie version of Melancholia, down to the perceived weakest family member being, in fact, the strongest one. Lars Von Trier's meditative pacing in Melancholia was very effective, however the pacing here is all over the place. Characters are undeveloped, events that would have explained motives and actions are unexplained, and character arcs are more like pinball trajectories. A barely watchable tangled mess.

So I feel like IMdB ratings are 80% accurate. Think because of the production quality and the actors/actresses featured this was amongst the 20% wrong rating but 4 is absolutely fair. Never once was I drawn into what was happening on the screen. I just kept waiting for something, anything, interesting to happen and yeah no. Scenes that were supposed to be climatic came off as forced. I typically watch movies distracted and if they make me say, wait what - I will give it my undivided attention. I cannot even remember the characters names.

The acting is solid here and that's about the only positive I can come up with for this most depressing and distressing apocalyptic film. Aside from the veteran pros Tim Daly and Kyra Sedgwick, young Natalia Dyer and John Patrick Amedori give excellent portrayals.

The sun is burning itself out and a highly dysfunctional family gathers in the hopes their politically connected father (Daly) can get them safe passage to "the caves" where the elite will go in case of natural catastrophe. The family though, will not only have to contend with the end of the world but with Daly's dictatorial and emotionally abusive self, as well as Sedgwick's mental unbalance.

As I see it, the viewer is just subjected here to a continuous bleak slog as the story plays out, which can be most difficult to watch at times. But then after all this, here comes one of the biggest cop-out endings I've seen in a long time. Do yourself a favor and avoid this mess of a movie.

This is hardly a masterpiece but it's not terrible either. If you go in expecting this to be filled with riveting drama or action or to simply be like many other films with similar subject matter, you're probably going to be disappointed. This isn't that. There's very little action and even the drama is relatively tame.

The story focuses on this broken family isolated in a mansion. They aren't in the center of what's going on. They aren't even paying attention to the news updates so the audience doesn't get much information. In fact, this almost apocalyptic event seems to mostly exist as a plot device to get this family back together and stress them out. The entire thing is just learning about this family and their history as they fight to survive what seems to be an apocalyptic event.

The science of the movie is well... is there any? We don't actually know much about what's going on, but it's probably not scientifically possible. That being said, it seems the idea of the movie might have been drawn from Lord Byrons poem, Darkness. So perhaps it wasn't meant to be scientifically accurate and instead just show a take on this dream that happened in the poem.

I think if you take the movie for what it's actually meant to be and do, it's not that bad. It's still no masterpiece and it's hard to watch sometimes, mostly because the behavior of the father really bothered me. This family is messed up. But if you like calmer movies with a little bit of an apocalyptic setting that focus more on individuals and families, you might actually enjoy this. But if you need riveting drama and action to keep you interested in something.. you should probably look for something else.

Okay so, to be fair, there are worse films one could point to than this odd snoozefest, but make no mistake, from start to finish you will find yourself wondering if your 98 minutes could be better spent doing something else. Nevermind the affront to science, there are bigger problems. The acting isn't the worst but it's pretty bad, maybe slightly better than an after school special but I'll admit I might be giving it too much credit. The characters are more like caricatures, and it's hard to care what happens to such shallow, exaggerated cliches. I wouldn't even really call this a scifi, more like a drama with science fiction undertones, and a bad one at that.

I watched this movie clear through so you don't have to, and don't endure to the end expecting to be rewarded for your sacrifice. I've seen some films that started out terrible but ended up surprising me. This was not one of those films. My suggestion is this: If after the first five minutes you find yourself hoping it gets better, know that it won't and stop wasting your time - I wish that I had. On the other hand if you're bored to tears and there's nothing else to watch, you could do worse (just not by much). I realize not everyone is going to agree with my low markings but if I really liked this movie I'd avoid going all in on five stars because it's so clearly bad that I'd look like a shill.