Le dernier refuge

"This is not the apocalypse and even if it is didn't we all say this would be the perfect place to ride it out?" After a group of friends receive a text that just says goodbye world they are confused. After the very real threat of an apocalypse occurs old college friends show up at an "off-the-grid" home to wait it out. Little by little old feelings of love and jealousy start to creep in as they all brace for the end of the world. This is a tough movie to review and explain. Some parts of it are very funny and entertaining while others really slow the movie down. The mood switches from happy comedy to downer drama. Some of it is very predictable and some of it comes out of nowhere. I did like this movie for the most part but there was a movie that came out about a year ago called It's A Disaster which was about the same idea and I liked that one much better. Overall, an OK movie that struggled to find an identity. I give this a B-.

Streaming service labeled it as scifi/action, but it is a pure drama.

Very disappointing and was waiting all the time for when it would get good.

Instead just boring stuff about relationship drama with some unrealistic things that made us stop the movie and talk about how unrealistic that would be.

It's seemingly the end of the world, yet these characters are so mildly disturbed by it, you have to wonder what pharmaceuticals they are on.

It's one of the silliest movies I've ever seen. It's so ridiculous and blasé, it's easy to doubt the world is ending. And the actual cause of the collapse of society is ridiculous.

There's an ostensibly suicidal character that has to be the happiest suicidal character ever.

There's a bunch of end of the world series out there and my assumption is that this one tried to make a cut to be one of them but din't quite pull it off and thus is now shown as a full feature. Plot is feasible but all characters are paper thin - as they would be when you prepare for seasons work. Fair . Almost decent. Characters follow eerily the bad series line up. Same good guy bad guy settings... Maybe if they had some edge on "this pilot", if could had become series. Now acting presumptuous, slow, almost clumsy. It is what you would expect if you were watching the TV-series. When you expect a movie you want a movie. With the movie ending and not just filling...

I was really excited about this concept, and naively went into it with high hopes. But with this kind of theme, everything hinges on whether the cast and crew create an aura of fear and doom. There wasn't anything even close to that. So I consider this film a failure.

Having said that, like many movies, it had redeeming qualities that kept me in the game 'til the end. I love the idea of high tech yuppies going native in Mendocino. They use their millions made from being movers and shakers in the mainstream world, to then retreat from that same world.

Interestingly, I didn't hear any angry manifestos from our husband and wife protagonists/property owners. While narrating, the man explains that he went to his property because he sensed an apocalypse would come eventually. He didn't say that he hated the world per say, and they weren't living like real hippies. They had a nice home with modern conveniences.

Yeah sure, it rips off The Big Chill, but I forgive them for that. It's what you do with it that matters. I didn't quite understand the politics of the property owners, their former male business partner, or the Gaby Hoffman character. I think some of them were hybrid. We were supposed to see them as Libs., but they were business people and loving parents.

What the film did convey effectively, is that friendship is messy. We don't necessarily give it up just because our friends betray us from time to time. When we make real friends, we become an intimate part of the other person's life. This is so even between exes. If you had a reasonably amicable split, you are still a major part of someone else's life story, and often you can't just disentangle from that.

Some of our characters did learn things about themselves, which is always good in a character-driven relationship picture. Some might say that there were no noble souls in this film, but I think Adrian Grenier's character came close. He didn't cheat on anyone, he tried to do the right thing, and he tried to quarterback the scenario.

***I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the allegorical nature of the "Daily Bubble." Some of the characters lived in a bubble of intellectualism, idealism,and narcissism to a degree. But how long can you do that without something bursting your bubble? Well, each day they would launch a new bubble and see how long it would last. Not even the end of the world was going to prevent them from trying to perpetuate the bubble.