” A beautifully, poetic film about the end of the world where complex characters take center stage instead of the disaster!”
~ Marcus Blake
What would you do if you knew the world was going to end? How would you spend your last moments on Earth? Who would you spend it with? They’re not easy questions to answer but at the heart of the film, Last Night on Earth, these are the questions being posed while watching the lives of the main characters unfold in the last moments of Earth. This film is about a young couple who try to live out their final moments in peace, but have to fight for their lives against people who want to reign terror on the innocent before the earth is destroyed. On the surface, this film plays out like a survival story, but in the film, there’s a deeper meaning, which makes it great. There’s a philosophical question about what we would do in our final moments and how much we’re willing to fight to survive just to have those final moments. And I’m a big fan of movies which has a deeper meaning than what we see on the surface. Last Night on Earth is a great film that invites the audience to a great discussion about what their final moments of life would look like and is seen through characters who are having to fight for their last moments of peace This is demonstrated perfectly through the great performances of Jake McLaughlin, Leven Rambin and Shane West.
I love the film because it’s not a simple story. It seems like it, but there’s so much more going on especially as you see it through the transformation of the characters. I feel like the greatest transformation is through Holly as she is a girl who has dealt with suicide but becomes stronger by the end. Shane West gave one of the most surprising performances because we’re used to seeing him play the young hero always doing what’s right whether it was from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or a rebellious doctor on ER. But he plays a great villain with a very ambiguous backstory that made me want to know more. Was his character a serial killer trying to get away with a few more murders before the end of the world or just a guy who always did the right thing and said, “fuck it,” I’m going to be a killer because it doesn’t matter at this point. The best part about the movie is the cat and mouse game with his character of Gene and that of Ryan and Holly who are just trying to spend their remaining moments together as a loving couple. But it’s their characters who end up having to fight back to claim those last moments. This is very much a performance-driven movie. I can easily see it as a three-act play where we gradually see these characters transform into something completely different. Marco’s Efron, the writer and director does a great job showing how this transformation will play out until the end. So many disaster movies about the end of the world focus on the ultimate survival, but not so much about having those last moments together and facing death with your truest self. That’s the brilliance of the storytelling.
The biggest complaint I have about this movie, I want to know more about these characters. I always feel like there could have been an extra 20 minutes where we got the backstories of these characters, but maybe the mystery is better. Maybe, it’s better NOT to know everything that happened that got these characters to this point, or who the villain was before the world was about to end. It’s a minor complaint. But I also feel like we could have seen more of what was happening to the world in its final days and unfortunately, when you make an independent film, you don’t always have the budget to show those scenes. It’s obvious, they didn’t have the budget as great disaster movies like Deep Impact or 2012. But again, this is a minor critique because my curiosity makes me want to know more. However, the most important part of this story is the characters themselves and how they get to the end and face that. What makes this movie worth watching are the performances. And I hope we get to see Leven Rambin in more heroine roles as much as we get to see Shane West be a villain because he’s really good at it. But for me, I like this film for the questions that it makes us ask of ourselves. What would we do knowing when the end is coming? How would we face death, and would we fight with all that we have to claim those final moments of peace? One thing that I like to talk about with films is how sometimes they are defined by the very last shot. John Wayne in The Searchers is a broken man who can never cross the threshold of a wholesome home after he rescues his niece, then the camera fades back to a shadow of the man he once was. It’s a great metaphor. The last shot of this film is very reminiscent of that as two people come together to face death and claim their lives back as the sky is filled with meteors about to destroy the Earth. It’s beautiful and poetic. And maybe that’s the best compliment I could give this film.
