How It Ends (2018)

A torturous, illogical crawl across the US that ironically never seems to end.

The trailer for How It Ends does give clues that we're not looking at anything original here.  Something terrible has happened on the West Coast and Will (Theo James) and Tom (Forest Whitaker) set out on a road trip from Chicago to Seattle to find out what's happened to Will's pregnant girlfriend, Tom's daughter.  The premise itself, therefore, sets us up for a buddy/road trip movie where Will can prove his worth to the ultra-uptight ex-Marine Tom and sure enough, that's what we're given.  The pair faces dangerous challenges that they overcome together, growing to respect and love their individual failings.  Well, something like that.  So, what's not to like?

For a start, very little in the movie, either in the actions of the characters or the scenario painted, makes much sense.  When Will, who has been visiting Chicago on business, and meeting the parents for dinner, finds that the flight to Seattle has been cancelled and the airport descends into chaos when the power fails and cell coverage goes down, he's somehow still able to find a taxi to drive him back into town to the parent's apartment block.  At the apartment, Tom has clearly already decided to go to Seattle but packs his wife off to drive on her own somewhere (the dialogue is unclear at this point, as it often is throughout the movie).  Seriously, the world's going to hell and you're sending your wife off on her own?  No thought that it might be safer if the three of you stuck together?  No matter, we never see the wife again and throughout the entire remainder of the movie Tom never tries to contact her or even speaks about her, so perhaps they weren't that close.

By now our heroes are on the road and looking for gas.  Astonishingly, not only are they able to drive right up to a pump at a filling station, but somehow the pumps still work, even though there's no power.  Just hours into whatever the heck has happened, thugs are preying on drivers at this gas station in broad daylight and surrounded by people.  I know we're all only a couple of meals from anarchy, but this seems extreme.  Tom, of course, scares them off by pulling a pistol, which seems to shock Will, who clearly has forgotten Tom is an ex-Marine setting off on a dangerous journey.

There's a scene on a bridge where Will - driving Tom's boat of a Cadillac - reveals previously unhinted driving skills that probably challenged the stunt driver.  There's the crashed military transport train that Will loots, apparently finding only two cans of gas (in decidedly non-military cans) and nothing else, no food, no weapons, water, nothing.  "Found this spoon, sir!"

The list could be endless.

Then there's the odd cameo of the Native-American girl Ricki (Grace Dove) who they meet when the pair pull in to get their car fixed.  They persuade Ricki to come along as their mechanic, on the basis (from what I can make out) that she's always wanted to go to California.  The point that the West Coast is, by anyone's understanding, either destroyed, invaded by aliens or both, seems moot.  Ricki travels with them for 30 minutes of screen time, really adding nothing to the story (nor, in fairness, taking anything away), then simply walks off into the fields, never to be seen again (nor ever mentioned by the pair).

By this point in the movie, I was seriously wondering where the heck everyone was.  Tom & Will are driving from Chicago towards the West Coast.  Now, even if there's been an epic disaster, there should be hundreds of thousands, possibly still millions of people fleeing that region East.  It's no spoiler to reveal that Will's girlfriend has escaped, and she was in the city when the weirdness kicked off, so it seems logical (sigh) that a goodly proportion of the rest of the population would have done as well, but no, the roads are deserted, and when Will gets to walk around an impressively messed up Seattle there's not another soul to be seen.

When the credits finally roll, after what seemed like five or six hours but was apparently only two, we're left completely in the dark.  Other reviews have criticised this aspect of the movie but in truth that's not its worst sin, it's the hotch-potch of old ideas, poorly thought out actions and snail's pace progess that makes this so hard to enjoy.

Terrifyingly, there's a good chance this production is (or was) intended to lead to a series, indeed, some segments of the movie have the whiff of episodes roughly stitched together - the Ricki bit, the bit with the neighbour, the bit with the family - and we can all only hope that idea has now been put away in the Netflix basement.