REVIEW: Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World

It's a rare thing for a movie to illicit a physical emotional response out of me. I'm by no means made of stone, but there's a difference between something that's funny and something that makes me laugh, the same way there's a difference between something that's tragic or touching and something that actually makes me cry. Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is a film that managed to do both before the credits rolled.

The film opens with a news report informing us of a massive meteor that is set to collide with Earth in a mere three weeks. The impact will end all life on the planet and people are reacting to the prospect of imminent doom better than one would imagine. This is the first little detail that I truly enjoyed about this movie; it's easily the most down-to-earth portrayal of the apocalypse that I've ever seen. Things don't go from "fine and dandy" to "Mad Max but somehow worse" within the span of a day; in the early stages, people even still attend their boring desk jobs, as evidenced with our protagonist, Dodge (Steve Carell). After his wife leaves him, he's left without purpose. The realization slowly sinks in that he is going to die alone and totally unfulfilled once the meteor hits. His outlook begins to change after he meets Penny (Keira Knightley), a neighbor from upstairs. She reveals that the mailman had been delivering Dodge's mail to her apartment for the past few months by mistake (she just hadn't gotten around to returning it yet). After finding a letter from Dodge's old high school sweetheart proclaiming that she still loves him, the two set out on a journey to reunite Dodge with the one that got away while at the same time attempting to reunite Penny with her family in England.

At its core, this is a simple roadtrip movie. A lonely sadsack and his optimistic friend race against time to get to an emotionally significant location, encountering all sorts of strange characters along the way. The thing that really makes this movie unique is the backdrop; it really plays around a lot with how different people react to the end of the world (the most pedestrian example being the riots that cause our protagonists to leave New York in the first place). Instead of killing each other and declaring martial law, mankind remains in some semblance of order (at least in the part of the world we see during the film). As the meteor approaches, people are let off of work, the police are more lax, the news stays on to give people updates. It's a very mellow kind of end that you really don't see that often in apocalypse movies. This is the kind of movie where doomed people do comical amounts of drugs and engage in casual sex rather than eat each other alive; it's both funny, refreshing, and interesting at the same time. It makes you wonder, what would you really be doing in a situation such as this? This is less armageddon and more Friday night; characters are either out engaging in shallow, overindulgent fun, or they're sitting at home, contemplating what remains of their life. The aspect of the ticking clock in this movie is unique, in that it's not some shallow plot device. If they arrive too late, the love of Dodge's life isn't going to marry some stuck-up rich guy or move to Europe; human existence will simply cease to be. They are given a time limit; once it expires, literally everything ends. As an audience, it's very easy to connect our own mortality with those of the characters on screen. It's a movie about people making the absolute best out of the absolute worst scenario possible.

The reason it works as well as it does is mostly in part to the performances of Steve Carell and Keira Knightley. I can't think of two actors who would be better suited to take on these roles; not that the characters are particularly unique in concept, but the chemistry on display between the two is what makes this film work as well as it does. The focus here isn't on the apocalypse; as interesting as that aspect is, it's merely the staging for these characters to work around. It's not a movie about the world ending so much as it is about the people who will be there when it does. The apocalypse is always shown in film as something in the far-off future, something we would never have to deal with. And even if there is something afterwards, there will definitely be survivors fit to go on all kinds of badass adventures. In this case, the end is here NOW, and as far as we know, there isn't anything afterwards. This is a film that says "here is the amount of time you and literally every other human on the planet has left, do what you will with it". The result of such a scenario manages to be a stellar mix between hilarious, touching, and heartbreaking.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is a fantastic film that raises the question, "if it was all going to end tomorrow, would you be happy with your life?", before pointing out that, if the answer is "no", there's no time like the present to go out and fix it. It puts into perspective just how little time we have on this planet; as far as I'm concerned, the time I spent watching this movie was time well spent.