These Final Hours

Gripping and well made, simultaneously uplifting and redemptive but also depressing and definitely apocalyptic, this is the beautifully filmed story of two people facing the end of the world in Perth, Australia. The day the film depicts beginning about ten minutes after an asteroid impacts the north Atlantic Ocean, there are about 12 hours before a global firestorm reaches Perth. It is heavily implied again and again everyone knows this asteroid strike was coming and really there was no way to survive it. The world is truly ending.The story is essentially about how people chose to spend those final hours and how they decide to face the end. Will they fall into crime and violence? Party until they are numb and don’t care? Spend quiet time with family and friends? Take their own lives and/or the lives of loved ones so they don’t feel any pain from the coming firestorm? Face the coming apocalypse, wanting to feel and experience things up until the very last moment, maybe alone, maybe with those they love most, maybe with complete strangers?The movie focuses on two people. We get James, the main character, who in the beginning is with his lover Zoe, enjoying each other’s intimate company on the beach and what they know will be a great view of the firestorm. Zoe, who tells James she is pregnant, wants James to stay, but James wants to join his friend for one final party and get wasted, blocking all feelings for what is going to happen and is really rather upset to receive such serious news on his last day alive. Understandable, certainly, but also selfish, and James leaves over Zoe’s objections to make his way to his friend Freddy’s party.Along the way James encounters signs of the end of the world, one of them two men taking a young teenage girl into a house with the obvious intent to rape her. Torn between going on his way to the party and rescuing the girl, James finds he just can’t leave the girl to that fate, even knowing she would die in less than 12 hours and rescues her.The girl – her name Rose – was never someone James intended to bond with, but bond he does while hoping to find Rose’s dad (Rose and her father got separated) or failing that, leaving her with someone while he makes his way to the party, but events don’t go as planned owing to a variety of encounters along the way. Also along the way James becomes less selfish and redeems himself, finding peace with his life and what he needs to do in his final hours, some of that from Rose’s positive influence, some of that from the quest to get her to her father and to do something selfless in his last hours on earth.The movie was beautifully filmed with just gorgeous use of color and light. It had just the right touches of post-apocalyptic mayhem without being ugly or brutal (certainly nothing quite as dark as The Walking Dead or the like). Some of the encounters were tropes of a sort of this subgenre – people trying to take your working vehicle for instance – but others were not and a surprise. The actor who played James (Nathan Phillips) did a great job and was believable as he made the slow slide from selfish and nihilistic to a man on a mission to a man at peace, and Rose (played by Angourie Rice) was endearing, right between the line of a child and an intelligent and quite capable adult, precocious and frustrating and very well portrayed.The movie reminded me a bit of Iain Rob Wright’s novella _Tar_ and the novel and the movie _On the Beach_ but I think was superior to either one (though they are all quite good). If you like any of those three you would enjoy this film.

I found "These Final Hours" both disturbing and touching.There is some violence in it, but most of it is actually brief and offscreen. (As shown in the preview, the protagonist hits someone in the skull with a hammer to save a little girl from being raped and killed; we know what's happening, we see him swing the hammer, see the body slump, but we don't see the hammer connecting. There's no gratuitous spray of blood, and no real gore). The violence is implied but is actually downplayed.So if you're looking for a hyper-violent movie, this isn't it. If you're looking for a sanitized story without even a suggestion of violence, this isn't that either. Those reviewers who've complained about the violence are actually complaining about how their imaginations filled in the details that were never shown.Re: profanity (another complaint), there's some, but not as much as some reviewers would suggest. It's a film for adults, not children, so is appropriate in my estimation. Re: the complaints that there's sex, welcome to the 21st century. If you want to watch movies without even a suggestion of sex, go dig up some 1950s movies. I don't know why you're watching this in the first place.These questions aside, the deeper story being told in this movie is about the choices people make when faced with the end of things. The hero, for example, chooses to save himself from one threat of death early in the film, knowing another is on its way. He faces the question of whether to save the little girl from some terrible violence, knowing that (according to the situation established in the movie), he can't save her from the end that's coming soon for everyone.Some have made the point that the doom facing the characters are facing is not based on science. If an asteroid hit the Earth, it wouldn't kill some people immediately, and the rest 12 hours later as the fires sweep over the Earth. At least not in the way portrayed in this movie.This is true. If an asteroid hit the Earth, some would die instantly; others would probably linger on for years or even decades, before life was finally snuffed out. But the movie is not so much about the science of what would happen, as how people respond to it, and how even in circumstances that would push us toward nihilism and denial, there can still be moral questions and choices. Even if all is ultimately lost, i.e., if the end is coming, the choices we make as it approaches still matter on a human level.The truth is that we all have to face these questions and issues in our lives: we live knowing that death could come for us and those we love, if not today, then decades from now. We (or the people we love) may die in traffic, or of cancer, in interpersonal violence, or of old age. But it nonetheless matters how we live our lives. The movie compresses this conundrum into a twelve hour time frame, and makes a thoughtful statement. If it uses some artistic license in terms of the science, the statement is still valid in my estimation.

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Ich habe in einer Kritik gelesen, dieser Film "frißt sich ins Gehirn". Und das tut er. Nur wenige Filme schaffen es, mich über das Ende hinaus noch zum Nachdenken zu bewegen. Was wäre wenn? Was würde ich tun wenn? Die Fragen, die sich die Hauptfigur in dem Film nicht mehr stellen muss, denn die Fakten sind unumstößlich: das Ende kommt. In etwa 12 Stunden ist das Leben auf der Erde ausgelöscht.Ein unglaublich starker Film, der beschreibt, dass es nie zu spät ist, das Richtige zu tun, und das keine Zeit zu kurz sein kann, das Richtige überhaupt zu erkennen... für sich selbst und auch für andere.Wer hier Weltuntergangsspektakel im Stil von Armageddon oder Deep Impact oder so erwartet,der ist hier fehl am Platz. Es geht hier um Charakter, Einsicht, Sehnsucht und natürlich um Angst, Leid und Mitleid.Starke Nummer! Musikalisch super untermalt ein ganz starker Film. Kaufen und mehrmals gucken. Vielleicht hilft es dem einen oder anderen auch, seinen eigenen Focus wieder etwas zu justieren.

good film, well cast and for once humans lose. I liked this

Pretty OK if you like end-of-world films. Not as spectacular as say Deep Impact, but more personal. Beware, very dark!

great thanks