How It Ends is a 2018 action thriller about a desperate father who tries to return home to his pregnant wife after a mysterious apocalyptic event turns everything to chaos.
What immediately separates How it Ends from so many other disaster movies like it is how it steers right clear of the thing that every title in the genre has put the most effort in, the mayhem. There’s hardly a single frame of destruction as it happens. That’s mostly because for nearly the entire runtime of the movie, it’s not really clear what the heck has happened, only that something has and it’s put one man many thousands of miles from his pregnant fiancée, and he has to find her. Director David M. Rosenthal‘s film is a strangely engaging effort for about three-quarters of the way, leaving just enough questions lingering that it nearly makes up for a sloppy last act and a wholly unsatisfying end.
In Chicago, Will (Theo James) has come from Seattle to get the blessing of his girlfriend Sam’s (Kat Graham) father Tom (Forest Whitaker), a notably wealthy and ornery fellow already not keen on Will for an incident that left his prized boat at the bottom of the lake. Naturally, things don’t go well, but when Sam calls Will later at his hotel, she’s suddenly cut off and the power goes dead. It soon heads east and then Chicago loses power with cell service and television cut off as well. What has happened? A nuclear attack? A natural disaster? Aliens? No one knows, but Tom and Will decide to join forces and try to head west to Seattle and find – if they can – Sam, knowing that what lies ahead is surely a dangerous journey. Little do they know just how true that is.
The first forty minutes of How it Ends is really smart, building up a convincing and authentic relationship between father and future son-in-law as they butt heads at dinner. Even much of the early segments of the road trip have some impact, though it starts to lose some grip with all-too-soon pockets of the population that seem to go wildly rogue, just a single day after the ‘event.’ We’re talking gun fights and car chasing of the like that seem months if not years out-of-place. Everywhere along the road the duo head (and soon trio when they pick up a young female mechanic played by Grace Dove), they run into packs of well-armed isolationists who guard their marked territories with abhorrent threats of violence.
Unfortunately, not much of these moments ring true, with the Road Warrior mentality coming along all to swiftly. I have some faith in ourselves that at least for a few months we’d try to come together and solve some problems rather than instantaneously revert back to trope-ish post-apocalyptic nightmares. But whatever, the story is the story. What does work in this is the great performances of both James and especially Whitaker, who does some good things in the role of the former Marine who recognizes that it’s not about what’s gone wrong but rather what to do about it. That’s smart and fun to watch.
However, it all comes to a head-scratching collage of been-there done-that scenarios where thugs on motorbikes harangue them along with desperate survivors (three days in?) who stop at nothing to take whatever they can from passersby. And then it travels Will to a place that caps with the introduction of a last minute character who provides one more hurdle that seems really packed with contrivance and a whacky theory that is meant to have some kind of ‘WTF?’ spin. It doesn’t. And it’s an absolutely wrong turn to make in a movie that needs to stay much less circuitous.
There are some truly dazzling visuals here with the high-end production top-notch, loading this up with a whole lot of potential as a psychological thriller. It’s just too bad the story is about the same old same old gotta-reach-my-girl-in-danger linear thinking instead of taking that whacky theory and running with it. A good start but a hazy end.