This is an exciting film that has a lot of good and a lot of bad in it. To start with, you know something bad has happened, something "end of worldish"...I mean, it's in the title. But what is it? Aliens? Nukes? Meteor? Earthquakes? So the tension is good as the story unfolds and weird stuff happens, and you still don't know.
But there are some bad things as well. When it starts, you are amazed at how utterly annoying Forest Whitaker's character is. I've enjoyed him since I first saw him in Fast Times, decades ago. But here he practically wears a sign saying, "I'm a jerk!" You hope they will kill him and his sucky wife off soon but sadly realize it's not likely. Both he and his wife are inexcusable and nasty pieces of work. If they were my in-laws I would divorce my wife if she didn't sign a contract to never have contact with them again. I'm not sure what the writers were thinking by introducing them as such horrid people.
I was also amazed at how things turned to anarchy almost within minutes of the power going out. A trio of thugs try to rob them at a gas station full of people. Maybe that's NYC, but I would think they would wait until dark, or not so many people, or once the apocalypse has really set in. I mean, NYC has had power outages before and people didn't immediately assume it was the end of the world. Then the character Will has a near hissie fit when he finds out Whitaker has a gun. Seriously? The apocalypse is meant for people willing to fight back, not whine about a scary gun. That made me feel ashamed for the whole film.
Then we have them flying down the highway and a fake redneck cop tries to kill them. He really goes out of his way to track them down. Let's think about that for a second. The power has been out for only a day at this point. Surely, if he's decided to start robbing people, he might try something simple, like the locals. Why go to so much trouble to track down and chase down a single car on the highway which may or may not have any loot? I wouldn't waste my time, especially not if I had a cop car and fire power and could blast my way through several encounters with any of the tens of thousands of locals in all the neighboring towns. After that, they end up at a secluded Indian reservation. At this point, you realize they are going through every stereotype of unusual, frightening things a Hollywood writer can dream up about Americana.
A few things that really made sense, though. First, they were using ham radios to communicate. That is the most likely scenario in this situation. But it was odd they didn't find any info, since those things can reach around the world without the need for satellites or cell towers. Second, and this is exactly what I would expect, small towns closed off their borders and put armed squadrons on the roads into town. If you recall after the fall of the Roman Empire, when tiny towns throughout Europe were left to fend for themselves, they walled themselves in. That's the way to survived and keep your town safe.
In real life, people would have known what happened, there would be no question. It would be on radio and ham radio frequencies around the world. So it was dumb to pretend no one knew. In the end, what hurt this movie the most was the bizarre ending where they're running from it and the credits roll. They never definitively said what caused this world ending scenario, and we never knew if our heroes survived to tell the tale and raise a family in the quiet wilderness. Writers today are never as good as they used to be. They always screw up the ending. I think a 5 out of 10 is generous for this because of the stupid ending...or lack of an ending.
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