“Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” came out in 2012. Hollywood was cashing in on all that business about the Mayan calendar, which was long known to have predicted that 2012 would be the official end of the world. Remember all that? How quaint it all was. Never a more opportune time for a movie titled “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.”
There’s a chance, since most of us are still in quarantine, to go browsing Netflix and come across this movie title, and go “Hey! Wow! This could be just the comedy to make me stop feeling depressed today.”
There are two possible benefits for seeing this movie. Firstly, if you watch it, you'll be strongly reminded that time is precious, and you will therefore henceforth meticulously plan all future movie viewing so as not to be this bored again.
Why It’s the End of the World
A 70-mile-wide asteroid named “Matilda” is headed toward Earth, and all attempts to divert it have failed. What to do, what to do?
Well, for one, Linda (Nancy Carell), the wife of Steve Carell’s character, Dodge, upon hearing the news, exits the car and leaves him on the spot, stomping away in her high heels.
People riot, loot, and flee their jobs in droves. It’s announced at his insurance sales office, “We have lots of new job opportunities, like, for example—anybody want to be CFO?!”
Dodge’s normally staid, well-to-do neighbors choose the rapid-moral-decline route, throwing parties—“Hey everybody, Sarah and Dave brought heroin! Who wants to go first?!”
Dodge, finding all such behavior completely tasteless and pointless, starts staying home. He then crosses paths with Penny (Keira Knightley), a Converse sneakers-wearing pretty young thing who dates a musician and lives in Dodge’s building. They couldn’t be more different.
Time is running out. They bond a bit over botched burglary (taking the moral high ground comes a bit later). They jump in her Smart car, ditch her farcically self-involved boyfriend, and flee the city. All of a sudden it’s an odd-couple road movie.
The movie starts off leaning toward broad comedy, as if to announce “This is a Steve Carell vehicle,” but it’s not really sure what it wants to be and eventually ends up a drama.
Overall, the movie manages to be hectic while lacking tension, thus paradoxically ending up irritating and boring simultaneously. It’s a script chock full of mundane musings, droning on about trivia, all accompanied by a cheesy soundtrack largely comprising little-known early-to-mid-1960s pop non-nuggets, just this side of elevator music. It’s been hip to do these retro-hit soundtracks in movies lately, but this one’s a clunker.
One never really comes to care about any of the characters, and the chemistry between the two leads feels fairly contrived. Which is a shame, because this topic is very apropos of our current COVID-idity. The Grim Reaper stalking around in our midst has a way of making normally hard decisions easy. A massive asteroid threatening to wipe out humanity demands, “Choose now!” Well ... we’ve all been asking ourselves: Choose what?
This is the heartfelt (if boring) story of two people who choose not to let their humanity slide into depravity. And there you have the full benefit of this movie in a nutshell, without having to actually suffer watching it—I did your suffering for you. You’re welcome.
But make your life choices soon. The Mayans were clearly wrong, but the end of the world is very much a possibility, necessitating comportment choices of various kinds. And choices matter.
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