K-SCORE: 8
Writer/Director: John Huddles
Starring: James D’Arcy, Sophie Lowe, Daryl Sabara, Freddie Stroma
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“It’s rare for a film to be both this preachy and this nonsensical.”
A trailer mislead Graham and I into thinking that After the Dark would be enjoyable or at least enjoyably bad. It wasn’t. It’s an obvious one-star, two-thumbs down, bottom tier K-Score festering pretentious corpse of a film. It’s barely worth the effort to expostulate with the douchebag filmmakers about what makes it a failure.
The film poses three to four hypothetical apocalyptic scenarios to a philosophy class that is discussing ethics and not philosophy and then films bits of their collective imaginings as to how those scenarios (again hypothetically) unfold. Throughout the film they call their borderline hallucinations, “experiments” yet never is there a process for their machinations, hypotheses, or goals. It’s rare for a film to be both this preachy and this nonsensical. In fact, if you were to evaluate films only on those two grounds, coherence and annoying preachiness, then plot a film’s value based on that X,Y coordinate plane, this is the worst movie ever made. Incidentally the best movie ever made by that rating system is… I don’t know, The Graduate or something else grounded in realism. The Godfather. Maybe still The Empire Strikes Back.
Throughout, I couldn’t get over how strange it was that anyone of the beautiful-people student characters cared at all what the obnoxious teacher did or said. It’s all hypothetical, a meaningless classroom game. Okay, the teacher says I have Ebola now, so I guess I don’t get to go in the bunker. Sad face. But you know what, while we’re all just making shit up, I’ve decided that I just discovered the cure for Ebola, and the secret to immortality, and invented cold fusion.
I stopped caring what they were hypothetically doing when they ate their hypothetical turtles. It didn’t even fit! They barely discussed survival scenarios in even unrealistic ways. Why did they have those turtles? It could not possibly have been a high-yield energy source to eat them. Hypothetically. It’s like they put it in the film just to enrage me! (Which obviously failed.) RAAAAH! Filmmakers, characters, whatever - I hope your experiments result in all of you dying. Death by getting eaten by snapping turtles. Or, just bears. Bear-turtle hybrids.
(c) NitendoFan92 Deviant Art, reprinted with permission