p e n g u i n d e v i l

Well, call me a rare fool but I watched Netflix’s How It Ends and I actually liked it. I didn’t Google it until it was over, so I was able to like it unsoiled by the amount of dislike leveled at it.


The story was maybe a bit light, but, you know, sometimes life’s just like that. A couple in Seattle are planning to get married, so the fella goes to Chicago to ask for the blessing of the gal’s dad, who is a curmudgeonly, wealthy, retired marine who thinks that said fella is kind of a loser… Fella basically blows it at dinner with the folks and leaves without asking his big question. Next morning on phone to gal, some terrible unseen and unspoken disaster happens… Gal is seriously concerned about something outside her window, but then the call goes dead. Fella heads to the airport to catch his flight, but then all the power goes out and all the flights are cancelled and a newscast comes on about how something has happened on the west coast, but they don’t have any info about what it was. Fella heads back to gal’s parents apartment and finds dad preparing to drive out to Seattle to find his daughter. Of course, regardless of the dislike between them, they team up and head out to drive through the unknown from Chicago to Seattle in a caddy.

As one might imagine, civilization has taken a bit of a fall out west, so they encounter numerous bad guys along the way, lots of scenes of driving, and a supporting character who I really liked but didn’t last long… With the two main characters, Theo James is convincing as a guy who really just doesn’t know what to do or how to react to anything, Forest Whitaker is convincing as someone who knows all too well what to do and how to react (and knows that others don’t, yeah, kind of a jerk), so Grace Dove is appreciated as the only genuinely cool character in the movie.

I quite liked the pacing of it: driving, countryside, moments of evasion, some strange and mysterious sights in the air, and then more driving. Kind of like Damnation Alley in concept, but not dumb and corny like Damnation Alley. I liked the ending as well, but we don’t walk about those things here. It’s a road trip movie, a bonding movie, an Armageddon movie (maybe), a post-apocalypse movie (maybe), and a disaster movie in which you don’t know what the disaster is.

Though there were some potentially implausible action escapes, it doesn’t have all of the stupid, over-the-top action stuff and mumbo jumbo that Hollywood usually uses to make these sort of movies boring and unbearable. Just some people trying to get somewhere and not willing to stop at anything to get there,