Initially, this movie piqued my interest when I first saw the scene of the boat on Tiktok. As I usually do when I intend on finding the name of a movie or series, I ran straight to the comments where I was met with loads of spoilers and opinions that were more or less the same. Just about every other comment went along the lines of, “that ending sucked”,”It was good but the ending is a cliffhanger.”. So I went and saw for myself, now I'm here to talk about it.

In the beginning, the mother seems to be having a midlife crisis, ranting on about how she hates people, and had a spur of the moment idea to go away for the weekend. I hadn’t caught the symbolism of the mothers analysis of people up until the end, which I greatly appreciated. The mother remains vigilant throughout the entirety of the movie, opposed to her husband and kids. Making her seem quite overbearing, and harder to like. 

The first peculiar scene to set the movie off on its end-of-the-world theme was the boat scene. As they laid on the beach, a cargo ship fastly approached with no intention of redirecting itself, nearly crashing into the hundreds of people laying there on the beach. This is one of those scenes that, depending on the person you are, have you yelling common sense at the screen or silently nodding your head in disapproval. 

A series of ambient events unfold soon after. The BNB owner of the place they were staying in, had come over to ask to stay at the house. Whilst the owner remained calm and professional, the daughter did not hold off on her snarky remarks and entitlement. We see the mother and owner's daughter’s personalities clash throughout the entire movie. They told them of a power outage in the city, and they had to come there to be safe. As they laid down for bed that night they let the audience know that they had more knowledge than they were letting on. 

First there was the alert on the TV and missing news alerts, not much to alarm them. The large amounts of deer in one spot, the sirens, the hacked teslas and the sharecropper that dropped flyers in a language they did not understand. Ultimately, they were able to figure that written on it was “death to america”. 

The way the story unfolds, we learn things at the same pace that the people in it do. This was a connect the dots kind of movie, where the people in it know just as much as the audience does. There isn’t a whole lot of dramatic irony, which is probably why they chose to end the movie off with it. 

GH, the owner reveals his knowledge of the “3 stage maneuver”. Step one, isolation, two, synchronized chaos, and step four, civil war. The idea is that it is the human way for them to be selfish. This component is what makes this so easy, because if done correctly, the third stage happens on its own.  

I can say that the movie had a ton of plot holes. It reminded me of the movie “Birdbox” a bit. It flew all over the place with aspects of the world ending, and it wasn't until at the end we identified what truly had been going on. The main complaint I've seen is that the ending was unsatisfactory. So as for the ending being as simple as the girl finding the bunker just watching “Friends”, i’ve been just content with it. We were previously given enough insight on what had been going on and possible outcomes of the future. The directors made this to be a testament to our mindset, or a cautionary tale. It is a warning, and not really meant to give us an answer.