Ebola, that terrible disease ravaging western Africa and threatening the United States, inspires dread, but it’s nothing compared to the natural disaster looming large in Zac Hilditch’s science fiction thriller, These Final Hours, which opens in Canada on Oct. 17.
Set in the suburbs of Perth, Australia, as a cataclysmic force devours cities and continents in its blazing path, the film opens as James (Nathan Phillips), a hunk in the early 30s, humps his girlfriend. From there, it plunges head-long into an eerie canvas of fear, madness, death and destruction.
“It’s making its way toward us,” a voice of doom on the radio warns. “It’s here. It’s real.”
Western Europe has already been destroyed and the eastern coast of the United States is imperilled.
As the world tumbles into the abyss, James gets into his car to survey the damage. Residential properties have been damaged and some residents have gone berserk, forcing James to fend off two crazies intent on killing him.
En route, he picks up Rose (Angourie Rice), a blonde girl who’s looking for her dad. Smart and composed, she accompanies James on his nervous rounds of the apocalypse. He finds corpses in a garage, discovers that his girlfriend is pregnant, encounters a distraught man who asks James to shoot him and his family, stumbles upon a wild party cum-orgy, during which one of the participants mistakes Rose for her daughter, and pays a visit to his nonchalant mother.
The musical score is, as you might have expected, ominous and chilly, presaging a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Every so often, the camera pans on the sun and the clouds, giving us a hint of what lies ahead. Rose seems to know what is afoot: The sun is scorching the earth.
As garden-variety science fiction movies go, These Final Hours is not bad. But it’s pretty predictable and even banal, virtually devoid of tension. We’ve seen this film before under different titles.