How It Ends

The Apocalypse of the Algorithm

Lately I’ve been thinking about how movie apocalypses used to carry some real weight. They used to feel suffocating or revealing—like the end of the world would strip people down and show you who they were. In David M. Rosenthal's 2018 film *How It Ends*, civilization collapses and somehow the main impression it leaves is of a very uncomfortable family dinner stretching on forever.



This is a movie that feels reverse-engineered for the weekend-scroll era: sleek surfaces, recognizable faces, just enough catastrophe to promise stakes without ever getting too messy. Theo James plays Will, a Seattle lawyer who travels to Chicago planning to ask his intimidating future father-in-law Tom (Forest Whitaker) for permission to marry Samantha (Kat Graham), who is pregnant. Before the conversation can settle, the grid goes down. Some mysterious seismic event rips across the West Coast, communications vanish, and suddenly these two men who barely tolerate one another are in a Cadillac CT6, driving across a broken American Midwest to reach the woman they both care about.

I wanted that premise to work. Really. A road movie through the ashes of the country should come preloaded with dread and mythology. But the film refuses to get its hands dirty with the human fear of the situation. *The Guardian*'s Jordan Hoffman put it bluntly: "One thing you wouldn't expect from the violent breakdown of society would be for it to be an utter bore." That is, unfortunately, exactly what happens. Social collapse registers less as tragedy than as a sequence of mildly annoying road obstructions.



Forest Whitaker is especially stranded by the material. This is an actor who can make stillness feel haunted, whether in *Ghost Dog* or *The Last King of Scotland*. Here he gets flattened into a stock ex-military hardass. The jaw stays clenched, the orders come in barks, and that strange, soulful gravity Whitaker usually brings never gets a chance to breathe. The script doesn’t seem interested in a father panicking over his daughter. It just wants a stern man with a gun.

Theo James doesn’t fare much better. He plays Will like a man who is faintly inconvenienced by the end of civilization. Even while the country tears itself apart around him, he maintains the glossy composure of someone midway through a fragrance ad. The physical relationship between the two leads never quite becomes believable. They sit in that car stiff as mannequins, and you never feel the exhaustion, adrenaline, or terror sinking into their bodies.



The early Chicago dinner scene lays out the problem in miniature. Will sits across from Tom, trying to project confidence. The film cuts back and forth with basic over-the-shoulder coverage while Tom crowds the frame with rigid disapproval. It should simmer. Instead, the macho dialogue is so generic that all the tension leaks out. Rather than watching two men test each other, you feel like you’re watching two actors patiently wait for their next lines.

Maybe the movie thinks its vagueness about the disaster is meaningful. Is this climate collapse, foreign attack, natural catastrophe? It never says. In another film, that might have created productive unease. Here it mostly feels like indecision. Without an emotional center sturdy enough to hold the mystery, we’re left with a handsome car gliding through attractively ruined landscapes—Idaho is gorgeous, even at the end of the world—until the whole thing just stops. I’m still not sure what Rosenthal thought that abrupt, non-ending was buying him. Maybe some people will call it ambiguity. To me, it felt like a long, smooth drive to nowhere.