Review: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

An asteroid is headed for Earth in about 20 days, and there’s nothing anyone can do. It’s the end of the world. People all around are rioting, freaking out, committing suicide, or just giving into every temptation they have thus far suppressed. Hey, if the world’s gonna end, why not? Steve Carell plays an insurance agent, whose wife takes this particular point in life to walk out on him (Amusingly, she’s played by the real-life Mrs. Carell!). Keira Knightley is his British neighbour, who, save for dickhead boyfriend Adam Brody, is all alone, having missed her flight back home to see her family. And there will never be another flight ever again. So she turns up at Carell’s door one night and they get to talking. Carell’s interest is piqued by a letter from an old girlfriend that he has only now just gotten. She says he was the love of his life. Riotous behaviour in the city forces Carell and Knightley to flee their apartment building. It is then that Carell offers Knightley a deal; If she helps him find ‘the one that got away’, he knows someone with a plane who can fly her back home. And so the last ever road trip begins. Patton Oswalt is a drunken loser (and plays one in the film), Connie Britton and Rob Corddry play friends of Carell who aren’t coping with the impending apocalypse, Melanie Lynskey plays a potential love interest for Carell, William Petersen plays a paranoid trucker, Derek Luke plays a survivalist ex of Knightley’s, and in a moving cameo, Martin Sheen turns up as Carell’s estranged father.

 

Well here was a really pleasant surprise. I think I must’ve liked this 2012 film from writer/director Lorene Scafaria (in her directorial debut after writing “Nick and Nora’s Far Too Long And Self-Consciously Quirky Movie Title”) a great deal more than most people. I certainly wasn’t expecting much going in, but this is a terrific movie; Funny, sad, interesting, moving, and also a believable apocalyptic scenario as well. The ending is especially beautiful, right down to the final frame. Like the also excellent “Safety Not Guaranteed” from the same year, this one is more of a romantic/character piece with a sci-fi bent and a title derived from a newspaper ad headline (albeit fictional in this case). It starts out as truly morbidly funny, with Carell given the most hilariously awful job for an apocalyptic scenario: insurance. How scared is this guy of facing Armageddon alone? He tries to convince the cleaning lady to hang out with him! The laughs are still there throughout, whether it’s Adam Brody as a douchebag who uses Keira Knightley as a human shield (funny for several reasons), or William Petersen in a very funny role as a trucker Carell suspects of being a serial killer. TJ Miller is an absolute scream as an overly friendly waiter at a restaurant aptly named ‘Friendsys’. It’s the creepiest place on Earth. Actually, if hot chicks kiss you on your birthday, then I wanna go there. Why isn’t this restaurant more well-known, damn it? But it also came off as realistic (if slightly warped in its sense of humour) to me, with everything just slowly shutting down and everyone getting panicky and/or depressed. Some will even kill themselves, some will simply cease to give a fuck about rules, regulations, morality, and social conventions. That’s how I would imagine it happening. Looting in the streets? It only takes a blackout for that kind of shit to happen in the present! Meanwhile, here’s the one situation where I think we’d all turn into the ‘we all gonna die!’ guy.

 

Steve Carell’s understated work here will probably be overlooked. It shouldn’t. Sure, he and Knightley seem an odd match, but it’s the end of the world, and maybe Carell’s cashing in his ‘if you were the last man on Earth’ credits. I know I’m hanging on to mine, that’s for sure. No one wants to die alone (Then again, if everyone is dying at the same time, are you really dying alone? Corddry makes that point himself in the film). After the underrated “London Boulevard” and now this, I’m rediscovering my love for Keira Knightley. She has such charisma, fragile beauty, and a lovely presence on screen. This, along with Carell’s innate decency make these two characters easy to go along with, which I think is a very important thing in a film.

 

I think this film has been somewhat underrated, and certainly far too unseen. It works on multiple levels, and unlike many apocalyptic films, it’s a smaller, more humanistic take on the subject. It even makes you think and reflect on your own life and how you would handle such a situation yourself. Terrible title, though. 

 

Rating: B