After the Dark (2014)

Strictly average movie

Charming and brutal

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

I watched this movie based on the following, "Faced with an impending nuclear apocalypse, a group of twenty college students must determine which 10 of them would take shelter underground and reboot the human race. The decision quickly becomes deadly as each in the group turns against each other in a desperate fight for survival"... FALSE! Whoever wrote this synopsis for Amazon should be fired. This barely describes the story.Now on to the problems with this movie: 1. The lead actress SUCKS! Her acting is horrendous, and it's a HUGE SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF for the audience to believe that this girl is the best student in the class... she can barely deliver her lines and her voice makes me want to jab an icepick in my ears. 2. I want to punch the writer/director right in the face because of this movie. It's supposed to be a movie about thought experiments, philosophy, etc. yet all of the characters in this movie are a bunch of idiots. Oh, and if you're expecting a cool twist of an ending, you won't get it. Whatever studio exec thought this would be a good film to finance should be fired.3. Plot holes and logic failing abound. For instance, they are locked in the bunker and the only guy with the key is locked out and left to die... but inside the bunker are a STRUCTURAL ENGINEER, PHD IN CHEMISTRY, CARPENTER, ELECTRICIAN and a SOLDIER. So between these people, they could have made an explosive, wired it, found a weak point and detonated it. Or hacked the panel... And in one scenario, the idiot lead actress/best student in the class selects the absolute more worthless group of people to go in the bunker to REBOOT THE HUMAN RACE... She picks a wine genius because she packed a case of red and a case of white, an opera singer, a harp player, a gelato maker, a poet, etc. Proof positive that millenials are the most self-absorbed and idiot people on the planet. The HUMAN RACE IS ABOUT TO GO EXTINCT, but let's pack the bunker with wine and have a poem every night... and using tooling and supplies to build a harp?!?!? Are you kidding me?4. This biggest plot hole of all... lessons learned in one thought experiment carry over into another... Wrong! That's not how they work. You can't learn something in one experiment and carry it over into another, it negates the purpose of the experiment. This is where the writer of the movie shows his contempt for the audience by thinking that they are completely stupid.5. The "thought experiment within a thought experiment" in the third act, is literally retarded. The biggest dork in the group (who's sterile by the way) finds himself on an island with 6 women and is tasked with knocking them up. This is where the writer just gave up... this "experiment" was stupid, pointless and not funny. And he tries to give it some philosophical weight by having the kid say "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king"... like these women are supposed to be grateful when he rubs his pathetic little pecker against them... oh, and at the end he brags about the size of his Johnson (basically this is just a teenager fantasy, not a thought experiment)6. The lead actor/student, says his best quality, when asked, is that he's a pacifist. How is this a best quality in the event of an apocalypse? He's a pacifist organic farmer who's gay... so he can grow food... but will not fight someone who's going to take it, and doesn't want to reproduce (then tries to give this idea some weight by saying "evolution through non-reproduction"... that's not how evolution works)7. Back to the lead actress picking the most worthless group of survivors, she picks a gay guy (who's a PHD in Chemistry but who likely won't reproduce) because he's virtuous and the world needs that... newsflash, virtue is not genetic! It's a learned behavior. She picks a fashion expert because if you dress well it raises self-esteem and raises productivity. In an apocalypse, clean socks and underwear would be a rare treasure, so how do you plan on dressing well? Is she gonna create "the apocalypse collection" out of dog-crap, animal bones and radioactive ash. Oh, and picks a dancing gelato maker, because he's gay and the gay chemistry guy needs someone to bugger. Her whole lack of logic on these choices made her deserve and instant F and nearly made me punch my TV.I really can't say enough bad things about this movie. The writer/director is a complete idiot and failed miserably at whatever idea he was trying to convey. And an earlier reviewer said that "rarely is a movie made that it's meaning is so deep most people don't get it", that is a true statement... unfortunately, this is not that movie.I only gave it 2 stars because the bunker design is really cool, and a couple of the supporting cast women are attractive. Otherwise this movie is a huge turd.

The best thing about this film is trying to remember what else you've seen the actors in. Pitch Perfect. Master and Commander. Best of all, the King of France in the fantastic Versailles series. As for the plot and much of the acting. Shocking. Self indulgent. Up its own backside. In the third 'iteration' of the purposes of the students thought experiment - to survive s nuclear war and repopulate the planet - the whimpering, whining, very annoying heroine, choose all the artistic types to be in her bunker. Sure they have a fun year, playing cards and singing, but when they get out, completely lacking in practical skills, they die. And the human race dies with them. Doh! If the point of the writer is to show that emotion and feeling are 'better' than rationale, then a) that may be true in certain situations b) it's not true when you let all the useful people die and you are are left trying to survive, with a poet, opera singer, harpist and ice cream maker. What a waste of time. How did this idiot writer and director get funding?

Made worse by the fact it had potential. It ended up being nothing more than the same postmodern rejection of reason that permeates "entertainment" today... ignoring the fact our basic means of survival is the mind. Every philosophical turn is used to undermine logic, including making the "teacher" into nothing more than a bewitched servant to feminine bullshit. It's not deep. It's a denial of our nature in an attempt to sound important so people won't see how pathetic the mind that created this is.

It starts off with a fairly interesting premise, some philosophy students debating moral issues at the end of the world. But it quickly falls down when it succumbs to pathetic teenage morals and self-righteousness. But I think it's the misrepresentation of philosophy that make it so infuriating. The idea that at the end of the course the so-called top student still isn't able to disengage her own moral code long enough to join in the thought experiment. What have they been doing all year, if this is the first time that her sense of moral right and wrong is being challenged? Also, philosophy is the exploration of ideas and thoughts. So, what kind of philosophy teacher starts marking down his students because they show thoughts and opinions that differ from his own? He should be encouraging independent thought. Then, in the final act the right shows his true disregard for philosophy when logic is utterly shut down by emotional arguments. I assume this is just to make an appeal to the over emotional teens this movie is aimed at. Serves me right for watching this rubbish, I suppose.