Goodbye World (2013)

Crappy film

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

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.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

"Goodbye World" (2013) is technically a post-apocalyptic drama. I say "technically" because this sometimes misguided movie contains little tension associated with its apocalyptic event. (A cyber- attack destroys the technological infrastructure of America and possibly the world.) Indeed, this catastrophe doesn't even truly drive the plot — it's more of a background subplot that fails to even affect the tone of the film. (The poster you see above is misleading.)Instead, the film scrutinizes the personal lives of a group of thirtyish college alumnae who have an informal reunion at a mountain cabin — one of their number is a plot-convenient intellectual- turned-survivalist. They're portrayed by an (admittedly quite good) ensemble cast. I think a lot of my friends would smile at "Gotham's" Jim Gordon (Ben Mckenzie) being a rather meek, feckless husband. And Caroline Dhavernas here is no longer the alpha female we saw in NBC's "Hannibal," but is rather an insecure, overly sensitive young wife who immaturely pines that she was the student "everyone hated."And there lies a problem that the movie has … few of these characters are terribly likable. Only Gaby Hoffmann's surprisingly tough civil servant made me root for her. And Kerry Bishe's perfectly performed, chatty neo-hippy eccentric was also pretty cool … Bishe might have given the best performance in the film. Finally, Linc Hand is a surprise standout, arriving halfway through in a menacing supporting role. It's a far smaller role, but damn if he doesn't nail it. (Please, Netflix, cast this guy as Bullseye in Season 3 of "Daredevil.")The others all seem either self-absorbed, self-righteous and preachy, or inscrutable and vaguely dumb. Dhavernas' character actually steals a child's teddy bear (which she herself had brought as a gift) and … sets it free in the forest. It was a belabored character metaphor when written. Worse, it just seems jarringly weird when it plays out on the screen.All the characters seem strangely detached about the watershed national or global crisis. Some cursory dialogue is devoted to the imagined welfare of their family, colleagues or other friends; the character interaction is devoted mostly to marriage issues and personal emotional crises that I have mostly forgotten as of this writing. And those seem maudlin and slightly selfish compared to the Fall of the United States. The characters mostly failed at engendering viewer sympathy in me.The screenwriters' juxtaposition of personal matters and the end of the world also seemed tone deaf. We follow what the writers hope are educated, successful and endearingly quirky fun people, and we're asked to worry about their love triangles and spousal communication issues. But … we're then asked to view this in the context of a pretty frightening collapse of society, complete with plot elements that are interchangeable with those of AMC's "The Walking Dead." (One secondary character turns violent over the issue of resources, then charismatically justifies his violence to a crowd using a half-baked ideology that seems to channel "The Governor.")I felt like I was watching two movies at once, and not in a good way. The opening motif is brilliantly creepy — the virus causes cell phones everywhere to receive a text reading the titular "Goodbye World." Our laconic, uniformly telegenic protagonists kinda just shrug at it. And even when suspicions arise in the group about whether one character is connected to the cyber-attack, there is dry, dialogue-driven humor instead of any real consequent tension. It was like John Hughes wrote a thirtysomething dramedy, but then tried unsuccessfully to sprinkle in the human pathos of one of George A. Romero's more pessimistic zombie films.But don't get me wrong. This wasn't even really a bad movie. I didn't hate it. It held my interest, its actors gave good performances, and I am a shameless fan of Dhavernas in particular. The cinematography was very good too, and the story's tonal differences were occasionally interesting. (This is definitely a unique end-of-the-world tale, if nothing else.)I'd honestly give "Goodbye World" a 7 out of 10. I think my expectations sitting down with it were just unusually high, seeing Dhavernas attached to what looked like an independent, cerebral, apocalyptic science fiction thriller. I might even recommend it if you're in the mood for a really unusual doomsday movie. Just don't expect "28 Days Later" (2002) or "The Divide" (2012), and you might like this.

Unless they were trying to make a comedy. The idiocy of the ideas in this movie has to be seen to be believed. There is a far left spin to everything here. At one point, the girl says she used to catch squirrels in trap, right after the communist boyfriend says we are all scum because we invented traps. Then the girl says sometimes they used to get rabbits and she was the one who had to kill them. I don't know why she didn't have to kill the squirrels. Maybe because they aren't cute enough to make people hate you for inventing traps and killing them.. So she says there IS a hell, I guess because we have to eat and survive. Gee, how terrible. Since almost all animals kill to eat and stay alive, I suppose she believes they all should be exterminated, right? Well, guess what. Some people DO have to use a trap to catch squirrels to eat for food because they need food. These people who made the movie apparently would rather they get food stamps. To you socialists and communists who made this movie, you are hypocrites if you eat meat at all, including fish and chicken. Or bugs. Or what about vegetables. Who says they don't have feelings. And you are KILLING life when you eat vegetation. These movie makers had better just stop eating and polluting. Stinking humans! The movie is so twisted it's disgusting. Crazy Bernie would surely love it.

This under-rated little film is a slow build story of relationships in all their real-life complexity.The characters are (fairly) normal humans, geeky college friends who each went on their own path post-school, and are yanked back together when the world they grew into falls apart at the seams.The lack of explosive on-screen destruction and explosive emotional confrontations may dismay viewers looking for a stereotypical disaster movie with all its CG-heavy scenery and OTT reality-show emoting.But those deliberately understated elements are exactly how the tension builds and the human stories, with all their heartbreak and forced adaptation, are most strongly revealed.The disaster is only the catalyst for the confrontations: with the friends' own natures and past secrets, with their most significant others, and with the shocked and disintegrating world of modern America as seen in and from their isolated rural arena.If you're looking for a thinking person's examination of life after the internet goes down, check this one out.

I was really excited about this concept, and naively went into it with high hopes. But with this kind of theme, everything hinges on whether the cast and crew create an aura of fear and doom. There wasn't anything even close to that. So I consider this film a failure.Having said that, like many movies, it had redeeming qualities that kept me in the game 'til the end. I love the idea of high tech yuppies going native in Mendocino. They use their millions made from being movers and shakers in the mainstream world, to then retreat from that same world.Interestingly, I didn't hear any angry manifestos from our husband and wife protagonists/property owners. While narrating, the man explains that he went to his property because he sensed an apocalypse would come eventually. He didn't say that he hated the world per say, and they weren't living like real hippies. They had a nice home with modern conveniences.Yeah sure, it rips off The Big Chill, but I forgive them for that. It's what you do with it that matters. I didn't quite understand the politics of the property owners, their former male business partner, or the Gaby Hoffman character. I think some of them were hybrid. We were supposed to see them as Libs., but they were business people and loving parents.What the film did convey effectively, is that friendship is messy. We don't necessarily give it up just because our friends betray us from time to time. When we make real friends, we become an intimate part of the other person's life. This is so even between exes. If you had a reasonably amicable split, you are still a major part of someone else's life story, and often you can't just disentangle from that.Some of our characters did learn things about themselves, which is always good in a character-driven relationship picture. Some might say that there were no noble souls in this film, but I think Adrian Grenier's character came close. He didn't cheat on anyone, he tried to do the right thing, and he tried to quarterback the scenario.***I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the allegorical nature of the "Daily Bubble." Some of the characters lived in a bubble of intellectualism, idealism,and narcissism to a degree. But how long can you do that without something bursting your bubble? Well, each day they would launch a new bubble and see how long it would last. Not even the end of the world was going to prevent them from trying to perpetuate the bubble.