This review comes with a caveat. The reason I watched it is because awhile back I noticed that my crush was starring and outside of her usual role. So popping it onto the TV last night I wound up getting sucked into a pretty intriguing story that I’ve found lots of reviewers elsewhere have torn apart. After reading why these other moviegoers disliked it so much, I think I can understand where they all went astray.
Originally titled “The Philosophers” (and probably still called that in the UK) the film is about a group of 20 students from all over the world in their last day of philosophy class in Jakarta. I’m assuming they are all studying abroad, otherwise that’s one weird school. Anyway, their professor Mr. Zimit (James D’Arcy) decides that instead of the normal last day spent cleaning your desks with shaving cream and telling that girl in the third row that you’ve been in love with her for the entire year, these students would be engaging in a final project. Choosing not to participate would result in a letter grade drop (I had a teacher threaten to do that in 4th grade), so naturally all of the kids decide to stick it out.
The premise is simple: a situation is posed where an atomic apocalypse is headed towards the class of 20 while on a field trip, and the only shelter they have is a bunker with enough oxygen to hold 10 of the students. Each student picks at random a piece of paper with an occupation on it, and from that occupation alone they need to decide among themselves who will live and who will die. The wild card is that Mr. Zimit is playing too but he does not reveal what his trait is, the students simply have to decide if he’s worth keeping around.
Pretty cool, right? Well this idea repeats itself three times with three different scenarios, each time a new trait revealed, such as an orthopedic surgeon (scenario 1)…who just happened to treat an ebola virus victim two weeks prior (season 2). As you can see, that person may have been essential in the first scenario but screw that noise when it comes to the second. I enjoyed this as it would be an interesting discussion to have with friends. In fact I couldn’t stop thinking about how much my friend Eric would enjoy being in those situations. He’d probably be so good at it that the other students would decide that he wouldn’t get a spot out of sheer spite. But I digress, he is not a character in that film.
For your final exam, you’re going to kill each other off. Good luck.
Here is my note to the other reviewers. Almost all of the negative reviews I read were due to the fact that the characters didn’t seem to carry much emotion, ie. they weren’t acting very much. I honestly think that most people would see it this way because yes, they were quite stoic and it seemed weird, UNLESS you put yourself in their world. Hear me out. The students never leave their classroom so all of the scenarios (acted out in their real world locations) are just imaginations. The kids walk around referring to previous scenarios and information they learned as if it’s just a game, which technically it is. Therefore the actors aren’t really “acting” per se, they are just living out their imaginations as a group. I’m realizing now that this is harder to explain than I thought, so if you’re lost I’m sorry.
I guess what I took away from this whole film is that this really could happen somewhere, sometime. It doesn’t have to be during an apocalypse or a cataclysmic event but the point is that choices will have to be made about who is expendable and who isn’t. The movie does a great job of distinguishing the differences between “necessary” and “wishful”. Sure, the organic farmer may be an important person to have in the bunker but that doesn’t mean the poet is an immediate negative. Everyone in the world will have their own vision of who should stay and who should go, so at most “After the Dark” gives you something to ponder.
DIRECTOR’S CUT: With the exception of the ending being kind of loose and a bit of a cop out, I found it pretty enjoyable overall. And I’m guilty for enjoying Bonnie Wright.
FLICKCHART RATING: 396/2133 (A bit high but Flickchart kept giving me crap to rate it against)
The Scene Collector 