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These Final Hours (2013)

 


These Final Hours (2013) was released the same year as end-of-the-world comedies This is the End and The World’s End. It was preceded a year earlier by Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, and succeeded the following year by a second screen adaptation of Left Behind. The 2010s, generally speaking, was a lucrative decade for apocalyptic cinema: the world was overtaken by zombies (World War Z) and apes (the Planet of the Apes revival), collided with another planet (Melancholia), and was subject to other myriad calamities, with a fourth Mad Max film thrown in for good measure. Mad Max: Fury Road extended a tradition of apocalyptic Australian cinema dating back to On the Beach and encompassing Dead End Drive-In, Salute of the Jugger, Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds, Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World, Undead, The Rover, Wyrmwood, three prior outings for Max Rockatansky, and indeed These Final Hours.

Despite this well-worn terrain, These Final Hours feels fresh and enthralling: the doomsday it projects feels immediate, is recognizably bogan, and has personal stakes, with a relatable avatar in James as played by Nathan Phillips. Phillips has had the misfortune of starring in a handful of deeply dire films, including You and Your Stupid Mate and Takeaway, but he’s also featured in some quite good ones like Australian Rules, Balibo, and Wolf Creek, making him both underdog and overachiever. There’s a neat point of departure early in These Final Hours between James and Phillips' character in Wolf Creek. Where that film’s Ben is repeatedly symbolically emasculated, first by rural bogans and later villain Mick Taylor, and flees into the outback at film’s end rather than saving his travel companions, here James—despite vowing to blot out the end of the world in drunken, druggy debauchery—becomes a reluctant hero when he rescues a kidnapped young girl (Angourie Rice) and transports her home, navigating tests and tribulations along the way.

The many and varied iterations of doomsday desperation and societal collapse that These Final Hours presents over its brief runtime are familiar but vividly thumbnail-sketched by the clearly talented writer-director Zak Hilditch (subsequently enlisted into the Netflix racket, for good or ill). James himself goes through what we might call the five stages of apocalyptic woe—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—with said stages also dramatized via other characters. The result is an alternately bleak and hopeful view of humanity in its last throes. Supporting performances swirling around Phillips and Rice are uniformly strong, particularly Kathryn Beck and Daniel Henshall in especially sweaty turns, and effective use is made of the film’s Perth setting and locations. Bonnie Elliott’s stylish, sunburnt cinematography was perplexingly ignored by local awards bodies.

Ben

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