Last Night (1999)

How sad is this?

Great Film overall

Good movie but grossly overrated

Best movie ever!

As the end of the world approaches, two lonely souls find companionship together in this unusual apocalyptic drama from Canada. The film is very light on special effects and deliberately skirts over the pseudoscience of what is causing the apocalypse to instead explore the diverse ways that human beings would likely approach a predicted doomsday. With most of the characters quite calm and collected, the film does not always convey the feeling of an impending apocalypse, however, the use of constant brightness (even late at night) serves as a reminder that things are not quite right. The main setback of the film in any case is the fact that it spends a lot of time on supporting players such as David Cronenberg's workaholic executive and a young guy interested in trying every sexual experience under the sun before dying - all of whom have more fascinating quirks that the two protagonists, always rationalising everything around them (that said, their rational carjacking of a vehicle is a certain highlight). Whatever the case, the film concludes on a surefire memorable note and the frequent playing of gas company phone call messages in the background injects a welcome dose of humour into the rather grim proceedings. Director Don McKellar would later go on to write the terrific 'Blindness' for Fernando Meirelles, but this is an interesting stepping stone of sorts movie.

It's the last night on Earth. There are six hours left before an unknown calamity. Patrick Wheeler (Don McKellar) wants to be alone for the event but he has to go to a family dinner first. Sandra (Sandra Oh) is going home but her car gets trashed. Craig Zwiller (Callum Keith Rennie) has a series of women come over to his apartment.I think the movie needs to concentrate on McKellar and Oh. It would be more compelling to make this a buddy road movie. They could go to Wheeler family dinner, meet the various characters and go back to his apartment. I don't think Zwiller's story is that compelling. The other characters add some quirkiness but none of them are that compelling. It would be better to make these actors support the McKellar Oh story. This is an interesting different kind of apocalypses movie but I only enjoy parts of it.

Last Night is an original and intelligent Canadian independent film that takes a literal look at the phrase "live each day like it was the last day of your life"; it starts with the hypothetical situation in which the world is about to end, and the date and even the time are known to everybody (don't look for any scientific logic behind that - the actual method of the apocalypse is left intentionally unclear), and follows several characters who have different ideas of how they want to spend that final day.The concept is appealing and immediately creates an infinite number of possibilities; the script makes the most of it, though I feel it could have been better. My main problem is with the main character - played by writer/director Don McKellar - who takes up a large chunk of the screen time but is far less interesting than most of the secondary characters (this is not because of McKellar's acting but mainly because the character is probably an avatar for McKellar himself and therefore far less extreme). This, couple with acting that is sometimes great but often wooden and lacking in emotion (a strange trait of many Canadian independent films) makes the film less effective emotionally than it should have been, and keeps it in the category of though-provoking allegory and intellectual exercise. As such, it's a wonderful little film and a very unusual one.

Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" is certainly one of the greatest television series ever, and a 1961 episode titled "Midnight Sun" may have been the inspiration for this film. Or maybe not. But it immediately came to mind as I realized what event would bring about the termination of the earth in this movie.. In Serling's tale, the earth has slipped its orbit and is moving towards the sun, as the few people remaining in an abandoned city await the end in an increasingly hot environment. While this film doesn't have the psychological twist to its ending that "Midnight Sun" had, it does evoke the same sad, elegaic mental landscape of the characters. OK, so the science here is way off, but I think that may be part of McKellar's intention. He's less interested in telling a science fiction yarn than relating an allegorical memento mori to a stupefied culture.