Film Review: 'Goodbye World'

June 21, 2013|Scott Foundas | Variety

The end can't get here soon enough in "Goodbye World," an unholy cross between thirtysomething gabfests like "The Big Chill" and "The Decline of the American Empire" and the suddenly flush lo-fi apocalypse subgenre ("This Is the End," "Melancholia," et al.) Mostly, director Denis Henry Hennelly's sophomore feature strands us in a cabin in the NorCal woods with a half-dozen of the whiniest, most self-entitled protags this side of the worst mumblecore movie you barely remember seeing. If these folks are supposed to be America's best hope, we might as well all pack it in now. As for the movie's future, it's looking dim indeed.

A pretitle sequence depicts the first inklings of the coming social breakdown: a cryptic text message stating simply "goodbye world" appears simultaneously on more than 1 million cell phones, followed quickly by a collapse of the power grid and mass panic in the streets. Against this backdrop, two couples are preparing to spend a weekend together: uptight yuppies Nick (Ben McKenzie) and Becky (Caroline Dhavernas), so identified by their penchant for traveling with their own bedding in vacuum-sealed space bags; and crunchy, back-to-nature types James (Adrian Grenier) and Lily (Kerry Bishe), who've left "society" behind for a rustic-chic Mendocino County estate handily decked out with its own water supply, pharmacy and other rapture-friendly sundries.



The core idea of a power failure outage leading to something like anarchy was previously explored far more thoroughly and plausibly in David Koepp's superb, underrated "The Trigger Effect" (1996), which further benefited from characters you didn't want to strangle. Here, the tenor is oddly sanguine for most of the pic's first half, with the friends even taking time out for an impromptu talent show, until the arrival of a couple of bullying National Guardsmen signals an abrupt shift into more serious terrain. Even then, "Goodbye World" remains fatally predictable and reductive in its pitting of our forward-thinking intellectuals against a variety of get-off-my-lawn rednecks -- an attempt, one supposes, at some kind of allegory for our divided nation (made even less subtle by Laura's sideline as a George Washington-quoting Revolutionary War re-enactor). A third-act revelation that connects the dots between the "goodbye world" text and the ensuing crisis is at once risible and incredibly contemptuous of human intelligence.

Among the talented but squandered cast, McKenzie fares best, largely because his is the only character with any semblance of an inner life -- the kind of guy who's done everything "right" in life, only to wind up fundamentally dissatisfied in the looming shadow of 40. Pic does sport an unusually polished level of technical craft for a low-budget indie, especially cinematographer Jeff Bollman's inventively composed widescreen frames and judiciously employed CG effects that suggest fires burning on the horizon and President Obama addressing the nation on TV.

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