SunnyHello
Nice effects though.
Protraph
Lack of good storyline.
TeenzTen
An action-packed slog
witward
I hardly ever write reviews unless a movie is incredible or pure trash. This movie is pure trash. I am still in disbelief at how bad this movie is.1. The lead actress in the movie is so bad. Its so bad that all of her lines are almost straight monotone. 2. Their "logic" is anything but logical. It would be like having a thought experiment and in the middle someone say "i went into this room and there was a time machine and everyone lived happily ever after"...Its like there was no rules. You could make up whatever you would like. I was going to keep going with this but i just realized i have wasted too much time on this movie. I recommend skipping this horrible waste of time.
Alexander Hartmann
Well, this was a *really* interesting movie in the sense of *WHOM* would you "invite" to your nuclear-proof bunker for two weeks or even a year? Would your bunker "survive" more people than it could provide for (food, water, air, entertainment, etc.)?? Our teacher speaks of "theoretical scenarios" - i.e., what would you do in this situation? And yes, the "trolly scenario" is demonstrated - Trolly Problem scenario is here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). How would students resolve this issue? So we move on to a global problem - "nuclear war". So, who gets to stay and who gets to stay outside? The bunker can only hold 10 people and there are 21. Of the ten, would you include a teacher? A Real Estate agent? A musician? A biologist? A Doctor? Also, you need to consider re-population, so you'll need to include a balance of men and women.So you *don't* include the Real Estate agent - what could they *possibly* contribute to life after nuclear war? Nothing? Think again. Perhaps their outside work hobby is survivalism? What about the teacher? Yes, you'd include them, for obvious reasons. But what if the teacher was not capable of reproduction? Has their value to the bunker dropped? Possibly.Let's throw in a variable - someone who doesn't identify their job, their background, their hobbies, their usefulness ... would you include them in the bunker? Most likely not.So, this movie is NOT really about nuclear war, CGI nuclear bomb scenes, "Terminator"-like graphics, action, "life-after-war" or even "The Road" (a movie).This is a thinking movie about preparation for disaster and thinking about whom would be most useful for, in this case, post-nuclear life - or really, about post-disaster/pandemic/zombie apocalypse/etc. scenarios.So, who gets to stay and who gets to die - *thats* what this movie is about.It is a talkie film, but you get to think about the usefulness of the kind of person that you would include in a bunker following a world-wide disaster. It is most definitely worth a viewing, at least once. I watched it once after reading all the reviews and thought, "Um ... yea ... " but the darned thing is that the movie's concepts played in my head for the next month. Thus why I am writing my review here.Go watch. Enjoy the irony, the decisions made, the scenarios. It's all good fun.
Nicki B
I would say that this movie started off great, but in all honesty, I don't think that it did. While the imagery was impressive, the characters were all unlikable. It was nearly impossible to sympathize with a pretentious group of young people and their narcissistic 'holier-than-thou' teacher. We begin with a game about a hypothetical situation that our students refuse to play, because pretending about death offends their delicate sensibilities. With the dramatics that go on, including our leading lady attempting to walk out of the class, you would think they were being asked to actually kill people. Sophie Lowe played our lead, Petra, who's character is apparently the smartest to ever attend the school. Her acting was atrocious. Absolutely awful. Her character was the second worst in the move, following only the teacher himself. The delicate rose petal of a genius is supposedly morally superior to everyone else, because her way of thinking is apparently the best way. This, by the end of the movie, is proved to be untrue. Our professor is played by James D'Arcy. I've seen this actor in other projects and always thought he was decent, but his performance here was awkward and forced. Maybe he found his character as distasteful as I -and the other characters in the movie- did. Normally I love a good movie, but it was hard to watch a teacher bully a group of students under the pretense of "stretching their minds". The logic behind the game Mr. Zimit creates is flimsy at best and is obviously self serving, in fact, he creates for himself a player that wins out no mater the scenario. His obsession with Petra, and hatred for her boyfriend, is obvious from the very beginning. The romance in this story is thrown in for literally no reason. It has nothing to do with the actual theme of the movie. Instead if just makes for poorly filmed make outs between to actors with no chemistry and gives the teacher something to be bitter about. Whoever wrote this movie seems to have learned everything they could about philosophy from Wikipedia.
Leofwine_draca
AFTER THE DARK is a non-starter of a film, financed by the USA but shot in a teaching school in Indonesia somewhere. The plot - if it can be called such - involves an eccentric teacher who takes a class of pupils on a metaphysical journey to explore the ethics and morality of an end-of-the-world scenario.That's it - this is a single location drama with a few excursions to make-believe worlds where the characters watch CGI mushroom clouds and the like. And it's not really a film at all, just a collection of scenes in which characters explore the human dynamics and relationships that would evolve if the world did collapse and a new society needed to be built from scratch.A project like this smacks of pretension, for me; why not just have the scenario play out properly instead of making it this quasi-fantasy teaching project? It could still have been achieved on a low budget. Watching the flights of fancy play out is extremely boring, and even worse, the characters are dull stereotypes. AFTER THE DARK raises a little interest by having some interesting actors in it (James D'Arcy as the teacher has done better work elsewhere, and Darl Sabara, Bonnie Wright, and George Blagden have all had better parts in other projects) but then squanders it by making the viewer feel like they're sitting in on a boring philosophy class.