This is a find I will treasure, all the more because it's flawed. It has a plain TV-look and seems pretty straightforward, nothing that will pass muster for Criterion certainly, but if we learn to detach ourselves from aesthetic preoccupation and focus on meaning, we'll find it in the most inconpicuous of places. Such as here.
Imagine a fairy-tale fantasy about a man, who having stood up the one-in-a-million' girlfriend he just met, imagines a scenario of apocalyptic destruction that will permit him to redeem himself in her eyes and become the savior. When he rushes into her apartment to pick her up she is sleeping, a sleeping beauty and he the prince charming.
Now imagine this planted inside a world of chaotic synchronicity, the Los Angeles, nuclear-paranoid version of After Hours. Like the Scorsese film, this unfolds as latenight chance encounters - except at the doorstep of the end of the world. Lovely LA streets, empty, beckoning us to travel. Empty architecture, kitsch (the burger joint) or futuristic (the apartment high-rises). Clean looks, but things are delightfully askew. A gun-totting man walks into a gym and yells at a crowd of lycra and spandex that he needs a helicopter pilot (and finds one).
Better yet, consider this. The film starts with TV footage about the creation of life from the Bang onwards. Evident is a plan, a structure that births from nothing intelligent life. The actual story begins with the man finding perfect love, the soulmate that completes into one. This rare moment of attaining perfect balance in life, the rest of the film progressively assaults by showing how entropy and chaos foil the plan. There is no plan. Except it all begins with the man setting in motion the entire story of destruction, karmic or a deeper instinct of destrudo that overpowers the desire to love. Makers of our own fate.
Here the film falters, in the finale. The apocalyptic vision of an entire city in the grip of bloody frenzy is one of the most potent, better than most zombie films about the end of times ever achieved, but it ends the way it does. It's so strong it threatens to swallow everything into its black hole.
Others might like this last part more. Whatever you do, this is a sleeper you can't afford to miss. Criterion will not do the work for you on this one, this you have to seek out.
