The End

No pun intended - a great cast! No doubt about that - and they can act and play ... I really like them. You can have different opinions about their singing ability I reckon - we do have one (female) main character who seems to be above everyone else ... the others seem to be content with their voice ... not too bad, but I don't think one would tell them they can have a second career (or third? Or fourth and so forth ... again no pun intended).

I had no idea the movie would be a musical - not the biggest fan of the genre - still (and hopefully you are or were aware of this) the main story had quite the weight with it. Also the movie is way too long for its own good ... yes criticism, yes society and humanity ... but there is a point where you may just feel numb.

Which may very well be the point - so I reckon a bigger/higher score would be more apt ... still the movie is more likely to annoy you at times ... maybe even multiple times ... and I don't think you'll be sitting there thinking: very clever ... even though it has more than the fair share of moments where you could attest it to be clever ... it evens itself out with other moments ... and the length ... have I mentioned it is too long? All that said, it is in the eye of the beholder and I always love watching Michael Shannon doing his thing! One of the greatest to grace our screens (whichever size ... length that may be in the end) ...

The Best of the Best Musical movie One of my all time favourite documentary films is Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing: an experiment where the director (and co-filmmaker Christine Cynn, along an anonymous Indonesian director) traveled to Indonesia to not just interview monsters who partook in the mass killings of 1965 and 1966, but allow them to tell their story through cinema. In fact, these genocidal men were granted the opportunity to use a number of classic film genres and movements, from your typical crime and gangster flick, to a Golden Age Hollywood musical. That second example leads us to Oppenheimer's first narrative feature film, The End, but before we get ahead of ourselves, I want to circle back to why this experience worked in The Act of Killing: this documentary provided us with angles of hatred and occasional guilt that we've never seen in a film before. No one who is evil knows that they are. They believe that they are part of the greater good. This is how monstrosities work in reality, and not the phoned-in drive to be sinful that stories teach us. By the end of The Act of Killing, there's no turning back, either for the unchanged, terrible murderers of countless lives, or for the one lone person who fights back vomiting because he finally realizes the atrocities of his ways.

With some sort of global apocalypse having occurred up top, a family have taken refuge deep inside a salt mine where dad's previous profession in the energy sector has ensured that they live a civilised and well appointed life. With Reubens and Rembrandt augmenting their oak-clad walls, Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton have brought up their son, George MacKay, with the help of her best friend Bronagh Gallagher, a doctor (Lennie James) and their gay butler (Tim McInnerny). They spend their days rehearsing for disaster scenarios and rearranging their home, whilst the son writes a memoir for his father that marries an (environmental) history of the world with a curiously slanted homage to the efforts made by his father to provide unlimited cheap energy to the masses! Then one day, this Elysian dream becomes compromised by the arrival of a young girl (Moses Ingram) and that puts them into a quandary. Do they let her stay or do they evict her back from whence she came? If she stays, how might she upset the dynamic amongst a family who have clearly only a wafer thin sheen over a multitude of issues from their respective pasts that have largely been forgotten for then twenty-odd years they have lived their subterranean existences? There is singing, and a lot of singing - and with the possible exception of Ingram, none of them are very good at it. That doesn't matter, though, as the score from Marius de Vries and Josh Schmidt combines just about everything from Rachmaninov and Gershwin to Lloyd-Webber, Rice, Pasek & Pau. Once your ears get used to the sometimes grimace-inducing falsetto of an enthusiastic MacKay and an on-form but fairly tuneless Swinton then this actually works quite entertainingly. Gallagher can always be relied upon to add a little vitality to a story and McInnerny also knows how to ham things up (just as he did in "Gladiator II") to good effect, too. The timelines jump now and again, but never by much and it has quite a quirky effect on the delivery as characters appear to, well, disappear, at the end of the scene. MacKay steals this for me, delivering a role that reminded me a little of Luke Treadaway's Olivier award winning stage effort as "Christopher" from "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time". His journey to adulthood being tempered by a very slightly autistic characterisation; a dependant relationship with his mother and his own clearly awakening hormonal desires, too. It's long, and at times can be a bit hit or miss - but generally it does flow along well, in a very theatrically staged fashion and if you are looking to see something that takes just about everyone from their comfort zone, then this might be for you.

A family lives under a salt-mine from what seems to be the apocalypse. When a mysterious lady falls into their lair, her new perspective slowly changes the mood in their own lonely bunker.

The good, the story.

I love the backbone of this film. It reminds me of Blast from the Past, a somewhat similar bunker film starring Brendan Fraser. It actually nice to see Oppenheimer really understanding the ridiculous about this film and defiantly pushes the absurd comedy hidden within.

Love Mackay, who naturally looks like the guy from Garfield AND really plays up the innocence of his character. He is the hart of the film that really sticks everything together (even with my mis-givings).

I knew Oppenheimer of his masterful documentary way back in 2010s. It is by far one of the most memorable documentaries of all time AND that also has an ridiculous scenes that strays away from the dark absurdity of the film.

The bad, the music. On the very least, Oppenheimer knows the movie he is making and it really help take the bitter pill that is the musical. It literally was the musical tiktok. It is was not well written AND it is often times starts in the weirdest moments.

This would have been much better had it just be a straight forward end-of-the-world drama.

Soft recommendation.

I really wanted to enjoy this musical comedy because writer/director Joshua Oppenheimer made one of the best documentaries I've seen-The Act of Killing. The ending with Anwar dry heaving on the roof remains one of the most memorable endings to anything ever.

I was amped to see his first fictional film here. It's a mixed bag sadly.

Firstly the pace is so slow and laborious that mid way through I was getting fidgety, there wasn't much drama or tension which for a film about a family living (?hiding) in a salt mine would generally generate something tense and foreboding. Sadly, it's absent here. Even the arrival of a black girl (!) would rock the apple cart but feels strangely anti-climatic.

The romance between her ('Girl') and George MacKay (' Boy') lacks chemistry and conviction.

At 2.5hrs it is too long and scenes go nowhere.

This outlandish premise may have been better helmed by Yorgos Lanthimos who would have injected much more humour and ' sickness'. In fact the weird characters reminded me of his own ' Dogtooth' .

The songs aren't that memorable and like ' Amelia Perez' would have been better suited by not featuring them at all. It doesn't add much depth to the characters situation.

Nonetheless, I admire Mr Oppenheimer's chutzpah in creating something different.

And he has got a decent supporting cast-it's great to see Lennie James, Tim McInnerny and Bronagher Gallagher all on screen for a change.

Not a film I loved but I liked and admired it.