Movie Review: These Final Hours

Apocalyptic tale sheds new light on W(ait) A(while)

Movie Review: These Final Hours (Rated MA)

Reviewer: Lincoln Bertelli

Rating: 8 and a half/10

The world is ending. Disaster, despair, drama and doom.

These are all fairly typical themes for a film at the moment as the apocalypse genre appears to be an obvious go-to for filmmakers.

But until These Final Hours, none of these films had been set in Perth.

The opportunity to watch a WA-made film that puts our State’s capital as the focus should be enough to draw a sizeable crowd.

Because most end-of-the-world films are set in the United States, it is understandable many Australian viewers find these movies difficult to connect with.

These Final Hours is different – with the recognisable Mitchell Freeway, Perth Ice Arena and WA number plates all making appearances, the viewer realises we are not actually that detached from the rest of the world.

The result is a gripping, intense and emotional film that is extremely relatable.

Revolving around physically-fit 30-something James (played by Nathan Phillips), we quickly learn that parts of the world have already been wiped out and Perth is only 10 hours away from suffering the same fate.

For some, this might be seen as a subtle play on the ‘Wait Awhile’ nickname of our State.

His unexpected meeting with 10-year-old Rose arrives early in the film and after initially viewing the girl as a nuisance on his way to a big party, his mindset slowly changes after the initial challenges of this “obstacle”.

The film is not for the feint-hearted.

There are scenes of gratuitous violence and nudity which are confronting.

Apart from this, audiences are not exposed to the same level of world-shattering destruction that such films normally thrive on.

By instead focusing on the certainty that this is the last day on earth, the film is spent showing how these final hours of life are spent.

It is a time for reflection and realisation about priorities in life as told from a number of perspectives.

Raw human emotion is shown and we are exposed to the reality that while some people would choose to love, have fun and go out on a high, others would prefer to commit crimes, sometimes unspeakable ones, without the fear of consequences.

The reality of life, death and everything between shows the significant contrast in mindset between citizens who would all appear relatively similar and normal on the surface.

With a cast of recognisably WA characters, it is easy to put yourself in their shoes.

These Final Hours is a thought-provoking movie that remains as such until after the last scene unfolds.

A clever technique used to conclude the film will create a common bond between strangers in the cinema and leave you pondering it all until well after you leave.

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