As post-apocalyptic dramas go, this one is adequate.  I’ve seen much worse . . . but this should have been much better than it actually is.  What it really needs is a cogent explanation of how the Earth’s oxygen (and, thus, its water and flora and fauna)  disappears so quickly, followed by a lot less gunfire from people who just don’t trust each other.  Sadly, too, its take on human nature may be all too accurate.

Stefon Bristol’s film is set in Brooklyn, 2039, where, somehow, an engineer (Common) and his family have built and live in a bunker with a functioning oxygen generator so they have survived while everyone else has not.  One day the father disappears and does not return.  Months later the mother (Jennifer Hudson) and daughter (Quvenshané Wallis) encounter a couple of visitors, people who claim to know the father and represent survivors in another city.  But the visitors (Sam Worthington, Milla Jovovich) have guns and aren’t afraid to use them to get what they want.  The future looks pretty grim.

The grimness works pretty well.  The film’s CGI effects of a dead Brooklyn, empty river beds and grand scale hopelessness may be cheesy but they are effective.  So too is the family dynamic, especially the mother-daughter relationship.  But once the visitors arrive and threaten violence almost immediately things turn sour all too quickly.  Granted that the biggest hurdle to survival is people not being able to communicate with or trust one another, this story makes any compromise impossible.  Especially when one of those people is certifiably wacko.  Add to this the world’s most annoying alarm system, which blares incessantly, and headaches are unavoidable.

But wait!  Against this harsh battleground of betrayal, violence, double crossing and lack of trust comes a big family secret and then an unexplainable road trip which is meant to provide hope.  Perhaps we are not all going to perish of oxygen deprivation after all.  Actually, I think Common’s character had the right idea in the midst of such chaos and inhumanity.  This movie is a downer.  ☆ ☆.  27 December 2024.