Actuakers
One of my all time favorites.
SoftInloveRox
Horrible, fascist and poorly acted
BoardChiri
Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay
Dana
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
muons
The movie rather looks like a badly edited mashup from survivor episodes focusing on the boring story of two failing contestants. This introduction should tell enough about the quality of directing and script upfront. The tenuous plot is set up on a power outage that lasts 15+ months. In today's living standards this is as close as you could get to an apocalyptic world but the movie never goes into that avenue. Instead, it uses the power outage as a stage decoration backdrop for the whimsical behaviors of two sisters whose survival instincts and decisions can't match a five year old. The grindingly slow pace and wispy dialog don't help the poor quality of the movie, either. Part of the reason is that there are hardly any subplots that would help to pick up the tempo except for a couple of instances which come out of nowhere and fizzle out quickly. As for the acting, one can speak about some decent efforts from Ellen Page but owing to the dismal script, she, too fails a convincing performance. Finally, the absurdity of the ending is beyond description.Now some technical criticism is in order. The lack of electricity for the collapse of our modern world is a valid reason but not realistic at all. Indeed the movie makes no attempt to give a rationale for the lack of power for so long. Including an asteroid hit at the scale of Yucatan peninsula some 65 million years ago, there's no natural or human made disaster that would take out the grid (not even the internet) for more than a few weeks, owing to the distributed nature of the network. Yes, it is fragile and unstable enough to go awry with something as mundane as an unbalanced power load but it's only a matter of days to restore it back because the infrastructure and source is always there. Besides that, our social order and life in big cities are all organized around electrical power. As much implausible as it seems, even a month long outage would take us to a madmax world order since we can't wind back to 1850's at the snap of a finger. In the absence of electrical power, there would be no universities, no hospitals, no dance clubs, no tv stations, no malls but famine, disease, marauding gangs, plundering, killing rampage and anarchy on the streets. Without making a a reference to such a chaotic world, showing the girls continuing their everyday life with the usual concerns of the modern life is naive and pathetic beyond comprehension.
1914
THE GOOD,acting was low key but suspenseful ,the interaction between spoiled brat sisters touching.
The cinematography very good.
Made me check my survivalist stockpile while realizing I could survive but could not survive my angry , isolated ,fragmentary, diversified ill prepared America neighborhoods ...that safe zone forest road that those two sister take for granted is a thousand miles away.
THE BAD.The narcissism between all the characters (except Dad) was exhausting...maybe mirroring the unraveling American society and how Hollywood is now fixated on male typecasting..rapist,creep or beta male.
Now these isolated female slackers eat Rice n Beans for a year while the unseen society over the hills implodes.Both are two self absorbed to bother experimenting with rudimentary forest skillfulness , bitching or pouting for months on end]The selfish defiance statement as the end is how it would end.
Michael Ledo
Electricity goes out, two sisters learn to survive off the land around their woodland home. And not to spoil the plot, but the power goes out and never comes back on. The explanation was sketchy and even North Korea rations electricity. Not the case here. Yes, the sisters get by and the film is more of a drama than any kind of action film as even the action scenes are made low key...more like real life. So if you are waiting for something to happen, it does, and life goes on without much fanfare. Good performances, realistic, once you get past the electricity never comes back on, however the entertainment value, at least for me is low.Evan Rachel Wood is actually younger than Ellen Page pushing 30...still playing a teen.Guide: F-word, sex, rape, brief nudity (Evan Rachel Wood, Ellen Page)
gogeccc
Seriously, in the ending I was like WTF, DUDE!? After delivering the baby, walking to the house in the rain, she decides to burn it down? I thought she was displaying a case of postpartum psychosis and wondering what is her sister gonna do about that... And what does she do? She agrees that the best option, with her sister's baby just having been born, is to burn the house and go live inside a tree bark while it's raining and doesn't look like it's gonna stop? WTF!?The movie was OK, performances OK, premise OK. What happens to our civilization if (when) we lose power and communications? How do we survive, having lost all our survival skills (or never even being learnt)? The film deals with issues such as human nature, people robbing and raping each other in case of a catastrophe, instead of helping out and joining forces.I feel like the most sensitive topics, like how do you preserve food and how do you grow food and how do you prepare food and how do you survive winters when there's no food around and... basically anything that's about survival has been left out. How do they survive 15 months in the forest? There only so much berries in the forests and they're not even there for the entire year... Though, they did show how they can (cook and sterilize) berries, which is respectable.All in all, the entire film was overshadowed by the ending. They didn't cover much of survival - OK, I can get over it, films don't have to be about what I expect them to be about - but the ending is a complete and absolute sack of... well you know what. So much from me.