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50%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #9,461
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Twelve years ago, a plague swept through, wiping out most of the population; in San Francisco, only 186 people remain. Two of them use jury-rigged batteries to power a camera and make a documentary. We see a variety of approaches to survival, from the artist and engineer who trade for their needs, to the surfers and woodsmen who fish and hunt, to the scavengers, and a communal farm. We also see how the community deals with those who threaten it, and how the youth are growing up with different values from those who knew our world.
--IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: July 15, 2007
I love "end of the world" films. Knowing that it'll eventually come to this someday, what with the way that we're killing one another and devising bigger and "better" methods of killing mass quantities of people, I think that it's interesting to see how the world will work when most if not all of the world's population is gone. Will people go batshit insane and continue killing one another? Will a new type of society form, adapting to the new world while leaving the old one behind? Or will we have to fight zombies, vampires, or even aliens on a daily basis? There's so much that can be done with the scenario, and these films usually keep me far more interested than they should. Well, usually, unless the title of the film happens to be Ever Since the World Ended.
Instead of focusing on the actual events which cause the end of the world or the immediate aftermath, tonight's film takes a different approach as watch a team of documentary filmmakers talk to the 186 people of San Francisco - the only surviving inhabitants of the entire city. You see, a plague swept through the world twelve years ago, leaving almost the entire planet's population dead. Now, there are small bands of people living here and there trying to rebuild civilization, but it's certainly a far cry from the world we live in today. These two filmmakers attempt to show us this new world, talk to the people living in it, and see just how much things have changed.
On the surface, this is an ingenious plot that could have been excellent. There's so much that could have been done with it and so many ideas that could have been explored, but in the end, it simply falls flat and leaves the viewer disappointed while thinking about what could have been. However, the biggest crime committed by this film isn't failing to reach its full potential; no, the biggest crime here is that it's simply a boring film for the most part. Yes, there are bright spots along the way that gave me a glimmer of hope that maybe - just maybe - things were finally going to turn around for the better, but this wound up being a hard film to sit through without fast-forwarding thanks to bland characters and a severe lack of interesting events.
Now, when I say that there's a lack of interesting events here, I'm not saying that I was hoping for alien invasions, car chases, or a serial killer mowing through the population. I knew how the film was going to be presented before I even popped the disc into my player, so I was fully aware that it was going to be about eighty minutes of talking heads. What I was hoping for was a film that told an interesting story or characters who had insightful things to say about the differences between 'then' and 'now', but what I got was basically an episode of Seinfeld: a story about nothing. Unlike Seinfeld, however, this simply did nothing to entertain the audience.
We get to listen to a Native American discuss how he hopes to pass on his heritage to the kids of today. An older gentleman discusses da Vinci's achievements to a group of people. Another man hopes to build a museum dedicated to the plague that nearly wiped mankind off of the map. Still another woman searches for the perfect man to impregnate her before leaving her to be the sole parent for the child (this is her request - my, how things have changed). These are the sort of things we watch as the film plods along, and although not all of them are quite as mundane (some are actually quite good), the vast majority of them turn out to be exactly like the ones I described. Even if we had watched these being played out in a post-apocalyptic world, things could have been a tad bit better; unfortunately, most of these interviewees discuss these events in nice, modern houses with all of the luxuries we enjoy today (yes, we'll still have electricity twelve years after the shit hits the fan).
Avoid. Ever Since the World Ended has a lot of potential on paper and it could have been a really great film, but potential only goes so far - you actually have to deliver somewhere along the way, and sadly, this film fails to do that. 3/10.
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