Leave the World Behind

I don't get the complaints about the ending.

The reveal is there's a war on and I took that everybody was going to be be safe as all the characters where on their way to the house with the bunker where the daughter was who had a happy ending as she found Friends DVDs.

I don't see how that's inconclusive. Doesn't take much brainpower to work that out and it doesn't need to be shown.

If it was shown that they all arrived at the house, hugged each other and went down to the bunker and locked the door and found a tin opener would that have been better?

Seriously, how do you think that Roberts character was racist? Strange people turning up at her door late at night claiming to be the owners is definitely a situation that any person would be wary of and not welcoming so I don't see how that makes her racist. If the the father or daughter were white then her reaction would have been the exact same.

If you can't work out what the ending meant with the girl happily watching Friends and all the characters on the way to a house with a bunker with a huge door and full of food and home comforts then I think you just need everything explained to you.

The problem for me with the attempts at foreboding is that they quickly became ridiculous and unsubtle.

You have to care about the people for a sense of foreboding to work and I really have to think hard to remember a film where I cared less about the characters.

At one point I was urging a stag to have a go just to get it over with 😁

Ridiculous film way too far up it's own sense of importance.

It's interesting that you didn't pick up on something which seemed obvious to me, although not explicit because her character is too bourgeois for that. As pixelburp said, racism here is about making different assumptions based on race. It was plain that the Julia Roberts character was far more sceptical and mistrusting of the owners because they were black. She admitted as much later on. And the owner's daughter had no doubt about that.

I am mystified as to how this covert racism is related to all the bizarre events in the movie. Are we to think that America is being attacked because it is racist? Or that racism will prevent America uniting to defend itself? Is the little girl escaping into the whiter-than-white world of Friends because she feels threatened by black people?

Who knows? The makers of this nonsense care don't care what we think.

Does Netflix claim 47m views?

Grain of salt - the company owns its own algrithms, is a black box, and it's impossible to argue with its numbers because the data is not public. Maybe 43 million people switched to Schitt's Creek after 5 mins, maybe not. We simply don't know.

Personally I liked the film for its sense of chaos - no one really knew what to believe, because the world was suddenly in the throes of an attack that simultaneously cut off all reliable and unreliable news sources. The woman screaming for help in Spanish, to the bewilderment of the Ethan Hawk character, summed it up well. Stuff is happening, we can't see it yet, don't understand it, and don't understand the warnings.

The 'Friends' ending escaped me, until I realised it was about 'endings', suggested above. Can't argue with that interpretation or its creativity.

I'd say it's a very watchable film dealing with hot button issues that don't imply any easy solutions. A complex story, in other words.

If it makes you think, it's worth the price of admission.

Lads, I think what you're all forgetting is that the book was even more ambiguous about what was happening than the film is. You're all clamouring for a neatly resolved little ending that never existed in the source material to begin with.

I wouldnt have a problem with it so long as they were good but its always just horrific quality, Disney/Pixar would be embarrassed.

I suppose AI will sort it all out in a few years.

Your version of the pitch is backwards. The pitch would’ve been “check out this brilliant, hugely successful book with a very contained set of locations that could easily be shot”. All the extraneous stuff will have come from Netflix needing to dumb things down to take a clever small story and provide it to a too-broad audience.

Finally watched it myself last night - this is one of my favourite books of the past few years, so was very wary of the movie, especially as a Netflix product rather than smaller indie production.

Given my worries, I actually got more out of this than most on here it seems. It largely caught the general mood and helpless uselessness of being in the situation.

Look, its not anywhere near as satisfying as the book (the chapters where Clay is lost, driving around actually made me feel like this guy was just gonna die out there simply for not realising his total reliance on gps), and it definitely gives us too much ‘apocalypse’ (there’s no tanker, no plane crashes, no leaflet drop etc in the book), but it holds enough of its essence in the character dynamics that I still found it worthwhile. And I quite liked the little thread of closure with ‘Friends’ - the book offers none at all, you simply leave the characters, entirely sure they’ll be dead before too long.

I think the pitch would never get past

When was the last blockbuster movie made from a recent novel? In the past, Hollywood dreamed of the Great American Novel but those days are "Gone With the Wind".

Books can still be made into movies, but not novels. Oppenheimer was based on "American Prometheus", but that was a biography. And "Killers of the Flower Moon" was also non-fiction. "Where the Crawdads Sing" made some money last year on a modest budget, despite negative reviews, but that was "counterprogramming".

Harry and Meghan bought the rights to a romance novel as part of their $100Million deal with Netflix. I rest my case 🤑

None of those are blockbuster movies, apart from Dune which was not a recent novel (60 years!).

Hunger Games and 50 Shades were blockbusters but they are not novels in the sense we were discussing i.e. literary works. By that standard, the Harry Potter books were the most successful novels in movie history.

You seem to be plucking some definition of ‘novel’ that I never intended or suggested. A novel by definition is simply any book with more than 40,000 words - which I’d say every book suggested is. (I’m also not at all sure I’d call the movie version an attempt at a ‘blockbuster’)

Leave the world behind was an award winning, bestselling book that was an obvious pickup to adapt.