I try not to watch bad movies, but Leave the World Behind seemed like it might be good. It’s new, it’s easy to watch (on Netflix), and it’s one of my favorite genres (end-of-the-word-disaster).
It has a lot more going for it, too. It hooks the audience early, it has a great, star-studded cast (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, and Kevin Bacon), and it has a mesmerizing, fluid vibe.
Despite all these plusses, the filmmakers made a mess of things.
So, what’s to be learned from this movie?
Make things happen.
The story, if you can call it that, surrounds a family that rents a vacation house while the country collapses around them from a cyberattack.
But a story isn’t a story when nothing happens. Things happen around them, but the characters don’t grow, change, or take any meaningful action. It’s more like a two-hour first act, a lot of intrigue and questions that never get answered. More on this later.
Don’t have a political agenda.
My first clue that this movie would misfire was when Barack and Michelle Obama show up as producers in the opening credits. The movie feels like an Obama speech, an attempt to mold your opinion while trying too hard not to offend any political group or nation.
Apparently, the former president worked on the script.
One example of the political agenda is that we never learn who the bad guys are, even though they hack America’s technology grid and bring the nation to its knees.
Another example is the inept and not-so-subtle analogy to Israel and Gaza. The Black (maybe Muslim) family that owns the vacation house returns unannounced. When the White family refuses to leave, the two families try to live in peace in this occupied territory, with the possibly-Muslim family relegated to the basement, which is unmistakably lit with Pan-Arab colors.
The analogy is never resolved or exploited to communicate a coherent theme. Instead, it’s complicated by a bizarre monologue from Ali filled with anti-Semitic dog whistles straight from Hitler’s playbook about the evil, money-grubbing cabal that runs the world.
Movies are at their best when they explore universal human themes, not politics—especially not creepy, hateful politics.
Make sure storylines track.
When things happen in a movie, they should cause other things to happen, and situations should escalate and get more tense, more dramatic, and more complicated. In story-construction lingo, that’s called “tracking,” and this movie doesn’t track.
One of the mysteries set up early is that deer randomly appear in groups outside the house. The cyberattack has somehow affected animal migration patterns, but we never learn why, and the situation doesn’t affect the story. We get several scenes of unnaturally congregated CGI deer staring at people, but the scenes don’t escalate. This is one of the many instances in the movie where things don’t happen.
Be logically consistent.
At one point, a teen in the family suffers from a presumed bioweapon that makes all his teeth fall out in two minutes, and he starts vomiting. There’s no explanation of these sudden, isolated symptoms, and no one else is affected.
Characters have mind-blowing experiences (like witnessing a plane crash a few feet away, and an oil tanker smashing into a crowded beach), yet they aren’t in shock, and they don’t tell the other characters what they saw. For some imagined dramatic effect, they keep the information to themselves and act like everything’s fine.
In one particularly odd scene, Ali finds a watch on the ground and examines it carefully for way too long. Then he’s suddenly shocked and horrified to see a dead man on the ground a few feet from the watch. It’s played as a jump-scare, but the dead man—staring with wide eyes frozen in terror—is in clear view the whole time Ali is examining the stupid watch. There’s no way he wouldn’t have seen the dead body earlier.
There are a lot more befuddling details to share, but that’s enough for now. Watch this surprisingly incompetent movie if you can. Sometimes watching a bad movie is inspiring. It makes you realize you could make a much better movie.
Thanks, Obama.
When I saw the promo, my gut impression was, this is another movie with famous actors and bad writing, but didn't think it was political at all. I wasn't planning to watch it, but after hearing about the Israel-Palestine subtext I'm tempted to just to see what they actually did.
I would add that more than one coming to terms monologue is two too many. I watched the brit movie polite society the same day. Its Freckin amazing.