"Leave the World Behind"

Last night I finally got some down time and decided to watch a film recommended to me on Netflix called Leave the World Behind. The film has an ensemble cast (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Bacon, Myha'la, and Mahershala Ali, among others). It is based on a book that I will now want to read. Based on the reviews I read after the fact, the book is probably far superior to the film, and I say that while at the same time noting that I found the film to be pretty darned good. 

It's an apocalyptic film with a fairly basic premise. A bored and out of touch yuppie couple decide to go on vacation with their teenage kids in a beachfront hamlet not far away from their home in Brooklyn. Julia Roberts' character comes across as something of a Karen. Ethan Hawke's character is this superficially politically correct college professor who seems to succeed by charming his way through life (there is something a bit skeezy about that character). Their vacation starts off fairly mundanely (bored teens always on their phones or tablets and a middle-aged married couple who seem to be barely on the same page) but after an oil tanker washes ashore and cellphone signals go out, the film takes an ominous turn that becomes only more on through the end. I won't spoil too much here because I think it is best you see for yourself. The undercurrents of racism run throughout the film in ways I doubt anyone would find terribly surprising. Nor would the undercurrent of economic inequality. There is a sense that a reckoning is long overdue throughout the film. 

The thing that is striking to me in the film is how easily America's enemies could effectively cause the system many take for granted to collapse within a very short window of time. I don't think it would take too much creativity these days to figure out how to hack into the systems that control our satellites (which affect GPS, cellphone service, media and internet, etc.) and the how quickly that would devolve into chaos. At the time the book was published (at the start of the decade) and the film debuted (2023) our enemies were well-known already. Our government under Trump is certainly creating many more enemies who were once allies. If the EU and Canada now consider us a threat to their existence, might they band together with any of a number of other nations to topple the mighty American colossus once and for all? The film didn't address that specific question, but it did ask the question of whether or not our government's enemies in general could do so and if so how they could make it happen. Let's face it: cyberwarfare is already a thing and will only get more sophisticated. Knock out the trappings of civilization and it won't take long for a society that has acted as if it is untouchable to crumble, and for Americans to turn on one another enough to make a ground invasion easy to accomplish. 

This is not a film that will offer a happy ending. There's a sense that once the wheels fall off, that's it. Even those who think they have it all figured out - from those who rub elbows with government insiders to the usual preppers - don't have it figured out after all. What if it turns out that when the proverbial shit hits the fan, there is no one in charge? What if there was only the illusion of control and the more foreboding reality is that there is no knight in shining armor coming to the rescue? Those are just some of the questions the film attempts to address. 

I wish that Myha'la and Mahershala Ali had a bit more screen time since their portrayal as a black adult daughter and father of means really pops, and they do a good job of directly and not so directly pointing out the implicit and not-so-implicit racism the white family who rented their vacation home display. There was some material that could have been more deeply explored there. I suspect that the book this film is based on has considerably more nuance, and films (often by necessity) do away with nuance when adapted from a novel. So it goes. I won't call it the best film I've ever seen but I will say it is good enough to sit through at least once or twice. I'll see what the book can tell me in due time. 

If you are looking for a film that addresses some questions about how a civilization could disintegrate practically overnight, this one is for you.