After The Dark Aristotleypse Now I imagine it must have been something substantial to bring John Huddles back into film making after an absence of over a decade, being the writer as well makes me believe that this is Huddles love child, this is the film he always wanted to make, this is his Inception, his master piece. So I suppose the reel question is should After The Dark be or not to be? I think it’s only fair to say before I really get started that After The Dark is an incredibly deep movie, it’s about philosophy, and on every level forces the audience to enquire into more than is in front of them, so if you like your explosions and your violence mindless, perhaps this isn’t the one for you, everyone else I hope has a brain, so shall we begin? The outline for After The Dark is a simple one, a philosophy class on their last lesson on their last day are given one last assignment by the teacher, he asks them to imagine the apocalypse has happened, they are lucky enough to be next to a bunker, which will hold and sustain 10 people for one year while the radiation subsides, but here’s the twist there are 21 pupils (including the teacher), the class is asked to pick the student who should be kept alive using nothing but their logical ability, but to help them out the teacher hands each of the candidates a card, on which it states their job, which at the end of the world turns out to be a deciding factor in life or death. One of the main points of philosophy is that to any given question posed, there is no definite answer, because in making that transition it stops being philosophy and starts becoming science, After The Dark is continuous in it’s one central idea, the concept of it never offers us a way out, or a perfect outcome, each time the students attempt to invasion the right decisions for a world they control, they fail. That isn’t a spoiler because it’s not so much that they fail, its why and how they fail that makes After The Dark so interesting. Actually I’m lying, the thing that makes After The Dark so interesting is it’s central idea and premise;, the conundrum that is laid out in the opening is the movies greatest asset, and it is this; this one idea, is the reason everyone is involved in the film. You can see it written in their faces, that the cast want to see the film play out just as much as you do. I know that After The Dark might sound like it could be so boring you would climb the walls begging for it to end, however this is where Huddles shows us his hand, because somehow he makes people talking in rooms engaging, now this could be because he made the wise choice of showing us the pupils discuss their ideas, he shows us how the reality would play out in thinking. However he never lets us forget that this is just a theory test played out in the minds of 20 philosophy students. Now I’ll admit that not everything marries up perfectly and not all of it makes total sense, and yes the last attempt is both strange and a little unsatisfactory after the first 2 stronger incarnations, and once the final vision ends, the film does lose itself almost totally, but in honestly, I don’t care, because After The Dark is unique and different enough for me to overlook it’s faults, it has that which is most sort after in the world, a brain. The cast are an important thing for a movie like this, because if people aren’t convincing in what they are saying you’d still have nothing, you would have a great idea, a good flair for direction but still a lifeless movie. Lucky for Huddles he keeps good company, James D’Arcy is strong as the analytical teacher, being sophisticated, cool and cold is a hard hat to wear, but D’Arcy makes it look easy, supporting him is a room full of young talents from Spy Kids, Datyl Sabara, to Harry Potters Bonnie Wright, each of the cast make their contributions (no matter how small) count for something greater than themselves. After The Dark is a physiological, philosophy thriller the likes of which I have rarely if ever seen before, and for that I marvel at it, I am in awe of a film that even attempts to do what After The Dark so clearly achieves, and that is to show us something about ourselves. 5/5
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:30:21 +0000
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