Last Survivors

Some great ideas (survivalists / loyalty / desertion) but also faint whiffs of gun control and anti-masculine ideas that seem silly. Silverstone is good - but the last third of the movie falters in making any good points.

The movie was a de ja vu to a hundred different movies that you can't help but skip to the end just to confirm that you're not wrong. They could have chosen a different title too. This should have been a 3 if it weren't for the actor's exquisite behind.

Filmmakers (the writer and director) that only have short-film experience need to start becoming more mindful of what they put on a film's running time. Of the long and dragged out 98 min runtime, the entire first half should've been condensed to at most 20 mins. Ya we get it, father and son are survivalists, get on with the story. Typical rookie filmmakers mistakes.

And whoever decided to genre-label this a "sci-fi" needs to give their heads a shake. There's zero sci-fi in this film. For that matter, there's very little thrills even calling this a "thriller". Maybe 10 mins tops near the end where your heart rate may go up a few bpm. This is more of a mystery/drama film, that drags out a lot of filler, and underutilized any good substance there was in the story. Conceptually, the story is smart, but the execution was clumsy, drab, and muddled.

The performances were good and convincing, especially Silverstone. The cinematography was decent, as was the soundtrack - especially the last song by Baker Grace, but the score was your typical B film nonsense; loud, overbearing, constant and annoying. If you're patient, and maybe fast-forward most of the first half of the film, it does get better by the ending, and it'd be a good one-time watch if you have nothing better to see. It's a generous 6/10 from me for this non-thrilling non-sci-fi film.

It is a well crafted effort for a thriller which is burning slow, but eventually gets there.

The acting is very good on part of the three leads (not much to say about the few others who are barely in the picture), the camerawork is fairly good, and the score is lovely. No home-video style shaky camera here, thanks for God. The script develops well if sometimes slowly, it is easy (not too hard) to follow, and the emotions depicted by the leads are more than fine. Drew Van Acker is really there.

Just for the record, I am a neutral watcher of this movie from Hungary with no connection to any of the crew whatsoever, so I'm not making this up just get a higher score for it.

In my opinion, this is a decent thriller / drama for an evening watch. I give it 6.5 out of 10.

It's difficult to talk about the film without spoiling its premise, so beware, even if the premise is old, tired and badly implemented, not to mention telegraphed way before the reveal. The problem, though, is that after the reveal, the movie is just plain bad and totally predictable. Alicia Silverstone acts like her character is mentally deficient, which may just as well have been in the script, but I doubt it, Stephen Moyer kind of phones his performance in, while the plot holes are large enough to drop dead deer into. It could have been enjoyable if about a third of the scenes in it would have been deleted and people seemed to care about the production.

Bottom line: just wanted to watch the film because of Moyer and because I've not seen Silverstone in anything relevant in a long time. But it was a mistake.