Rating: 4/5

Three-Word Summary: Love at Armageddon

There have been plenty of movies recently about the end of the world.

Some have zombies. Some are post-apocalyptic romances. Some include deadly viruses or alien invasions.

None are quite like this one. Mostly because this one has love.

Steve Carell plays Dodge (appropriate because of how he seems to avoid life’s problems) and Kiera Knightly is Penny. The meet about three weeks before an asteroid is about to hit the Earth and end all life.

Penny is desperately trying to get back home to England to see her family one last time. Dodge is just trying to spend his final days alone. So they team up to have one final adventure.

Around them, the world is deteriorating. Riots roam the streets. People hire assassins to assist them in suicide. Restaurants become little more than organized orgies.

However, there are still a few people who continue on with their regular life, whether out of ignorance or habit. For instance, Dodge’s maid continues to insist that she’ll clean his apartment again next week, even when there won’t be a next week.

This is what the earth would actually become if we were all to be suddenly, simultaneously faced with our own pending mortality. This was the most realistic movie about the end of the world that I’ve seen yet.

Dodge and Penny are on the periphery of all this, just trying to reach one last goal before the end. Instead, they find each other and that turns out to be enough.

This movie was a perfect mix of sweetness and sadness. The plot was simple enough to get out of the way of the relationship that formed between the two characters.

Not too much was made of the end of the world — it was more of a plot device used to motivate the characters to action. In a film industry where the apocalypse is common, this was an uncommon movie about real people.