Title: 4:44 Last Day on Earth
Director: Abel Ferrara
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Shanyn Leigh
If you knew the exact time the world was going to end, how would you spend the final 24 hours and change?
That’s the situation the 85 minute 4:44 Las Day on Earth existentially explores. While the flick wants to showcase an emotional depth via a plethora of trivial moments, the delivery is fairly straight-forward.
Willem Dafoe and his girlfriend Shanyn Leigh are spending their remaining hours in their New York City apartment. They know, as does the rest of the human-race, that world will come to an end at 4:44 a.m. and there is no way of avoiding certain extinction. Leigh is a young artist who decides to paint one final canvas during these final hours and Dafoe spends his time walking out on the balcony observing what others are doing (the only scenes that have any spirit to them). When he’s not gazing upon the concrete world around him, he’s on his laptop engaging with people he cares about via Skype. Also acting as a running subtle commentary on the planet’s demise, is past interviews with Al Gore, who was obviously right about how climate change will end the our society, which streams on the couple’s television sets in their deluxe studio dwelling.
This quiet demise concept if you will has been done before in other flicks that purposely choose to forgo the drama and excitement as seen in many sci-fi flicks for example. Issue that arises here is that none of the conversations or personal reflecting by the two leads does anything remotely interesting. As stated, when Dafoe casually looks out at the world from his roof-top view, these are the only provocative moments. Seeing a person leap to their death to people still going to the gym is what gets the mind working. Aside from that, and the soft porno opening, this story ends up doing nothing more than taking away one’s precious time on this earth. The acting is up to the level you would expect from Dafoe and Leigh yet the atmosphere in which director Abel Ferrara places them in was more suited for a short film as opposed to a full-blown feature. Just as he isolates the situation to the apartment, the mood of the story would have been more viable if this was told in a more concise manner.
Overall, 4:44 Last Day on Earth has a few interesting bullet points it gleams over, but suffers from the narrow approach in its depiction of something so catastrophic. And yes that is the point of this; but that doesn’t necessarily means it works as a cinematic feature. If you do have an interest in these types of flicks, go track down Melancholia.
Technical: C
Acting: B
Story: D+
Overall: D+
