Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012) - Review

Can you make a comedy about the end of the world?  Well, I suppose This Is the End did it (and better, too), and I'm sure there are tons of others that have as well, but here's a more appropriate question.  Can you make a romantic comedy about the end of the world?  Well Seeking a Friend for the End of the World certainly tried its best, but the results are a bit too mixed to say they really passed the test.

The plot starts out with the world finding out that a meteor is headed straight for it.  And that's the first thing I really like; immediately we're told the world is doomed.  There's no saving it -- it's just gone.  There isn't any false hope in the movie that there's going to be some Bruce Willis kind of guy blowing up the meteor in a great self-sacrifice at the end or anything.  The world is boned.

It's a fantastic premise, but can you really build a truly funny comedy about  a bunch of people you KNOW are going to be dead by the end of the movie?  I'm sure other movies have done it, but it doesn't quite work in this one.  The jokes, while funny and carefully walking that line between dark humor and flat-out depressing, are a bit too standard for such a big and ambitious movie.  It plays the characters and story a bit too safe; we need to feel like the world's really ending, and it's sort of just meh.  Maybe that was the intent, but I file that as a mistake.

The actors do a pretty good job with what they have, which isn't a whole lot.  The movie plays out like a typical road-trip type of film like The Sure Thing.  Hyjinx, stop, hyjinx, stop, etc.  There's not a lot of variety to the movie, although some of the writing is well-done.  I liked the inclusion of avant-garde musician Scott Walker in the dialogue; that was a nice, hipstery touch.

But ultimately it's still a movie about everyone getting blown up, and that's really just too depressing to hang a comedy on, I think -- especially when it's played so straight.  The ending scene, while beautiful, is soul-crushing, making this movie a tough rewatch.  I enjoyed it, but I don't think I'd like to revisit the world ending a second time.