“These Final Hours” (2013) is an unflinching Australian end-of-the-world movie that views humanity’s last 12 hours through the eyes a flawed, desperate everyman.  It’s outstanding; I’d give it a 9 out of 10.

This movie pulls off a pretty neat trick — it effectively portrays a global catastrophe with zero special effects until its closing set-piece.  (And these visual effects work quite nicely for a low-budget film.)  A meteor has struck the northern Atlantic, and a resultant wave of destruction is enveloping the earth.  Its progress is documented in real time by a sad ham radio operator, wonderfully performed by David Field.

What we see is gut-wrenching.  Some people turn suicidal, a few turn homicidal.  People drink, use drugs and have sex, either privately or not.  Some are depressed, some are too drug-affected to care, and others are in shock.  The rare, vain efforts to survive include the laughable (a tin foil-covered house) to the sadly insufficient (a stocked bunker that nevertheless isn’t deep enough).  One reaction is befuddling; we see a street barricaded with metal shopping carts with a sign cursing at passersby.  This is a fatalistic story premise in which every character on screen is doomed to die within hours.

We follow the surprisingly touching character arc for our troubled everyman.  He’s played by perfectly by Nathan Phillips.  The young Angourie Rice is just as good as an incongruously self-controlled little girl who winds up his charge after being separated from her father.  The cast is uniformly excellent.  Hearing Kathryn Beck wail that she doesn’t want to die is heartbreaking.

For me, there were only a few flaws here.  The pacing seemed … off somehow.  This movie slowed toward the end, the nearer disaster approached.  Phillips’ protagonist seemed thinly scripted for much of the first hour.  He seems like a generic guy, who plans to get drunk before the end of the world, which makes him much like nearly everyone else we see in this movie.  Yes, he intervenes heroically when he first encounters the little girl, but we expect every movie protagonist to do that.

With that said, however, every character did seem “real” to me, thanks to terrific naturalistic dialogue, written by Zak Hilditch.  (He’s also the director.)  It made the drama hit home.

Thanks to blog correspondent Len Ornstein for recommending this movie!  I recommend it too.