If you knew the world was going to end in a few days, would you keep going to work? This is one of the big questions asked in Seeking A Friend, a film about what would happen if the shuttle mission in Armageddon failed to stop the Meteor.
For the most part, life goes on. Our hero goes to work, his maid keeps cleaning his apartment, TV news programs stay on the air, and the power is still on right up until the last minute.
Not everyone takes it all as calmly as our hero and his new girlfriend. Some people riot in the streets. Others decide to have sex with anything that moves. Some go to the beach and get baptized. Steve Carrell does a good job of looking depressed and Keira Knightley does a good job of looking clueless.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World turns out to be a road picture, with clean empty roads and beautiful clear days. The music is sad and depressing, as befits that whole end of the world thing. Our hero didn’t want to meet someone new, because he didn’t want to hear anyone’s stories and didn’t want to start something that he knew would end in less than three weeks. But he ends up falling in love anyway and adds this to his already long list of things he wishes he had done sooner.
We are told that a large meteor is heading for Earth and that it will kill everyone. On the road our heroes run into a group of doomsday preppers-a bunch of young men playing video games and planning on restarting the human race after a few weeks. The fact that there are no women in the bunker doesn’t seem to bother them. And this is kind of an over arching theme in Seeking A Friend, no one seems all that worried about the world ending.
There were one or two laughs, but the subject matter and the general what does it matter? tone kept rearing its head. Like the poor families going back to bed as the Titanic sinks, there is nothing else for our heroes to do as the finial minutes tick away.
