When I’m Ready movie review: it’s the end of the world, and you’d barely know it

It’s the end of the world as they know it… or will be, very soon. The “last-ditch plan to divert the asteroid cluster” heading to Earth has failed, the radio announces, and so it’s sayonara humanity in less than a week. Young lovers Michael (Andrew Ortenberg: Show Dogs, Alpha and Omega) and Rose (June Schreiner) get the news while they are on a last-ever road trip through unspecified Americana, in a vintage pickup truck for retro kicks, and they are not gonna let impending apocalypse harsh their vibe.

And that’s kinda a problem. When I’m Ready is a movie about pretty young people who are, supposedly and understandably, sad about the end of everything and the cutting short of their brief lives. Yet while the youthful earnestness of the whole shebang is palpable — this represents the feature debuts of director Andrew Johnson and screenwriter Ortenberg — there’s little emotional authenticity to any of it. We’ve seen much of this before, and pulled off with far more affecting feeling. Somewhat embarrassingly, Ready lifts much of its concept directly from Lorene Scafaria’s impossibly poignant 2012 apocalyptic rom-com Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, but it has little to add to the still-small but burgeoning science-fiction-adjacent subgenre we might call “kitchen-sink catastrophe”: not the adventures of the heroes trying to avert a very plausible demise of humankind but the acceptance of civilians resigned to it.

Rose and Michael are driving around, seemingly aimlessly — Rose keeps mentioning wanting to visit her grandmother, but even now, that never feels very pressing a desire — breaking into random houses to drink their wine, foraging for strawberries at an abandoned pick-your-own, exploring a middle-of-nowhere landscape that is almost entirely devoid of other people. (The film was shot in and around Los Angeles, mostly rural “around” bits, with handsome golden-hour cinematography by Rachael Kliman, also making her feature debut.) Where is everyone? This is a world already depopulated, which makes little sense; their scant encounters with a few people speak not to “everyone is doing their own end-of-the-world thing” — because surely many more of them would be doing their own thing where Rose and Michael, and we, can see them — but a lack of imagination about how to interact with other traumatized people. And so the movie just plain avoids them, for the most part.

The one exception is Michael and Rose’s encounter with a shellshocked Dermot Mulroney (Truth, Insidious: Chapter 3), who appears to have wandered in from a more psychologically astute version of this story. His is the only character — and he appears only in one scene — whom I believed actually believes that the world is ending. I never even bought that our young protagonists are in denial about what they’re facing. There is no terrified unacknowledged urgency simmering under the surface of Michael and Rose’s larking, which includes a goofy food fight, a slo-mo pillow fight, and a trying-on-fancy-clothes montage. I’m sure the couple’s playfulness is meant to be a coping mechanism, a roundabout way to confront their impending doom. But it plays as a facile lack of appreciation about what is happening. Even when the backstory about how they connected is revealed, all I could think was, Wow, this is in their very recent past, and yet it appears to have had no impact on them? It’s difficult to see how this movie would be appreciably different if apocalypse weren’t nigh and, perhaps, the couple were simply on the run from the law or from family who didn’t want them together, or something similarly mundane.

Ready could be read, on its grandest level, as a metaphor for the accelerating global warming we’ve seen in the past few years, our continuing collective unwillingness to confront it, and a cultural capitulation to what that means for the future young people today will face in coming decades. I am deeply sympathetic to the plight of the kids and the absolute planetary shitshow my Xer generation and those before me are leaving to them. And still, When I’m Ready left me cold. I wanted to feel more. A lot more.

more films like this:
• Seeking a Friend for the End of the World [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Netflix UK]
• Last Night [Prime US]