Leave the World Behind - A Review

Spoiler Alert: this Obama produced film is arguably the worst and most culturally toxic film I have ever seen

Very occasionally I waste a couple of hours watching something stupid. Leave the World Behind on Netflix “received positive reviews from critics,” so I knew it was going to be crap, but I watched it anyway. The Obama’s produced it, all the more reason to not watch it, but I have a perverse, or rather deeply strategic need to understand people who perceive me as their enemy. I suppose I’m coming with this review a bit late, but I think the film says a lot about America these days, worthy of a response. I’m not going to bother hiding any key plot points; if you don’t want me to “ruin” the film for you, don’t read any further.

Behold the fearsome white-tail supremacist king of the deer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Leave the World Behind

Leave the World Behind is a 2023 American apocalyptic psychological thriller film written and directed by Sam Esmail. It is based on the 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam. The film stars Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, and Kevin Bacon as they attempt to make sense of the gradual breakdown in phones, television, and other regularly used technology which points to a potential cataclysm.

Leave the World Behind had its world premiere at the AFI Fest on October 25, 2023. It was released in select theaters on November 22, 2023, before its streaming release by Netflix on December 8, 2023. It received positive reviews from critics.

This film was in the news recently, after the release of the Netflix film Civil War trailer, late 2023. It became infamous because of a scene in the trailer, where a young black woman tells her father not to trust white people. Netflix has a reputation for being quite woke, and aggressive about it.

When I first saw the scene last year, I suspected it was mostly cynical click bait, deliberately provocative to get people to watch the film, that the black and white characters would be redeemed some how. They were, even if they could not possibly be redeemed from the sheer stupidity of this film. I haven’t read the book, nor am I inclined to. The scriptwriters are the film Director Sam Esmail and the writer of the book, Rumann Alam, so I’m confident the book is as grotesque as this screenplay.

The basic plot is, the Julia Roberts character rents an AirB&B on the beach, that somehow has a clear view of Manhattan too. Her husband, Ethan Hawke, is surprised but hey, he does not make the decisions. They have two teenage kids, a girl and a boy. Surprisingly none of them are suffering from gender dysphoria. They get out of Manhattan just in time, because there’s an apocalypse in the works.

They spend the first day on the beach. The first sign of trouble is, a cargo ship beaches, plows into the beach displacing many tons of beach sand - right where they had been sitting. This was the first of many gross departures from reality in this film, such a huge ship with a draft something like 30-40ft somehow not meeting any resistance until it hits the shore, plowing a hundred feet onto shore. Maybe I am wrong about the basic physics of that, but right then I thought, this movie really is going to be stupid. The “white lion” is code too - remember that - as we will see throughout the film and later in this piece.

By the evening it becomes clear neither the phones nor the TV are broadcasting anything, the internet is down - but somehow the power is on. I kept thinking, what are the odds there would be zero digital communications of any kind, but electricity would be flowing freely? Of course how could we see the anguish of the characters without electric lights?

Later in the evening after the kids go to bed, a father and daughter show up, they are black, very well dressed, saying this is their house. We got out of the city just in time, sorry, you are going to have to leave our house you rented. It is a tense scene. Eventually it is agreed, the black owners of the house will sleep in the basement, because they can’t prove they own the house apparently, though he has a key to retrieve from a drawer a thousand dollars in cash to partially reimburse the guests. There must be a half dozen bedrooms in this house. But then, the basement is posh.

The next day airliners keep falling out of the sky, because apparently without the internet or GPS planes can’t fly, and apparently this plane is still in the air even as there has not been internet for something like 24hrs at this point. The main black character played by Mahershala Ali, narrowly avoids a 737? nosediving onto the beach - right where he had been standing - by hiding behind the entry door of a house, even as the windows around him are blown out, and really, based on the trajectory of the plane, the whole house probably should have been demolished, or at least the door blown out, based on the amount of material flying through the holes where the windows had been.

There is also a high pitched sound, deafening, that appears every so often, terrorizing our characters. Inexplicably, the teenage son wakes up one day and pulls a bunch of his teeth out. His teeth “felt weird” and then he just pulls them out. Everybody else is fine, but his teeth are falling out. Maybe it was the tick, someone says, which tick bite was also a gross misrepresentation of reality. The mysterious sound is said later to be the cause of his teeth falling out, which is just as fake.

The characters keep getting in cars and driving around. Because that is what you do in an apocalypse apparently, or in a war, when you are unarmed and otherwise functionally useless, you get in your car and drive around, looking for “help”. No one else is around, there literally isn’t anyone anywhere except one woman on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere two miles as the crow flies from Manhattan, speaking nothing but Spanish.

The white family decides they are going to drive back into the city. Because in an apocalypse that is what you do, drive into Manhattan. But the bridge is blocked by hundreds of Teslas. There is no one in the Teslas. All the Teslas are brand new. All of the Teslas are mashed into each other. All of the Teslas are sheer white (which is a continuing theme here; have you ever seen a white Tesla?), because, I guess, white supremacy, because Elon? More are coming, get out of the way! Julia Roberts is driving, the family sedan is weaving in and out dodging on-coming, white, brand new self-driving Teslas. She could have just pulled off the road, there is clearly space for her to drive off the road. The Teslas are being hijacked to block the bridges in and out of Manhattan. I was thinking, well, that is refreshing anti-electric autonomous car messaging. I guess electric cars are great, unless Elon. Except then, Elon’s only response to this scene I could find was a tweet where he says Tesla Model 3 can solar charge in an apocalypse when no electricity or gas is available!

Deer keep showing up too, staring ominously, by the hundreds. Something about migratory patterns being disrupted. Or was it circadian rhythms? Obviously, whichever. For as much money as Hollywood spends on films one would think they could hire an ecologist. They probably come cheap. I’ve long been perplexed, so many films seem to have no idea about how anything in nature actually works.

This bit of The Science is The Deer crescendo, the white angry liberal professional woman battling the black, young, unemployable woke woman, are reconciled, their come-together, now we understand each other moment, hey, see, we both think people are awful, we are both awful but we are awful together now; then, outside the garden shed in the middle of the woods where they have their reconciliation, white woman follows the track left by her daughters bike, who she is looking for, black woke girl lingers at the garden shed in the woods, is suddenly surrounded by hundreds of deer, creeping ever closer, enclosing her. Then a giant black/gray buck steps through the herd, looking like he is ready to gore the black girl. Because, you know, that’s what deer do when the people-world falls apart. Our characters succeed in scaring them away by…shrieking. Because, of course. There is even a surprising white savior moment, as black woke girl is frozen, about to be ripped apart by white-tail supremacist King deer horns, white liberal feminist jumps in shrieking, saves woke black girl. Catharsis.

That might be literally the dumbest scene I have ever seen in any film ever, not least because this is supposed to be a serious film.

Meanwhile, our main white and black male characters go in search of Mr MAGA, because Mr MAGA might be a racistbigotxenophobetranshaternatzee, but Mr MAGA is going to be the only one prepared for this shit-hit-the-fan. Because Mr MAGA probably has whatever is needed to heal white liberal useless man’s son whose teeth are falling out. Here we have a standoff, an actual guns drawn stand off, between Mr MAGA and Black Financier. But White City College professor gets in between the guns, admits he is completely, functionally useless, but willing to do whatever it takes to protect his family, just like you Mr MAGA.

The next scene is teeth falling out boy choking down blue horse-pill sized pharmaceuticals, while Mr MAGA says this apocalypse is the fault of the Koreans - he really is supposed to be that dumb, but also he has The Cure. He knows it’s the radio/microwave weapons that damaged the boy, those radio/microwave weapons that didn’t harm anyone else.

Here’s a double dose of sheer ridiculousness, in one minute:

This is when Black Financier who has a lot of clients in the Military Industrial Complex reveals, this is not a war coming from without, this is a DOMESTIC enemy, dropping literal bombs on Manhattan, hijacking white Teslas to isolate Manhattan, microwaving the woodlands, dropping planes out of the sky, turning the deer psychotic. And thus we come to the moral of our Barack and “Michelle” Obama produced film. This is a fever dream of liberals terrified of phantoms, not so much predictive programming as revealing of the liberal Id, peddling fear, be afraid of domestic “terrorism”, be afraid of white rural America, be afraid of white supremacists, be afraid of deer, be afraid of nature apparently. Be afraid of everything. Just. Be. Afraid.

Liberal progressives are addicted to fear, clueless that these phantoms are mostly their own projection.

Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Kevin Bacon are clearly devoid of self-awareness, to have read this script, agreeing to do this film. It would have been better to retire. Mahershala Ali and and Myhal’La can be forgiven, because seriously, how often does a black character get to stand as equals next to these three, in a serious film? Ok, I just choked on that sentence. The cinematography even showed the age of Julia Roberts, who is no longer America’s sweetheart. She was quite good at being the cold-hearted, bitter, liberal white professional bitch, who gets a little too intimate with the black guy with her white husband outside. These are supposed to be smart people among actors. Ethan Hawke is an author too. I wonder about his books if his discernment about this screenplay is any indication? I’ve long assumed Hawke is a douche, but what the hell, Kevin Bacon? Six degrees of separation from any sense. Clearly Trump and Covid broke their brains.

The Obama’s too. If they were smart they would be embarrassed about being associated with this film, though they are clearly neither. If they are the first gay black couple in the White House, and also are lawyers, one would think they wouldn’t actually be dumb. But this film is more than anything, just plain dumb.

Not unlike a little speech that made the rounds recently, dontcha know, government, oh ma god, does EVERYTHING for us.

Alas, do not fret for our hero’s, our hero’s will be fine, better than fine, as haunted 13 year old daughter finds the underground apocalypse room in the basement of a nearby mansion, full of food, workout equipment, live vegetable plants and dvds. The room has a door like a bank vault that is conveniently open, because who doesn’t leave their million dollar doomstead unlocked when they aren’t around to protect it? I think we are supposed to believe the deer led her here - the deer are mystical as well as psychotic - but that is not entirely clear.

A nice, neat multi-cultural post apocalypse in their million dollar doomstead.

All of our hero’s are going to be fine - except for the young white male who’s teeth were yanked out by the contemptible Egyptian-American and Bangladeshi-American script writers. You are welcome to take that as an emasculating metaphor about what the left wants to do to all young white men - de-fang that White Lion.

Hollywood threw out 2500 years of accumulated Western mythology; starting at Year Zero, they have tried to reconstruct reality and it is all garbage. Leave the world behind, indeed. I’m certain Rumann Alam did not mean to be ironic. He certainly did not intend to write a farce. Probably not even understanding it, he projected his fear of white supremacists onto white tail deer. It is hard to be dumber than that.

This is the sort of film for people who can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman, who think renewable energy is green and who think the climate change movement is about the health of the earth. This film is for people who aren’t able to see the fascist phantoms they freak themselves out about are actually themselves. This film is for people who are afraid of their own shadow.

I was happy for Obama when he won in 2008. I didn’t vote, but I hoped his presidency would be good in a healing way for America. When instead of holding banks and bankers accountable for the credit collapse he gave them the keys to the kingdom, I knew he was a charlatan. As soon as I heard about his Tuesday morning kill lists I understood he was a monster. I assume now he is still effectively President (and a charlatan and a monster), more than Biden is anyhow. I figure Susan Rice takes his directives to the White House, Biden unawares. I figured Obama was intelligent and calculating. Leave the World Behind makes him look dumb, full of his own myth, totally full of himself, utterly self-assured he can do no wrong, a classic case of hubris. More than that, this film makes him look weak and farcical, pathetic really, floating about in a false world of unreality - a bubble fake and GAE desperately needing to be popped.