Three days before the world is set to end, a photographer is drawn into New York’s criminal underworld after his friend goes missing.
It is always easier to imagine the world ending rather than changing our current one. This is why films capturing the end of the world are released time after time. Why movies like “Blade Runner” are successfully brilliant, foregoing the apocalypse and dropping us right into the dystopian future. Unfortunately, “Exposure 36” scraps the entertaining aspect of epic world-ending movies and takes a dramatic approach. After a cool synth scored opening through a tunnel, this tale, set during the last days of human civilization in New York, fails to overcome its student filmmaking aesthetics.
The script is packed with exposition, constantly reminding us that the film’s protagonist Cam (Charles Ouda ), a photographer turned two-bit drug dealer, is a “good man.” In between dealing prescription drugs, Cam gives the local homeless lady cigarettes, and after seeing a neighbor getting robbed, he slips the victim twenty bucks. Not wanting to face the upcoming apocalypse, Cam’s mentor commits suicide leaving him “sad,” which is not really expressed beyond a few frowns.
Things get moving but not very interesting when Cam’s irate customer introduces his younger sister Katie (Jennifer Leigh Whitehead). The two are forced to band together when her sibling goes missing. After talk of a facility upstate that could offer a way out of the ensuing extinction event, the odd couple tries to locate it and her brother.
I had a laundry list of grievances, but its continuous music displayed a lack of awareness for letting a scene breathe or trying to coerce the audience into feeling something. I usually appreciate a low-budget film going for ambitious endeavors, but this was a far cry. One particularly frustrating scene involves the film’s villain eating and with a mouthful of food, begins spouting some “Matrix”-ripped dialogue about humans being ants in a twisted colony. For the sake of the public and its filmmakers, I hope this exposure does not see the light of day.
Available on Video-On-Demand May 10th
