Main cast: Jai Koutrae (David Chamberlain), Kendra Appleton (Annabelle Chamberlain), Todd Lasance (Zach), Bren Foster (Agent Stipe), Brendan Clearkin (Ned Wilcox), Vincent Andriano (O’Mally), William Emmons (Agent Lubinski), Katherine Hicks (Jane Chamberlain), Steve Le Marquand (Sherriff Williams), and John Manning (Tony Cerillo)
Director: Marc Furmie
David Chamberlain has been a disappointing husband to his wife Jane and an equally disappointing father to their daughter Annabelle. He’s not good at making money or even keeping a steady job, and while Jane doted on him, his daughter can’t relate to him and resents him for never being there when she and her mother needed him the most. The culmination of his career of being a professional disappointment is when he donated his kidney to his sick wife, only to had Jane reject his kidney and died shortly after. Since then, he has never moved past his grief. He’s still doing a good job at disappointing Annabelle though—he doesn’t even realize that he hadn’t come up with the last two payments for his daughter’s college tuition, forcing her to come back to live with him.
Things spice up when David encounters what appears to be a fragment from a meteorite; he begins seeing Jane and she told him that he has been given some kind of important task to build an equivalent of a Noah’s ark, albeit at a much smaller degree, of course, as the world around them threatens to erupt into a devastating nuclear war. He’s not exactly crazy. When former soldier Zach helps David and comes in contact with the meteorite piece or whatever it is, his body begins to regenerate the leg that he had lost while on duty. The meteorite-thing has the powers to heal to a remarkable extent, and soon the government folks under the leadership of the zealous Agent Stipe show up to retrieve that piece.
Terminus, an Australian production, is not exactly an action-packed sci-fi film. Instead, it’s a hybrid of sort, as it focuses as much on the human elements as much as it does on David’s efforts to finish building his version of Noah’s ark while trying to keep the project under wraps from nosy people.
Due to its budget, this movie doesn’t have much CGI going for it, and when the CGI stuff does show up, let’s just say that the mushroom cloud is really, really terrible. It’s likely that they ran low of money by the time they needed the nuclear explosion, and had to persuade some high school kid to do something on a laptop for that penultimate scene. Not that this is bad thing in itself, as there is solid acting all around from the cast to elevate the cheese that comes with low budget films into something more high brow and even profound.
Sure, there is an obvious anti-war and anti-nuclear message here, but the most hard-hitting aspects of this movie are the main characters. David is a far more complicated character than the plot synopsis would suggest, as here is a man that is finally given a chance at redeeming himself and making up for a lifetime of failures and he throws himself into it unquestioningly. He’s not exactly a likable character, but that’s because he is far more real than I expected. I can relate to demons in his head, and I find myself hoping that he won’t eventually realize that all of this is just a delusion of his, and he would wake up in the end to realize that he’s still a screw-up. It’s the same with Annabelle: her disappointments are very relatable, and her determination to still maintain a good relationship with David an admirable one. Zach and the paraplegic O’Mally exist to drive home how war can damage even the strongest people inside as well as outside, and how these scars often lead one to willingly imprison themselves within their despair. While the message can be preachy, there is still some poignancy in the delivery that makes me choke up a bit inside.
Fortunately, the meteorite thing turns out to be the catalyst of humanity’s hope for the future, and the final act of this movie goes down a more conventional meanies-versus-good-guys route. On one hand, I’m glad that they didn’t do that arty-farty depressing ending like how the twist is that everything is just a delusion of David. On the other hand, taking this route means that the movie needs some decent CGI or practical effects to make things work, and let’s just say that maybe the intention is far bigger than the budget would allow. While the movie ends on a pretty good note, I find myself thinking that it’s a bit too overblown for a movie that had been delivering realistic, believable feels up to that point. Still, I guess these folks really want to tell people to stop dropping nuclear bombs on one another.
Terminus is a rather uneven movie that exists in that grey area between three- and four-oogies. The visceral part of me leans towards the latter, as I am pleasantly surprised and delighted by the solid acting and the feels that the movie manages to deliver, but the nitpick-y, think-y part of me points out that, outside of the character drama, what remains is a preachy, didactic movie delivered in an unsubtle, hammer-between-the-eyes manner that clashes discordantly with the more subtle, nuanced, and relatable human elements. It’d be grand of this movie had done everything in the same understated yet hard-hitting way as it has done with its characters.
