As the first decade of this new millennium ticks towards its conclusion, we find ourselves in the general temporal vicinity of what recent generations have perceived as ‘the future,’ and there’s nary a flying car or replicant in sight. Resultingly, most recent science fiction films - from the relatively successful (A Scanner Darkly) to the utterly ridiculous (Southland Tales) to the annoyingly didactic (Sundance hit Sleep Dealer) - have recast the near future in more immediate and recognizable terms, predicting the throughlines of current socio-economic and political trends to imagine what might be just around the corner. Director Jennifer Phang takes the same approach in Half-Life, but to a more unique end. Her film takes place sometime within the next ten years, after global warming has flooded the world’s coastal regions and parched the land left above sea level. Social disorder is rampant: there are riots in the streets and whispers of endtimes. And amidst all this is the Wu family, dealing with the suburban woes of a million cinematic families before them.
Phang’s science-fiction conceit doesn’t affect the core of her story; indeed, it could be removed entirely without affecting the plot. But what it does do is reflect the plot, giving the characters’ emotional turmoil a greater context to ebb and flow within. This family is a microcosm of the world they live in; but because it’s their story, the circumstances around them become epic extrapolations of their most intimate moments.
The first of those moments occurs on the ground, to which nineteen year-old Pam Wu (Sanoe Lake) has just plummeted in a moment of desperation. She wakes up, bloodied and bruised, and sees her little brother Timothy looking at her, down there amidst the Northern California fauna. She smiles reassuringly; that moment is gone, and she brushes herself off and resumes her role as surrogate mother to her younger sibling. Their actual mother, Saura (Julia Nickson-Soul) is in the midst of a mid-life crisis, and is looking for the fastest possible solution to all the things that are wrong in her life. The answer she’s come up with is a young white jock of a boyfriend named Wendell, who moves into the Wu’s home and innocuously lets Pam know that he wouldn’t mind extending his affections to her as well. Pam’s soulmate, though, is Scott, the gay adopted son of an Evangelical pastor. They meet frequently on the grassy knolls high above the city, talking shop about sex and love and all the nasty details of both. Pam pines for him. He pretends not to notice.
The other central character in this drama is the Wu patriarch, who is defined entirely by his absence from his family’s lives. He was a pilot, whose departure some years prior coincided with the rise of the oceans and the increase in solar flares, occurrences which allow the characters to ignore or make excuses for the sad state of their lives. Likewise, they separates Phang’s film from similar tales of middle-class unhappiness, of absentee dads and clinically depressed children. Indeed, a simple synopsis of Half-Life fails to encapsulate the scope that the film traverses: it jumps from epic to intimate, from the end of the world (conveyed via newscasts and subtle special effects) to the private thoughts and daydreams of its characters, which take place in an animated world of disintegrating airplanes and beached leviathans. These formal shifts are drastic, but they’re bound by a unifying tone that weaves these melodramatic threads and surreal flights of fancy into an elegiac tapestry of unrest.
The film’s slow boil eventually come to a head; everything hits the fan, and those threads spire together and begin to fray as one. Secrets are revealed, accusations are made, true love is requited and the sun burns brighter than ever. There’s an achingly beautiful moment where Pam and Scott lay in each other’s arms and wait for the world to end. “Now,” Pam says, “or now.” Snapping her fingers as the seconds pass by and the world moves on anyway. It’s the sort of scene that is so perfectly irresolute that no actual ending can top it, and indeed, the actual denouement is where the Phang’s ambition finally falters. She attempts to justify the conceit of her film with an awkward step into magical, almost messianic realism. Whether or not anything that happens at the end of the film really happens. Such tropes always work on a superficial level, which is why filmmakers so often use them to wrap up unwieldy narratives; but what happens here is both too subtle to qualify as deux ex machina and too bombastic to work within the literal world the film has established. Considering how much of that world gives way to dreamscapes and reverie, that the ending doesn’t work is actually a tribute to the difficult tonal balancing act Phang has pulled off in the rest of the film.
What the ending does succeed in, though, is offering a different perspective on the standard apocalyptic tones of recent sci-fi, which generally imply that the world is on a fast track to man-made annihilation. Consider the title, which is taken from the scientific term for “the time required for one unstable element to decay and transform into another,” and put it in the context of the film, and we’re left with a vision of the future that has a bit more faith in humanity. Half-Life sees past dissolution, past the end of the world, all the way to something else. What that something is is anyone’s guess; the point is that there’s something there at all.
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