How It Ends is a 2018 Netflix apocalyptic action thriller directed by David M. Rosenthal, starring Theo James and Forest Whitaker. The premise is genuinely strong: a mysterious catastrophic event strikes the West Coast, and a man must drive two thousand miles across a rapidly collapsing United States with his estranged father-in-law to reach his pregnant wife. It's a solid hook with real potential. That potential is squandered almost immediately.

The fundamental issue is that everything built on top of that concept fails to deliver. The story is flat. The action sequences are unremarkable. The characters are thin and difficult to invest in. You have Forest Whitaker — an Oscar winner — and Theo James headlining, and neither is given anything to work with. The film amounts to a long, repetitive road trip punctuated by encounters that fail to build any real tension or momentum.

And then there's the ending. Given the title, you reasonably expect the conclusion to be the entire point of the film — the payoff that justifies the two-hour journey. Instead, How It Ends explains nothing. The nature of the apocalyptic event is never revealed. The finale simply stops, leaving every question it raised completely unanswered. For a film named How It Ends, the single most frustrating thing about it is that it has no real ending at all.

The result is a film that takes a compelling idea and delivers almost nothing of value around it. Watching it, the dominant feeling was impatience — a growing sense that the film simply would not reach a conclusion, because in a meaningful sense, it never does.

This is, bluntly, one of the biggest wastes of two hours I've experienced. A cool concept, completely squandered.