How It Ends (2018)
Directed by David M. Rosenthal
No — How It Ends is not woke, scoring 13 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Netflix's How It Ends arrives with the confidence of a film that has read the assignment and misplaced it.
Consciousness Markers
The cast includes Forest Whitaker, Kat Graham, Nicole Ari Parker, and Indigenous actress Grace Dove, giving the film a notably multiracial ensemble for a 2018 Netflix thriller, though none of these characters exist to make a representational point.
No LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes appear anywhere in the film.
Sam is a pregnant woman largely relegated to a distant objective and a damsel role; the film offers no feminist critique or agency-driven female arc.
The film contains no engagement with racial themes, systemic racism, or racial consciousness; the diverse cast is incidental to the survival plot.
The apocalyptic event is a seismic/volcanic catastrophe, not a climate-change allegory, and the film makes no environmental argument.
There is no economic critique or anti-capitalist messaging; the collapse is unexplained and apolitical.
No body-positivity themes or body-diverse representation are present.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a fictional apocalypse with no historical revisionism or reframing of real events.
The film is a straightforward survival thriller that never pauses to deliver a social or political sermon.
Why it received this score
Netflix's How It Ends arrives with the confidence of a film that has read the assignment and misplaced it. A mysterious seismic event silences the West Coast, a young man named Will drives from Chicago toward Seattle with his reluctant future father-in-law, and the audience is treated to ninety minutes of gasoline logistics. The cause of the catastrophe is never explained, which the film appears to regard as restraint. It is more accurately an unpaid bill.
The cast is unusually multiracial for a 2018 streaming thriller, with Forest Whitaker, Kat Graham, Nicole Ari Parker, and Grace Dove appearing across the journey. None of them exist to make a point, and the film never asks them to. There is no racial argument here, no economic grievance, no environmental sermon, no gender critique. Sam spends the apocalypse pregnant and largely offscreen, a destination rather than a person. The film has no interest in correcting anything. It simply wants to reach the cabin.
What remains is a road movie about two men bonding over a collapsed lung and a punctured gas tank. The dialogue is functional. The apocalypse is a scheduling conflict. As a piece of social commentary, the film is a blank page, and it seems content there. As a thriller, it is a long drive with the radio off. The volcano, when it finally arrives, is the most emotionally available character in the picture.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A desperate father tries to return home to his pregnant wife after a mysterious apocalyptic event turns everything to chaos.
Questions about How It Ends
Is How It Ends woke?
No — How It Ends is not woke, scoring 13 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does How It Ends have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (30). On Representation Casting: The cast includes Forest Whitaker, Kat Graham, Nicole Ari Parker, and Indigenous actress Grace Dove, giving the film a notably multiracial ensemble for a 2018 Netflix thriller, though none of these characters exist to make a representational point.
How does How It Ends compare to other 2018 movies?
It ranks #160 of the 325 films from 2018 we've scored; their average is 20. The wokest is Return (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.