Yeah, I think I'll drive straight through that
dir: Paul Greengrass
2025
2018 isn’t that long ago. I mean, I know that the covid years in between were about 10 years long, but in truth the events depicted in this agitating and deeply stressful movie only happened 7 years ago. The so-called Camp Fire of 2018 saw over 13,000 buildings and houses burn down, but far more tragically, 85 lives lost to the fires or the general chaos that ensued.
What this film, with a certain degree of difficulty, gets us to care about, is whether 85 people dying is bad enough, or whether the survival of a busload of kids, their teacher and the bus driver, or not, would make us feel better or worse.
Let’s not fuck around – they wouldn’t have made this if the kids didn’t survive. But watching this flick you would have been convinced that there was no freaking way all these people survived this apocalyptic hellfire, not only including these kids but especially these kids.
And given those circumstances, and the fact that this is the past we’re watching, and not a post-apocalyptic future, its very verisimilitude is what makes it so hard to believe sometimes.
This is a very stressful flick. There’s no two ways about it: every choice the director makes is intended to increase our stress to try to match the terror of the people involved. The camerawork is jittery, handheld, and matches the editing and the overamped nature of the performances, and a lot of the real footage that I’m assuming they got and included in the film.
It feels too real a lot of the time. I have no doubts everything was done safely and no kids or McCounagheys were harmed in the making of this movie etc etc, but the queasy line between fact and fiction is often blurred, deliberately. There are scenes with the firefighters figuring out that the fires are only going to get worse and worse that looked like they were filmed when it was actually happening.
Very obviously, this was a horrific set of circumstances that impacted a lot of people in terrible ways, but some more than others. Everyone else in the film except the bus driver doesn’t get the luxury of a backstory, because you see the bus driver, the one that drives the lost bus of the title, he’s played by Matthew McConaughey. And if he’s playing a character, he’s not confused as to whether he has main character energy or not: he must have all of it. No-one else in this flick is afforded that luxury, which is to the film’s benefit, because honestly, we didn’t need it.
Everyone else in the flick is what they are or what they do. Only Kevin the bus driver has motivations, reasons, traumas, misgivings, inadequacies, beliefs, hang-ups, resentments etc. And yet much of that backstorying really, really comes across as generic fodder, I’m sorry to say (and I feel compelled to apologise to the actual person this is based on, who surely wasn’t created in a lab or by AI.
And so, in a flick where everyone else is either an impediment to or a helper to the main character, McConaughey really, really wants us to see how much acting he’s doing. You either win an Academy Award for the best acting or the most acting in a given film in a given year, and McConaughey seems pretty committing to getting another one of those golden statues.
To get there, wow, he probably set fire to himself for real. In most given scenes he has the energy of someone who could be literally dying for their next meth hit. Unshaved, unclean, wild-eyed even before the fires start, he is a perennial fuck up who needs to be ground down again and again before he gets his time to shine. There are heartbreaking scenes of the character’s teenage son Shaun (who happens to be played by his actual son Levi) treating his father with utter disdain and other voices, generally offscreen, telling Kevin and thus us, what a fucking loser he is.
Even when things are ramping up, and the fires are starting to march west across the Sierra Nevadas, through the towns where the kids need to be saved, and past the houses of people just like Kevin that won’t survive, his ex-wife has to call him to tell him what a shitty father he is and how he’ll probably fuck everything else up too.
You could be thinking that maybe, when the call went out to pick up the schoolkids and deliver them to a location where they think will be safe, that Kevin would intuit “nah, I’ll let someone else do it because I’m such a tremendous and unreliable fuck up that I’ll probably fuck this up too and get everyone killed” but instead Kevin thinks “Maybe this is my one chance at redemption? Maybe if I do this right, my son will respect me, my ex-wife will take me back and the world itself will give me a thumbs up and a “great job, champ!”
That Kevin chooses the second, less believable, far more freighted and emotionally resonant path is to our and his ultimate benefit. He decides to again neglect his own kid, who happens to be sick, and save the other kids instead.
He doesn’t much do anything to earn our sympathies beyond being continuously put down by everyone else, but obviously, given the stakes, we don’t want to see him fail.
It’s just that there’s so many things that could have gone wrong, and yet they all survived, sometimes despite his actions.
Watching a busload of children, frequently hearing them screaming in terror, and not like they’re on a fun ride at the Melbourne Show, is not an entirely pleasant way to spend two hours. But it does pull you in, perhaps against your will. The actual circumstances of how it all transpired, I am guessing, is probably pretty accurate at first, and most likely gets less accurate as it goes on, because past a certain stage you’re watching something like out of a Mad Max – Furiousa type film, except this bus and the people on board have no almost super-heroic qualities or plot armour that’s guaranteeing their safety.
And the world itself during this catastrophe, unfortunately for these people, it’s like it’s post-apocalyptic all of the time, because it’s America. Armed fuckheads threaten the bus at some points. And I’m not talking about masked ICE agents hunting for non-white kids; I mean people who don’t care that they’re threatening a bus load of kids, and who they would be happy to abandon to their fate if it means getting their stuff or making sure that other people don’t survive if they’re not going to.
They’re all on a regular bus. The firestorm outside, abundant flames supercharged by hot winds, will destroy almost everything in their path. And the only thing keeping these kids alive is the plucky determination of one bus driver and one teacher (America Ferrara) not wanting to be seen as two of history’s worst monsters, and oh okay they want to survive as well for their own selfish reasons.
It's harrowing throughout, and the ending, as in the climax of the flick, where the bus driver thinks they can wait out the firestorm, since they’ve run out of paths to take, and are surrounded, leads to the least possibly likely situation (drive through hell) but most cinematically potent, is especially exhausting.
And yet no matter how much I was telling myself “it couldn’t have happened like this, surely, they wouldn’t have survived”, when the emotional highpoint of the flick happens, I was reduced to a puddle of grateful tears.
I know it didn’t happen like that. I don’t care. After going through all of that, I just wanted to see them breath a sigh of relief, and try to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.
The ending is so deliberately understated, and that felt especially appropriate. No one is hoisted upon the shoulders of an adoring public, no one has to state or re-state “Kevin, you’re not a fucking loser anymore!” there are no medals or parades, there’s just a bunch of survivors dealing with the aftermath of a climate change exacerbated catastrophe, who still have to figure out where their next meal or drink of water is going to come from.
As the fire chief says to a press briefing after admitting they can’t fight fires this massive, on this scale; the fires are only getting worse, and they’re getting more frequent, and they’ve been fools about it all. It’s depressing stuff, because no-one likes admitting that a battle is lost, and that many more people will die, but that’s the reality they’re living in.
They’re won’t always be a heroic bus driver to save the next group of children, but we can live in hope, since that’s more likely that the Americans realising they’re the main cause of climate change, and most of the bad things happening on the planet, often to other people, but also mostly to them.
Director Paul Greengrass perpetrates the same kind of anxiety inducing atrocity here that he did for the equally harrowing United 93, but at least this story (except for the 85 people who lost their lives, and the tens of thousands that lost everything else) has a somewhat happier ending.
8 times the old line about Nature getting the last laugh is particularly gutting in this flick’s context out of 10
--
“I just want to add one thing: Every year the fires get bigger, and there's more of them. We're being damn fools, that's the truth.” – if only there was something to be done about it - The Lost Bus
- 682 reads