How I Live Now

Director: Kevin Macdonald
Year Released: 2013
Rating: 1.0

Moody American Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) goes to live with her cousins in Great Britain only to end up in yet another doomsday scenario (2013's mantra) in which unnamed forces are blowing up Paris and London. What begins as a story about a girl finding affection in a boy who understands her then goes haywire into cataclysmic violence in which Daisy and her female relative Piper (Harley Bird) witness friends and relatives dead and battling off potential rapists: sadly, it's good at neither genre it attempts, with the romantic teen fare being traditional and unsurprising and the apocalyptic wasteland aspect to it being too vague and not emotionally resonant. Coincidentally, this is the second movie I've seen with Ronan this year that has her character in some kind of schizo-state: in both this and Oblivion she has to keep battling voices ranging inside her. Come on teenage girls: is it really that bad? For teenage boys it's basically one long erection followed by anxiety. Or maybe that was just me....