The Worthy (2016)

directed by Ali F. Mostafa
United Arab Emirates
98 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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The Worthy is noteworthy (sorry, I had to) for being one of a few movies made and set in the United Arab Emirates. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, so as happens often, I was hoping for some emphasis on the apocalypse, but never got it. I wanted to see more of what happened as the world ended rather than hear about it in an opening narration by the main character. The scenario in which society crumbled is where The Worthy's anti-terrorism message comes in, telling us about a future where paramilitary factions' skirmishes between one another escalate to become all-out global wars until one of them successfully poisons a water supply.

I enjoyed this movie's post-societal worldbuilding because I felt like it hit on several critical points that help to establish the danger of a world in which basic resources are no longer obtainable without effort. Vast importance is given to having a steady and reliable water supply, which isn't even speculative, it's just the reality of living in a desert. There's a lot of guns, like a whole lot of guns, and a lot of knives too, and I think that's a fairly accurate part of what a world after this one will look like. I think there's going to be easy access to things that can kill people and not a lot of access to things that could help people live. Also, the compound where most of this movie takes place has an interesting design- instead of subterranean tunnels or a bunker or anything like that, it's an abandoned aircraft wing factory, and it's huge. The survivors aren't frightened people burrowing into the smallest, most undetectable corners of the Earth, they've got a gigantic, wide-open space to command, at least for a little while.

However, the fact that many synopses of this hail it as "visually spectacular" should be a little worrying. It's pretty fancy-looking, but it doesn't have nice cinematography at all, it just has that aesthetic movies get when they have a massive budget to work with and want to show it off. It's so overblown it's almost comical at times: so much unnecessary slow-mo, lots of shots of characters just barely ducking out of the way of some weapon or projectile, gratuitous usage of CGI blood and fire, et cetera. It's visually frontloaded and that might be impressive but it doesn't translate to something that's pleasant to look at.

I would say that this is a decent movie, but maybe not as good as everybody thinks it is, but it appears that people don't actually think this is that good. So maybe I should just say it's a decent movie. It might be because I watch and read a massive amount of post-apocalyptic fiction but this didn't come off as very original to me. I think I also would have liked it a lot more if any women had survived until the end.