Go North
Written by Matt Ogens and Kyle Lierman
Directed by Matt Ogens
Actors: Patrick Schwarzenegger, Jacob Lofland and Sophie Kennedy Clark
January 13, 2017
Reviewed by A. Renee Hunt
What do you do, as a teenager, when all the adults vanish from the world? Where do you go, and how do you survive? You let the high school jocks take over, that’s how. Go North, written by Matt Ogens, is a movie that tells what takes place when an epidemic, possibly a pandemic, hits the world, leaving teens and younger in the rubble.
Josh has adjusted to his new surroundings, but he doesn’t want to stay for long. Older children run the community, in which he lives, making him rise and attend school each day, work the garden, and adhere to the rules. The rules are easy, but if one is broken, enforcers with heavy hands judge the offender. The enforcers are bullies in letterman jackets. When Josh helps a girl, sister to the head jock, he’s targeted for punishment. So he runs, and the adventure begins.
Go North does its best to stir emotions for the youth left behind, but what it really does is raise questions. Exactly what happened to the adults? Through Josh’s flashbacks, we are introduced to his mother and father during a state of emergency. Everyone’s on the run, headed south for some reason, but a lone radio broadcast tells them to go north instead.
Why? It’s never explained, but the children left behind do learn to care for themselves. They just have to work beneath the despotic rule of about four or five bullish guys. I don’t understand how a handful of athletes can run an entire village, with no weapons, either. It reminded me of a modern day version of Lord of the Flies, but even they had spears to run things.
Lastly, I didn’t understand the timeline. If everything happened in less than a year, how had the wildlife become so overgrown? How had the homes become dilapidated, as though abandoned for years? The children also lived as if something was out there, past the tunnel that leads away from their home. I saw nothing but a dead world and wild dogs.
The movie held my interest, but by a thread. It was nice to see Patrick Schwarzenegger in a film, but even he wasn’t enough to bring some punch to this picture. Go North, pretty much, went south for me.
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