Nightmare Fuel / These Final Hours

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

These Final Hours begin with a meteor strike. Then you have 12 hours left on Earth and you're living on the last continent to not be lit ablaze by the fireball that will inevitably reach you. What will you do in those last few hours of your life?

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• The entire premise. A meteor strike has struck the Earth in the North Atlantic and unlike other meteor-strike films like Deep Impact or Armageddon (1998), the fireball from the impact approaches in a snail-like pace. So basically, even in places that are furthest from the impact, you will die knowing that you, your friends, your family, and everyone you dearly loved will burn to a cinder in a matter of hours.
• The radio man of VK6DF radio station. Aside from being the Mr. Exposition of the movie, his despondent and resigned attitude impacts hard when he details what has happened before the events of the film. He details that North America, the UK, Africa, and many other places have lost contact from the ensuing firestorm, before hammering home that his nation Australia will be the last one to be incinerated, and above all else, the remainder of all life on Earth.
  • His despondent voice, accompanied with the detail he states about the current statuses and conditions around Australia and the world as the film progresses, creates the atmospheric tone of the film being pure Despair Event Horizon.
• The Australian population after the meteor strike. Almost everyone turned chaotic when they realise that they're going to die in less than 12 hours, some of them breaking down repenting to their God(s), to others going full-violent against neighbours and other people. The intro illustrates how much society has broken down in at least Perth and when the main character gets accosted and hunted down by a machete-wielding man.
  • Others decided that, instead of waiting for 12 hours until the fireball strikes their nation, they resorted to killing themselves with their families and loved ones just to spare themselves the inevitable suffering.
    • It's interesting to note that the only children we ever see, besides Rose, are the girls in the library, whose father is desperately trying to work up the nerve to give them a painless death. Where are all the other kids? Probably some are being kept inside to keep them safe from the anarchy, but it's implied that many parents didn't want to let them suffer through the apocalypse.
• Rose's kidnappers, and the horrifying implications to her if James didn't save her.
• It is apparent that law and order (and to the extent the Australian Government) is no longer influencing the general public, as aside from the depictions of anarchy and violence, even those who have sworn to uphold the law have now joined the nihilistic masses of either doing something they wanted to do or just end it all.
  • In one scene, a police officer and his family arrived at an abandoned library in their police car where his wife brings the kids inside so she'll read a story to them....while the father loads up his pistol so he'll shoot his kids at the back of the head. At first, he wanted James to do the deed while he and his wife read a story to the kids, but James refuses, so the officer simply asked for forgiveness from James and and latter does so, before reluctantly proceeding with the plan. It then shows the final shot of the library as James and Rose drove away. No gunflash, no gunfire, just the sound of the main characters' car just driving away.
  • It's also made clear in the viral videos released prior to the film's debut that it was known 6 months in advance that there was an asteroid on course to impact with Earth, with the Australian Prime Minister being notably unavailable during this period. Either their plans to avert the disaster failed, or there was simply nothing that could be done.
    • The PM may have been aware in the second instance and decided not to hang around.
• The party scene. Everyone's about to die, and they all know it, so what's the final solution? go full on hedonistic and party till their hearts' delight. Fun, but still not without some uneasy moments.
  • One brief moment shows two guys playing a game of Russian Roulette, one decided to pull the trigger and blows his brains out whilst splattering the Australian flag. Given the circumstances, it doesn't matter if you get the chamber with the bullet, although maybe your death is quick and painless, a far cry of an unstoppable firestorm.
  • The woman in the party that keeps harassing Rose. She thinks that Rose is apparently her daughter Mandy and tries to take her away from James while he confronts his other girlfriend. She even goes so far as to give her drugs (implied to be MDMA) which caused Rose to be severely sick, all just so she could be her 'Mandy'.
  • Making the woman above even more unsettling is that we already see parents in the film prepare to kill their children or who have already done so, to give them a quick and painless death. It's quite possible that the women did that to her own daughter and ended up having a complete psychotic break as a result and now she desperately believes that Rose is Mandy. Or she could be a woman whose daughter was taken by the kind of people Rose was but wasn't lucky enough to have anyone save her, resulting in the same. Or she could simply be an unstable woman imagining the daughter she will never get to have. Whatever her backstory, the implications are unsettling to say the least.
  • Vicki's Doomsday bunker for her, her brother, and James. Despite being stocked with rations for all three of them, James instead gave her a Brutal Honesty, stating that the bunker is not sufficient to save themselves from the firestorm, as it needs to be more deeper and reinforced just to be safe from the intense heat of the meteor strike. Knowing this, Vicki breaks down infront of James because she doesn't want to die from the fate that everyone on Earth will have to face, thus reinforcing the fact that there is no chance of survival anywhere else on Earth, no matter how well you are prepared for a doomsday scenario like this.
  • James trying to escort Rose out of the party but gets accosted by the woman, which when Vicki grabs a gun and aims at James and Rose, the woman aggressively tells her that he's trying to take "Mandy" away from her. Instead of shooting James for spurning her however, she luckily kills the woman just to give them easy access out of there.
• The final shot, Australia's 12 hours is up, and the inevitable firestorm approaches the last remaining landmass, so James and Zoe decided to forgive and embrace one another as they face their inevitable death, all the while incinerating what is left of Earth's life.