Mark Reviews Movies: LAST JOURNEY OF PAUL W.R.

Last Journey of Paul W.R., Samuel Godwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

The world is on the verge of ending at the start of Last Journey of Paul W.R., writer/director Romain Quirot's visually engaging but hastily told science-fiction story. The futuristic world of the movie, as a rogue planet near Earth has devastated the environment and left the surviving humans to count down the days to the planet ending it all, is convincingly bleak. The story within that world, though, is in such a rush to introduce a lot of conceits, to keep up a chase, and to reach a conclusion that it's not nearly as convincing.

Opening as a children's story of sorts with juvenile drawings, we learn of the planet's arrival near Earth, humanity's effort to harness its energy, and the "Red Moon" starting a collision course with the world. A plan for one astronaut to travel to and destroy the destructive satellite was made, but just before the mission was to commence, said astronaut ran.

The astronaut, of course, is Paul (Hugo Becker), who is now hiding from soldiers and his father (played by Jean Reno), the man who harnessed the Red Moon's power and devised the plan to destroy the threat. Some flashbacks give us a vague sense of how the father believed the planet's energy could save his dying wife, how Paul developed some kind of foresight after being struck by lightning from the Red Moon, and how the future runaway astronaut, his father, and his older brother Eliott (Paul Hamy) are stuck in their shared grief. These ideas and emotional undercurrents are introduced but mostly bypassed.

It's all about the plot, which has Paul running, hiding, buying a hover-car to escape farther from a walled city that's the last bastion of civilization, and evading his father and the magnate's henchmen (who try to shoot and kill him, despite the fact that he's the only person who can accomplish the mission the save the world). Along the way, he meets and is helped by Elma (Lya Oussadit-Lessert), a young girl who's also grieving a lost mother and who says she knows the location of a forest that Paul has seen in his visions. The astronaut is later chased by Eliott, too, who travels to the Red Moon and, after failing to destroy it, gains the power to manipulate minds.

The movie is an expansion of a short film the filmmaker previously made, and one can sense its origin in how scant both the content and context of the narrative are. With Last Journey of Paul W.R., Quirot displays a sense of world-building that's both fantastical and grounded, but without a thoughtful tale to carry it, the movie feels like a tour through some exceptional design, decent visual effects, and a load of ideas in need of much more development.

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