Welcome to my worst nightmare
Welcome to my worst nightmare
You'll never want to go cruising after seeing this...
Good morning! I’ve found something that’s going to ruin your day completely and thoroughly - a horrifying documentary detailing what it was like on board a cruise ship suffering one of the world’s first, and worst, Covid-19 outbreaks outside of China. Yes, it’s as bad as that sounds - and probably a whole lot worse. Let’s go…
It’s a terrifying prison film from which no one can escape. It’s a horrifying pandemic movie in which people die alone and scared. It’s a relentless hostage situation in which no one can leave their tiny confinements.
In The Last Cruise, an onslaught of home videos are lined up, one after the next, each more desperate than the last, piling misery on top of misery until it all feels absolutely unbearable.
It’s all real. It all happened. Yet it doesn’t go far enough.
Welcome to life onboard the Diamond Princess, a first-class cruise ship that, in February, 2020, suffered the first major outbreak of Covid-19 outside of China.
More than 700 people were infected, and 14 of them died. This 40-minute expose shows exactly what life was like for passengers and crew as they waited for meals, for help, for information, for sickness, for death, for anything, while exiled off the coast off the coast of Japan, near Yokohama.
It gets bad. Real bad. Remember all of those found-footage horror films that were massively popular about 10 years ago? Called things like Cloverfield and Chronicle, they were full of shaky cameras and grainy images that looked like they might be real. People died in those movies, but it was all make-believe.
This is that. Only it’s real.
Eight per cent of The Last Cruise, which is available for viewing via Neon now, is made up of cellphone footage from those quarantined aboard the ship, the crew and cruise guests that made up the ship’s population of 3711. No one had anything else to do, so they filmed themselves making anxious and worried ruminations while stuck in a vortex, then posted them to Facebook and YouTube.
It morphs from happy cruise ship activities, like hotel buffets and birthday parties, to nervous mask wearing to sheer terror in mere minutes. The captain’s eerie Covid-19 orders and updates, issued over a loudspeaker to empty swimming pools while everyone is stuck in their rooms, sound like they could be scripted. Only they’re not.
So it’s a shame that The Last Cruise doesn’t dive deeper than its basic retelling of what happened. There are interviews with both crew and guests recounting the events, but they’re not incisive enough. Mostly, this incredible GQ feature, Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess, is used as the show’s blueprint, but it uses the same people and misses out crucial details.
The footage is great, but you’ll probably learn more from that GQ feature. The military flight that evacuated Americans off the ship and out of Japan sounds like the most horrific part of this whole appalling situation. But in the film, it’s only glossed over briefly. Here’s one excerpt, of many, of what it was like to be on that plane…
Sounds like a whole Woodstock 99 situation, right? Yet, by the end, I had more questions I wanted answered. Where’s the ship now? What’s going to happen to the cruise industry? Will any of those who worked on cruise ships keep doing so? Where are they, and what are they doing, now?
I just wanted more, and that’s not the feeling a good documentary should leave you with - no matter how horrifying the images are.
Everything else you need to worry about this week…
The Suicide Squad is out this Thursday and trust me, if you like a little bit of the old ultra-violence, this is the film for you. The cast is massive, the gags are huge, the hit count is high, and Sylvester Stallone plays a talking shark. I’m not kidding…
On Friday, you’ll be able to stream Val, the super emotional Val Kilmer documentary made after the actor’s cancer scare. It’s on Amazon Prime Video.
Here’s the first image from Amazon’s Lord of the Rings. It doesn’t tell us much.
If you’ve ever been a wrestling fan, Dark Side of the Ring is a fascinating look at some of the biggest names in the business - and the seedy underbelly of it all. If you’re wondering where to start, the Undertaker episode is incredible. The third season just started on Neon.
Tickets for Shihad’s New Zealand tour go on sale today (don’t be fooled by the $263 tickets available on Viagogo - we’ve alread talked about this) and I am definitely nabbing some. The new stuff sounds heavy as - perfect for some live metal catharsis after the past 18 months.
Finally, check out the trailer for The North Water, a grim yarn about some repulsive whalers doing terrible things while out at sea. Colin Farrell plays an absolute psycho and he put on a hell of a lot of weight for this role. He’s terrifying. I hope we can watch this one soon…