It’s the last day of philosophy class at an international school in Djakarta. Rather than let the 20 pupils coast, the slyly manipulative and smugly cruel teacher poses a series of philosophical challenges based around a single conceit: that the world is about to be flattened by nuclear war, and the students must decide which of their number gets one of the 10 berths in the fallout shelter.
It’s not a great movie, though it is an interesting one. I kind of like these philosophical questions – would you rescue the artists or the scientists? – and I liked the movie’s resolutions, even though I wouldn’t have voted that way myself, come the apocalypse. I wondered about the location too: Indonesia seems a completely random setting for these bright-eyed foreign kids (graduates of Hogwarts and East High, it would seem) to be whiling away a semester. It looks great on screen though, and scenes are the Prambanan Temple in Yogjakarta are particularly impressive. Worth a watch, if only to disagree.