If You Were the Last is a sci-fi rom-com that people seem to like… as someone who doesn’t understand hu-mans, I’m at a bit of a loss. I didn’t think much of this film or its two leads… I didn’t get why they were interesting as individuals or why anything they had to say (or do) to each other interesting either.

The flick stars Anthony Mackie and Zoe Chao as two stranded astronauts with no hope of rescue. They get along fine playing chess, riding stationary bikes, watching movies, and debating the financial realities of rescuing Matt Damon. They eventually start wondering if they should have sex.

The film’s aesthetics are deliberately cheesy… the “special FX” of their lost space craft are literally cardboard and the interior look nothing like a ship (and are sometimes cardboard too). All this is kind of cool… an arched eyebrow at how unimportant the sci-fi part of the rom-com actually is. They could be trapped in a well for all it matters.

So, fine. The movie has to live and die on whether these two are cute, charismatic, and interesting enough. And they largely aren’t? They aren’t offensively bad… they just left me with very little to hang onto. There’s a cute moment here and there but mostly I found it pretty humdrum.

The final act is just a countdown to what you know is going to happen and it goes on for too long. It’s actually the reason I’m giving it a lower rating than originally planned. It got boring. Dull. Repetitive. Predictable.

Everyone else who watches it seems to like it so clearly I’m just not connecting on a human level. <shrug> I’ll have to recalibrate my matrices and establish a new algorithm for understanding the species. Figures.

Score: 69