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Armageddon Time Movie Review

Armageddon Time is a 2022 coming-of-age drama film directed by James Gray and starring Banks Repeta and Anthony Hopkins. It is a very solid and sweet, albeit far from great movie.

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“Sometimes kids at school say bad words about the black kids“

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The story follows a young Jewish-American boy who befriends a rebellious African-American classmate and begins to struggle with expectations from his family and growing up in a world of privilege, inequality and prejudice. This is pretty much an autobiographical take on Gray’s own childhood, which constitutes this whole new movement where many directors are making their own personal films. I am getting tired of it personally, but this one is at least less nostalgic than others.

Pretty much acting as the antithesis to Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Belfast’, Armageddon Time doesn’t take a rose-colored glasses approach to its storytelling. Instead, it is mostly grounded in reality while still not forgetting to be inspirational and sweet when that is needed of it. My main issue here was the lack of originality in its storyline. There is nothing here that we haven’t seen before, certainly the coming-of-age elements felt too familiar. As is typically the case for Gray movies, this one is also far from great or authentic, but is so well made throughout nonetheless.

The flick benefits from two surprisingly strong child performances in the form of Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb. Both are excellent in their respective roles and the boys’ friendship was super endearing and realistic. I personally did not care for the parents’ roles and I found the performances from Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway far from great, but it is Anthony Hopkins who stole the show here.

He plays the grandfather and the oldest patriarch of the family. Hopkins has some of the sweetest and most inspiring speeches in the film, literally being the movie’s beating heart. His final speech about racism and honoring your own heritage was wonderful.

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Armageddon Time does deal with the theme of racism and the American Dream itself, but it does so in these familiar, far from inspired beats. The overall storyline is well told and solid, but never truly remarkable. And that is how I would describe the entire film – it is consistently engaging and well made, but hardly striking in anything that it does. That also goes for the cinematography, which is tender and muted interestingly so, but the movie was never truly cinematic regardless.