Review of Armageddon Time (2022), directed by James Gray

Armageddon Time was one of those movies I was mildly interested in seeing in theaters when it came out because of the trailers. The trailer wasn’t good enough to make me super invested in it, but I was interested because of the themes it seemed to be grappling with throughout those brief two minutes.

I also do genuinely like Anne Hathaway and the kinds of roles she tends to pick, so that may have been why as well. But because I wasn’t invested in the movie, I kept booking a ticket with my AMC A List and then cancelling it, which is why I never ended up seeing the movie at the end of the day.

But then, when I was aimlessly wandering my library to burn the time before I had to drive to work, I ended up seeing several DVD copies of Armageddon Time in the new section of DVDs.

Out of curiosity, and because they basically have five renewals that give you months to end up watching the movie, I picked up one of the DVDs, and, somehow, I didn’t procrastinate on watching it at all. I watched it in the same week I checked it out, even though I wasn’t impressed by the movie at all. It’s an okay movie, but the script needed work.

Before I spill too much, onwards with the review!

A young Jewish boy in New York grapples with racism, his coming-of-age, and family issues.

Our protagonist in Armageddon Time is Paul, and, despite his teacher being super dry and by the book, Paul manages to piss him off with his disobedience. He’s doing classic little boy things to get the attention and validation from his class, which ultimately lands him in trouble.

It’s through this that he ends up befriending a Black boy in his class, Johnny, who gets more aggressive reactions to basically the same things he does as Paul—it becomes obvious that the teacher is being racist, and Johnny has been held back in school because of it. He’s older than his fellow students in the sixth grade.

The setting for all of this is Queens, New York, during the eighties. Paul’s got a big Jewish family, and they own a house in Queens, which is why he goes to this school in particular. His older brother goes to a fancy private school that several New York elite ended up going to in New York, including the Trumps, and his mother, Esther, wants Paul to succeed just as well.

She ends up becoming the head of the PTA. Both of Paul’s parents are exasperated with him, as they don’t want him to follow his dream of becoming an artist. At the same time, Paul has a very good relationship with his grandfather, his mother’s father, and he encourages him when no one else will.

However, his relationship with Johnny teases out Paul’s more rebellious nature. We learn that Johnny’s home situation isn’t the greatest, and because of it that’s probably why he's also seen as inferior compared to his fellow classmates. He lives with his grandmother, who is barely able to take care of him.

The two friends go on a school field trip to the Guggenheim with their teacher and classmates, where Paul lives out a dream where he is a world-famous artist exhibiting in the museum, and they then sneak off to go places in Midtown Manhattan. On the subway, Johnny is harassed by two other Black boys older than him, leading him to lash out at Paul and taking off.

Things get worse when Johnny convinces Paul to smoke with him in the school bathroom while he’s in detention and cleaning art brushes. They’re caught by their uptight teacher, Paul’s mother defends him in front of the principal but then berates him in private, and he’s banned from being friends with Johnny.

His father beats him that night while his mother looks uncomfortable about the fact on the stairwell, and his parents make the executive decision to transfer him to his brother’s private school although the cost is going to be higher for the household.

Johnny comes to see Paul at recess one day, but the students at the school are racist and openly calling him slurs in front of Paul. He tells his grandfather eventually, who tells him about anti-Semitism that happened in Europe, as the reason why the family is there is because of how his grandfather’s mother escaped from Ukraine in to get away from religious persecution.

Meanwhile, at Paul’s school, they’re getting speeches from the Trump family members about how they work harder than other people from lower socioeconomic statuses, and that they will be the future of the country and the wealthy elite—when they kind of already are.

Johnny ends up living in Paul’s barn at one point, and Paul, hoping to help his friend and leave everything behind, tries to convince him to steal a computer from his school.

They succeed in doing so, but get caught in the process of selling it. Johnny takes the fall for Paul, ends up being arrested, and the movie ends with the school getting another speech from a Trump, this time Fred. Paul, who already was kind of against this system to begin with, ends the movie with not believing anything that’s being said.

Overall Thoughts

I can see how Armageddon Time can be biographical at times, as the director, James Gray, supposedly made the movie inspired by experiences he had as a child.

And while I can understand how he centralizing his own perspective in all of this, the movie doesn’t do the greatest job of depicting relationships between those of different races. While his grandfather offers nuggets of wisdom when it comes to accepting other people and races, Paul’s parents directly defy that expectation themselves.

Paul also will never truly be able to understand the consequences of his actions because he isn’t Black, especially because Johnny condemned himself to Juvie. It’s got some nice visual moments, but this feels outdated to me. I understand the biographical elements, again, but that doesn’t make it okay how it ended.

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