Maybe I’m not the right person to provide a review of Leave the World Behind, the Sam Esmail apocalyptic film starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon that is topping the charts at Netflix this week. I’m going to struggle to be objective about two major facets of the movie without which it wouldn’t exist.

First, I have very little patience with end-of-the-world films, and this is very much that. I find them repetitive and largely misanthropic, but, more than that, it’s the dishonesty and poorly hidden agendas, particularly coming from Hollywood, that rankle about that genre.

And second, Barack and Michelle Obama are listed as executive producers of Leave the World Behind, and the former president is said to have provided copious notes on the story, an adaptation of the Rumaan Alam bestselling 2020 novel.

It’s Esmail’s story; he made major changes to the plot and characters from the book. But not much of Leave the World Behind would seem out of place from the expectation had this been a soup-to-nuts Barack Obama production.

Then again, that applies to most of what the film industry has on offer these days, as the Obama effect on American culture, politics, and economics — as I discuss quite thoroughly in the new, soon-to-be-bestselling Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama — has been far more complete than his merits dictate.

And, in this film, we have literal involvement in the production by Obama himself. It isn’t just the fact that Leave the World Behind’s director and much of the cast are friends and admirers; Obama helped to craft the script.

So this can be said to be Barack Obama’s idea of an apocalyptic movie. Nothing about it is a surprise.

I’ll try to do this without too many spoilers, as it’s not a wholly awful movie and, given the dearth of anything watchable these days, it’s conceivable that many of our readers will take the plunge into it.

But you can certainly see this as a film that depicts America from the Obama worldview. Leave the World Behind features the tale, essentially, of two New York families — one white, the other black — who are thrown together amid a nationwide blackout courtesy of a cyberattack or … something.

The white family, the Sandfords, played by Julia Roberts as Amanda, the advertising executive wife, and Clay, the city college professor husband, along with a teenaged son and a younger daughter, are well-off Brooklynites who book a Long Island mansion for a weekend getaway. They’re the typical white family presented on television — Clay, played by Hawke, is a classic non-capable beta male in flip-flops who largely goes to pieces as evidence mounts of society’s crumbling, while Amanda is a classic misanthropic AWFL who hates her life and distrusts everyone around her.

Including, particularly at the beginning, the Scotts — a father/daughter combo played by Ali as George and Myha’la Herrold as Ruth. They’re black, and George is a high-end Wall Street fund manager/analyst who actually owns the vacation home the Sandfords have rented. They arrive at the house on the first night after the Sandfords settle in, asking to share the accommodations due to a blackout in the city.

Things have already begun to descend, as the Sandfords have a day at the beach spoiled by the arrival of a wayward oil tanker that steams right up onto the beach, apparently as a function of a GPS failure. Couple that with the loss of cable TV and internet signals, and there is no information coming in about the outside world.

So when the Scotts arrive, the Sandfords are already on edge. And with Ruth Scott copping an attitude that rubs Amanda entirely the wrong way, we’re off to an uncomfortable start. Naturally, there is a heavy pile-on of racial animus — you can’t imagine the Obamas being involved in a film project that doesn’t scratch at the racial itch, can you?

Three of the four adults are mostly unlikable characters. George, who despite his capitalist background gives off a fairly thick Barack Obama vibe, is intensely likable. We find out that his art-dealer wife, who might be white, was scheduled to fly home from Morocco the day the blackout happened, and he assumes he’ll never see her again. But that’s mostly the extent of his vulnerability; he exudes the kind of aloof cool that Obama was acclaimed for throughout his presidency, even when things go completely to hell later in the film.

And then there’s Bacon’s character Danny, the survivalist-nut home construction contractor who turns out to have a plurality of the answers. Danny, who appears in only two scenes, is presented the way Republicans are by the Obama Democrat narrative: He’s utterly selfish and mean-spirited, and he rejects any semblance of cooperation until he’s bought off late in the story.

Watching the interaction between Ali, Hawke, and Bacon in what’s supposed to be the film’s climactic scene, I couldn’t help but think of Obama’s frequent attacks on conservatism as an atomized, selfish ideology divorced from any concept of the civil society that Western civilization — the thing conservatism is trying to preserve against attacks from the Obamunists — is built on. He did this over and over during his presidency, and that comes across as heavily in Leave the World Behind, as does the conspicuous absence of any semblance of God or religion amid the end of the world.

Very little of the apocalypse is explained. It just happens largely out of nowhere while the characters are at the beach. Leaflets indicating Islamic terrorism is afoot are dropped out of a drone aircraft, and there is a scene where self-driving white Teslas (gosh, no obvious, ham-handed metaphors there!) crash into a massive pileup on the only road leading back to civilization. There’s a panicked Spanish-speaking woman who accosts Clay along a desolate road as he finds a way to get lost on an island, and because he doesn’t speak Spanish he simply drives away and heads back to the vacation house without finding out any useful information at all. There are not one but two unexplained plane crashes along a beach, with no one coming even to gawk at the wreckage.

And there are animals acting strangely. And an inexplicable illness without much of any context or usefulness to the plot other than to put the Sandfords and Scotts in conflict with Danny.

It’s like a bad version of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, with the difference being that while Shyamalan’s plot twists and endings generally leak out too early in the film to generate a real payoff, in Leave the World Behind there is no payoff at all. I won’t give away the ending, but the vast majority of those who watch it are sure to find it vacant and unsatisfying.

Just like Obama’s presidency, one might say.

Apocalyptic movies — particularly those that depict the apocalypse happening — are suspect as a class because they so commonly come from the perspective that society deserves its own destruction. Leave the World Behind isn’t quite clay-footed in presenting that view, but it’s there, and it’s irritating to watch. Here are people who have profited beyond any rational expectation from the society in which we live, and yet they come off as gleeful to see it go. And in this film, it goes in a way in which a civilizational collapse would almost certainly not go — namely, with hardly any people around.

There isn’t much tragedy in Leave the World Behind, for all the destruction it depicts. Perhaps that’s because the real tragedy is the entitled nihilism the film advertises in such a non-subtle way.

It’s Esmail’s movie, but it feels as though it’s Obama’s. And the bleak, misanthropic hostility of the production toward its audience and our society bears his stamp regardless of how extensive his role in making it actually was.

It isn’t the worst film you’ll see this year, but it doesn’t quite reward you for watching it, either. Rather, it’ll leave you desperate for a Hallmark Christmas movie as a palate-cleanser.

If this is what we’re going to get from the Obamas as executive producers, then I’d have to say that less is more.

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