Miracle Mile (1988) March 31st, 2024

Miracle Mile is a Cold War era thriller set in Los Angeles an hour or so before nuclear armageddon. Anthony Edwards intercepts a payphone call meant to warn the caller’s father about the impending apocalypse and to seek whatever shelter he could. Edwards spreads the word and the world falls into a panic as everyone everywhere begins choosing how to spend their last minutes alive. Some loot, some fight, others try to survive.

My experience with Miracle Mile was influenced heavily by having already seen Seeking a Friend for the End of the World starring Steve Carell and Kiera Knightly. They approach the same ideas with wildly different tones. Imagine if someone Parent Trapped an end of the world script but one was written and directed by Greta Gerwig and the other was written and directed by a sentient RedBox.

I spent most of my time watching Miracle Mile stressed out and irritated. Miracle Mile‘s strengths lie in its chaotic pacing and bleak vision of humanity’s final minutes but the plot focuses on Anthony Edwards’ desperate search for the woman he loves but just met. The contrived plot and subpar script drag a tensely directed thriller into the mud. I simply couldn’t relate to spending my last minutes on Earth harassing a woman I met hours earlier into spending her last minutes on Earth with me. I certainly would’ve related to a man confronted with a ticking clock to the end of the world desperately trying to reach his wife, children and parents more than a lovestruck acquaintance. That is, unless Miracle Mile is a date movie?

That’s the best I can make of it. Bring your prospective partner to see Miracle Mile in a dark secluded room where she’ll be subjected to bright lights and loud noises that put her into an artificially stressful state where she may experience temporary trauma bonding that accelerates your levels of intimacy and chances of copulation. Teenagers might not find a movie about adults desperately trying to reconnect with their parents during armageddon so arousing.

Their loss. As is Miracle Mile is one of those movies I never want to watch again. I hold out hope that somewhere, someone has written an insightful analysis explaining Miracle Mile‘s worth but I also have no plans to seek out such a review. I’m satisfied with just forgetting it until I inevitably watch and compare it to Don’t Look Up.