- Director
- Hannah Olson
- Rating
- TV-14
- Running Time
- 40 minutes
- Release Date
- March 30th, 2021 (HBO)
Overall Score
Rating Summary
This will be one of many reviews during this year’s SXSW Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.
The influx of pandemic-related content continues with one that many viewers may be familiar with being the saga of the Diamond Princess a cruise ship which was the site of the first major COVID-19 outbreak outside of China. The Last Cruise is a short but still very stressful documentary covering the crisis aboard the Diamond Princess and the sheer mismanagement by various governments and businesses that followed and the lack of preparation it unearthed. That being said, a pandemic such as this one was unprecedented therefore it’d be hard for anyone to adequately prepare for an event such as this one. Through intimate access with both passengers and crew aboard the ship, we watched as they followed the news of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and never thinking that anything would ever happen to them as we did before it did which we are still dealing with to this day.
What came about following the arrival of COVID-19 onto the Diamond Princess has to be one of the most stressful watches this year so far. The contrast between the hopeful start and what came later was still a shocking one despite already knowing what would come next. As the passengers and crew were essentially left to fend for themselves while operating the ship as usual all while not knowing anything about what was going to happen next was hard to watch in different ways as the division between its majority white passengers and poor Indonesian crew became very apparent. One can’t help but feel hopeless along with them as the number of infections and deaths continued to rise until hope finally came. Though this saga still continues for some of the passengers and crew, be it PTSD or other traumas, it felt good to see it end for some of them.
In the end, The Lat Cruise may not be an easy watch but it is an important one.
still courtesy of WarnerMedia
If you liked this, please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook.
The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
