The first half of Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus presents the oncoming tragedy of the 2018 Camp Fire as a journey of self-actualization for protagonist Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a bus driver who strives to work hard and provide for his family. Yet, everyone is literally “out to get him.”
He’s essentially painted as a hard-working father who is one step away from ruining his — and everyone else’s — life, in constant, anxiety-riddled days, where he has to beg for overtime and do everything by himself to care for his family. In his professional life, Kevin’s Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson) is always on his case, asking him to submit his timesheet on time and consistently reminding Kevin through various communication channels that he must bring his bus in for maintenance; otherwise, he will be fired.
But in his personal life, things aren’t going well. He has recently been separated, which creates a sense of friction with his son, Shaun (Levi McConaughey), who verbatim tells his dad, “I wish you were dead.” That’s not fun, and it's definitely not a nurturing environment where Kevin tries his best to ensure his son has a future, while his son doesn’t want anything to do with his father.
On top of that, Kevin has to take care of his ailing mother (Kay McCabe McConaughey) after the passing of his estranged father, whom he hadn’t spoken to for about 20 years. Oh, and he has to euthanize his dog, who’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer. That feels like the cherry on top of this first half of misery porn, when it should theoretically lure us into the protagonist’s life and make us understand why he, above all else, was not a figure that could’ve pulled off the feat he was about to accomplish during the fires.
This succession of events forces us to feel sorry for him before the fire even arrives, on the day when his son falls ill and has a fever! As if things couldn’t get any worse for the guy!
At some point, you have to dial the dramatic tension down; otherwise, it becomes too much for the viewer to assimilate. How much can an audience member take in so little time before it becomes purely ridiculous? Greengrass doesn’t care, because as much as McKay’s story may be true, the Bourne Supremacy filmmaker stages these sequences of intense drama with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, either in its performances or lines of dialogue. It becomes completely improbable — unintentionally hilarious, even — before any real-life disaster occurs.
McConaughey does his best and seems to enjoy sharing the screen with his real-life son and mother. Unfortunately, the screenplay, co-written by Greengrass and Brad Ingelsby, completely betrays any sense of realism that the Captain Phillips director aims to capture.
A button-pushing approach to a harrowing true story
Within his “real-life” movies, and perhaps even the installments he directed for the Jason Bourne franchise, Greengrass employs a documentary-style approach, where the erratic camera observes our protagonists facing harrowing situations in the most naturalistic and intimate way possible. In The Lost Bus, we must believe that the characters Greengrass depicts are flesh-and-blood human beings who were able to surpass insurmountable odds and embody a symbol of hope and resilience during the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California's history.
Instead, however, we get a dismally manipulative drama that prefers to exploit real-life horrors as an “Apple TV+ cinematic event” for awards consideration, rather than depicting this terrifying moment in history with as much compassion and humanity as possible.
I can use a thousand examples to prove my point. However, the most blatant one occurs early on in the movie, with Greengrass and cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth showcasing how the fire was formed by shifting perspectives and giving us its point of view. Yes, you’ve read this correctly, the camera embodies the fire’s point of view.
While that may theoretically work, how these shots are consistently intercut with close-ups of children screaming in agony, as the fire slowly makes its way to them, is incredibly insidious and morally questionable. This is a film that doesn’t want to depict the event as it happened, through the cinematic language, but one that wants to push buttons at every turn, so you feel sorry for the bevy of characters that are stuck inside the school bus McKay drives in the middle of what is undoubtedly a total inferno.
The fire started due to a combination of natural factors, including strong wind gusts and a prolonged period of over 200 days without rainfall. It was eventually revealed that Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) did not comply with state laws and turn off their power supply, which could’ve prevented the fire from starting in the first place.
An investigation revealed that the fire originated from a faulty steel hook, which created sparks on a surface where the risk of combustion was extremely high. Since every piece of land was dried up, it easily spread. In this case, Greengrass not only has the opportunity to discuss the ravaging effects of climate change, but also the lack of responsibility — and impunity — by gas companies regarding their role in contributing to the current situation.
We do get segments where Yul Vazquez’s Ray Martinez, Cal Fire battalion chief, yells at a PG&E spokesperson for their negligence. Eventually, he speaks to the camera and asks audiences what exactly we, as a collective, are doing, letting the planet consume itself like that, and not giving a damn about preventing it in the first place. That’s as far as he goes.
We spend the bulk of the movie’s 130-minute runtime inside the bus, with Kevin, who agrees to transport a group of children to a safe location at the Chico fairgrounds, and the teacher, Ms. Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), who accompanies the students through one of the most traumatic moments in their lives.
Tragedy gets turned into a theme park ride
This wouldn’t be a problem if the dialogue weren’t so perfunctory and pitifully clichéd. Variations of “There’s no way out. We’re stuck here.” are repeated ad nauseam, as are the “Are we close to our parents?” line that attempts to draw up some human stakes, but only treats the children as mere props inside Kevin’s path to becoming a better person.
Greengrass employs significantly more visual effects in this movie than in any of his other projects combined, which isn’t terrible considering how dynamic his camera is at plunging the audience into the hellscape. I particularly found mounted shots on fire planes effective, though not as artful as in Joseph Kosinski’s Only the Brave, which is possibly the best firefighting drama made in our post-digital times.
Yet, the “fire POV” segments never sat right with me. It’s one thing to document, through a semi-fictionnalized setting, the cause of the fire, and to represent the extent of its power, but it’s another to use it as a vehicle for tension-building, as it continuously intercuts with shots of the engulfing flames getting closer to the children, like an omniscient force, and the kids crying their hearts out in the bus. The dramatic power of those scenes is diluted because we’re forced to go along with the movie’s version of evoking terror in the children by embodying the oncoming flame, rather than entirely adopting the docudrama approach for which Greengrass is most known.
But the most distressingly terrible part occurs when the urgency of the situation is intensified, when Greengrass continuously puts adult characters in harm’s way, such as a ridiculously over-the-top sequence, worthy of Mick Jackson’s Volcano, that sees Mary leave the bus while the fire is raging even more significantly to find some water.
Of course, this is futile, but what she doesn’t know is that a propane tank is about to explode, which could put the children on the bus in even greater danger than they already are. It’s a real-life horror story transformed into pure action movie entertainment, where the disaster is not depicted as a monstrous force caused by human negligence, but in the vein of a Universal Studios interactive theme park ride.
The climax, in particular, is indicative of this, where the entirely CGI bus attempts to drive through the purely virtual fire, removing any ounce of texture that Greengrass so desperately wants to have, either in the relationship between Kevin and Mary or in how his familial story is depicted. Again, McConaughey does solid work, but he’s betrayed by a screenplay that doesn’t give any depth whatsoever to Kevin’s path within this harrowing journey, and puts him at the forefront of sending kids into the worst theme park ride of their lives, which it absolutely was not in real life.
Similarly, Ferrera’s Mary is a one-dimensional shell of a professorial character who sadly never receives the development – or agency – she deserves throughout this tale of resilience and survival. The two have solid chemistry together, but the movie never gives us a compelling reason to care about them, because we immediately know how the shared traumatic experience will overcome their personal struggles they will have on that bus, as they drive through the flames with the hope they will eventually make it to where the sky is blue.
It renders the telegraphed emotional ending unearned and offers no tangible point at which we truly care for anyone on screen, because their stories are used as vehicles to win awards. The sincerity of Greengrass’s previous works is entirely gone, and all that remains are competent visual effects, in service of peril sequences that feel too digital to have an impact, and a welcome return to the screen (in live-action form) for Matthew McConaughey. If only the film that supports this deserved comeback from one of our most treasured Hollywood talents were good…