The story of a marine who returns from Afghanistan to find an unidentified disaster has made a wasteland of the US is unbearably self-important

An oppressive cloud of macho self-pity hangs over this muddled and overwrought movie, which involves a cliched narrative device that is glib and unsatisfying.

Shia LeBeouf is Gabe, a US marine corps veteran traumatised by service in Afghanistan, where he has been involved in a brutal incident with civilians and upset by a personal discovery during his Skype calls home. To his horror, he returns to the US to find it has been overtaken by some unnamed catastrophe – rendered by pretty standard-issue, digitally created wrecked landscapes – and sets out with his army buddy Dev (Jai Courtney) to find his young son somewhere in this no man’s land.

The metaphorical properties of this desolation are naturally apparent, but what is more interesting at first is the mystery of how Dev and Gabe came to return here, dropped into the middle of this postapocalyptic wasteland, without any clue as to what exactly has happened. As the film grinds on, its laborious flashback structure seems to bring us no nearer to solving that issue, or to persuading us that it’s interesting. It’s unbearably self-important and heavy-handed.