The hectic, ominous vibration of giant power lines and shuddering transmission towers resonates like a Greek chorus throughout Paul Greengrass's intense new wildfire thriller, The Lost Bus. Throughout the film, Greengrass frequently cuts to the moving wires and metal structures, as well as the roaring flames of the 2018 Camp Fire, as it spreads across the mountains and cliffs of Northern California.
This helps us follow the spread of this real-life disaster and also conveys the insignificance and helplessness of the mortals fighting it. Based on true stories from the Camp Fire (which remains the deadliest wildfire in California history), The Lost Bus, which just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival before a brief theatrical release in September and its October 3 debut on Apple TV+, offers plenty of suspense and heroism. But it's all tempered by the certainty that these fires are inevitable, growing, and unstoppable.
Director: Paul Greengrass
Writers: Brad Ingelsby, Paul Greengrass, Lizzie Johnson
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez
At its core, The Lost Bus is a disaster movie—a great one at that—and it has some of the classic disaster-movie moves, plus a somewhat punchy narrative designed to introduce the characters quickly and efficiently. Greengrass cycles through various settings and characters, including the firefighters trying to deal with this rapidly deteriorating situation, but the central narrative resides with Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a struggling school bus driver in Paradise, California, who returned here after his life fell apart elsewhere.
Kevin is already having one of the worst days of his life even before everything burns down: his dog is dying, his teenage son is home sick (and hates him), his mother is old and out of sorts, and his ex-wife is nagging him on the phone. He's also missed inspection appointments for his bus, he's running out of money, and his supervisor thinks he's kind of weird. However, once the flames roar into town, Kevin will be the only one in a position to navigate a bus full of elementary school children, along with their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), through the totally biblical flames to safety. It's like Speed meets the end of the world.
McConaughey was made for roles like this: the good guy facing extraordinary circumstances. He knows exactly how to present this character and his desperation, not with confidence, but with a "screw the torpedoes, I'll try anything once" bravado. Honestly, they should cast him in every disaster movie. Plus, he's a perfect fit for Ferrera, whose teacher must project calm for the sake of her children while, not so secretly, freaking out inside. (Both Kevin and Mary have their own children elsewhere for whom they're also terribly worried.) As everything crumbles around them, in ways both large and small, we enjoy watching these two polar opposites clash and argue, then learn to function as a team.
The film is something of a homecoming for Greengrass, who cut his teeth in the world of groundbreaking TV documentaries before helping to redefine modern action cinema with the urgency of hits like The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. The director also brought that approach to docudramas like United 93, Captain Phillips, and 22nd of July (as well as his previous, masterful Bloody Sunday, the film that catapulted him to fame in 2002). But the shaky-cam style petered out a few years ago; his last work was Tom Hanks's towering, classic Western, News of the World, a beautiful film whose release was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In The Missing Bus, Greengrass combines his thriller side with his reporter side. He films Kevin, Mary, and the schoolchildren's journey through the hellish fire as an all-out action spectacle, full of immediacy and wonder, with narrow escapes and incredible visions of destruction. (Frankly, it's a shame The Missing Bus doesn't have a wider theatrical release; it was clearly intended as a cinematic experience.) Some incidents have been a little sensationalized, but Kevin and Mary's heroism was very real, as evidenced by Lizzie Johnson's exhaustively researched and absorbing 2021 nonfiction book, Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, on which the film is loosely based.
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