Plot
The film takes place in a single day and night. The film opens with the two main characters, Harry (Anthony Edwards) and Julie (Mare Winningham), meeting at the La Brea Tar Pits and immediately falling in love. After spending the afternoon together, they make a date to meet after her shift ends at midnight at a local coffee shop, but a power failure means Harry's alarm fails to wake him and Julie leaves for home.
When Harry awakes that night he realizes what's happened and rushes to the shop, arriving at 4 AM. Harry tries to call Julie on a pay phone, but only reaches her answering machine, where he leaves an apology. When the phone rings moments later he picks it up, hearing a frantic man telling his dad that nuclear war is about to break out in less than seventy minutes. When Harry finally gets a chance to talk and asks who's calling, the caller realizes he has dialled the wrong area code. Harry then hears him being arrested and presumably shot.
Harry, confused and not entirely convinced of the reality of the information, wanders back into the diner and tells the other customers what he's heard. One of the diners, a mysterious businesswoman (Denise Crosby) named Landa, calls a number of politicians in Washington on her Motorola DynaTAC and finds that they are all visiting South America at the same time. This convinces her that the information is most likely correct and she immediately charters several private jets out of LAX to an American base in a region in Antarctica with no rainfall. Most of the customers and staff leave with her in the owner's delivery van. Harry, unwilling to leave without Julie, arranges to meet at the airport and jumps from the truck.
Harry is helped and hindered by various strangers, who are initially unaware of the impending apocalypse. When he finds Julie and later tells her, she notes that there is no confirmation of the attack. Desperate to reach the airport, Harry finds a helicopter pilot (Brian Thompson) and tells him to meet them on the roof of the Mutual Benefit Life Building. Julie has also tried to find a pilot on her own, and in the moments it takes to find her, Los Angeles descends into violent chaos. There is still no confirmation any of this is real, and Harry wonders if he has sparked a massive false panic in the example of Chicken Little.
When they reach the top of the Mutual Benefit building they find the pad empty, and the roof manned only by a yuppie (Kurt Fuller) taking every drug he can find. Any doubts about a false alarm are eliminated when a warhead can be seen streaking across the sky. As they fear the end, the helicopter suddenly returns with the pilot badly wounded but fulfilling his promise to come back for them. After they lift off from the roof, several warheads hit and the EMP from the detonations causes the helicopter to crash into the La Brea Tar Pits.
As the helicopter sinks and the cabin fills with water, Harry tries to comfort Julie by saying someday they will be found and they will probably be put in a museum, or maybe they will take a direct hit and be turned into diamonds. Julie seems to take some hope in this, and the movie fades out as the water fills the compartment. A final explosion seems to imply a direct hit has taken place.
Read more about this topic: Miracle Mile (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)