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In a blend of the elements which made Cast Away and The Omega Man so successful, The Quiet Earth deals with after-the-fact questions about global isolation, questions that not even the TV movie version of Stephen King's The Stand could properly address: what happens when you're stuck with only so many people when the world ends? How are the lines redrawn, if at all? How do you hold up to the immense pressure of solitude, especially when you yourself may have been responsible? And how do you handle the threat of the entire thing happening all over again? The Quiet Earth addresses all these issues and then some in a more or less linear fashion in a deep piece of work that is heavier on the fiction than it is on the science fiction.
New Zealand scientist Zac Hobson
(Bruno Lawrence) wakes up one morning to find
himself the last person on earth, with everyone mysteriously vanished, as if
they had vaporized. He investigates at his lab and comes to the conclusion
that the project he'd been working on somehow ripped a hole in time and space,
resulting in what he calls The Event. Hobson struggles with his solitude for a
while, indulging in everything from wearing women's clothing to confessing his
complicity to an audience of cardboard cutouts, which suggests little to an
American audience, but the real thrust of the movie comes when he meets the
lovely young Joanne (Alisson Routeledge) and, later, the guerrilla warrior Api
(Pete Smith). At this point, then, the film deals in science fiction, romance,
sociological and racial commentary and a serious investigation into the phrase
"playing God." (It isn't enough that Hobson was an accomplice to the end of
the world--at one point, he stalks a church with a pump-action shotgun and
trains it on a crucifix, demanding "If you don't come out, I'll kill the kid."
New Zealand knows a few things about dark irony that we Americans apparently
don't.)
The performances are convincing, something hard to be found in post-apocalyptic movies (witness the dismal The Day After from the same Cold War-inspired era). Hobson seems seriously out of his mind for the first act, and the interchanges between him and the other two contain just the right blend of tension at the conflicts ensuing and relief to be with other people, no matter who they might be. Geoff Murphy's direction makes the best possible use of wide, open spaces to convey a sense of loneliness and alienation (incidentially, he was a unit director for Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring), and the orchestration is properly moving. The science fiction angle throughout the middle and end of the film isn't very clear, though (I mean, did these scientists blow up the world or not? And does it even make a difference?), which makes the ending ambiguous at best, irritating at worst. Admittedly, there are elements of The Omega Man and Mad Max that suggest a bit of copycatting, but for the most part this is an original story with surprising and satisfying plot twists right up until the conclusion.
Still, I'm going to lose serious sleep over Bruno Lawrence in a woman's nightie. That's when you know the world is really coming to an end.
--Long
Copyright 2002 Tso Long Productions ©