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 A scientist discovers that the "top-secret engery project" that he's been working on has seemingly wiped out everyone else on the planet. He does find two other survivors and this somehow adds "an intriguing spiritual and emotional dimension to the film." 1985, 88 minutes, DVD
This is another one of those "stinky Americans destroyed Earth with their hubris" movies. Well, excuuuuuse us! Can we help it if our super secret defense programs sometimes interfere with the very fabric of the universe? Did we plan for our optical death ray satellite to fry everyone's eyes and cause man-eating plants to rampage (The Day Of The Triffids)? Did we really intend for any harm to come to the environment just because we like to ride in the comfort of our sport utility vehicles (The Day After Tomorrow)? And you certainly can't think that we would have foreseen that trying to draw energy to refuel our planes from some grid that encircles the planet would have resulted in everyone but three ugly New Zealanders vanishing. Besides, I think it's a tenant of international law that every nation state has the right of self protection and if a few billion people get deleted along the way, well, they were probably planning on attacking us at some point anyway.
The Quiet Earth, based on a novel by Craig Harrison, once in awhile forgets itself and mentions the complicity of the New Zealand scientists for their participation in the project, but that only crops up whenever the minority New Zealander that survived gets in the surviving scientist's face with some variation that it was all Whitey's fault, regardless of what country Whitey happened to be from. Of course, our scientist/hero Zac claims that the Americans kept important information from him so they didn't really know that everything would be wiped out. Zac certainly had his suspicions though since he was attempting suicide the night that Operation Flashlight got switched on. All of this ought to serve as a wake up call to our military. When doing experiments that tamper with the space-time continuum, do not outsource!
Before we can get to the movie's version of the blame game as well as its forced commentary on race relations, we have to meet Zac. Zac wakes up one morning after a night of consuming a great quantity of pills (we find all this out later when it's a bit more dramatic and when it can show the tremendous guilt he has for his role as a American lap dog). Frankly, it's these opening moments that are among the movie's most disquieting. You see, when Zac wakes up, he's buck naked! And since this is one of these movies not made in America where there are laws against this sort of thing, there are no strategically placed pillows, blankets or naked chicks to cover up his shortcomings. Feeling my own world come to end as I got to know the late Bruno Lawrence as only his wife and urologist should, I was reminded of 28 Days Later where we had a similar situation. No matter what else you want to say about Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow, at least you had to figure the odds were pretty good that he would be smart enough to keep his boxers on, what with the arrival of the second ice age and all.
Once Zac gets out and about and on his way to work (uh, weren't you supposed to be killing yourself? Why are you going to work? Wuss.) he begins to realize that something is amiss. He sees no one, cars litter the streets, and airplanes have crashed without any sign of the passengers. It's almost as if some high level U.S. government project has go horribly awry and erased everyone but him. Once at work, things begin to come into focus for him as he sees one of his co-workers dead at the controls of Operation Flashlight. After a little problem with the lab being contaminated with microwaves, excessive ionization, or silverfish or something, Zac makes his escape by blowing a hole in the ceiling of the underground facility. When he climbs out, we know that he's climbing out into a new reality. As he predictably whines, he's been "condemned to live." Psst. Zac. I think you probably could have a pretty easy time of finding some more drugs to O.D. on if you wanted. Love it or leave baby. Love it or leave it.
Now that Zac's figured out that everything's pretty much hosed, the part of the movie where he goes nuts begins. This is how all these survival tales go. After figuring out that your old life is ruined, you lose control for awhile, contemplate suicide, live it up, destroy lots of stuff and generally behave like your average ordinary rock star. This part of the movie usually only lasts about fifteen minutes or so, before something happens that snaps our hero back to sanity and filled with a new sense of purpose to make the best of things in the new world. We know that our hero is fully recovered once he shaves off the stubble that he's let grow while engaging in a colorful variety of self-destructive behavior, as if retaking control of your beard somehow symbolizes that man hasn't completely regressed to his primitive origins. (Are these movies underwritten by Gillette and Schick?)
As if Zac's early immodesty wasn't bad enough (and what with him being middle-aged, bald, and not exactly camping out at the gym, it was), when he goes crazy, he decides that he can finally live out his dream and go around a barren planet wearing only a woman's slip. He also sets up a bunch of cardboard cut outs of luminaries such as Richard Nixon, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill on his front lawn and proceeds to give a presidential address to them from his balcony. The most egregious combination of symbolism and crossdressing occurs though at a church when Zac runs in there with his shotgun looking for God. Since God doesn't show up, Zac starts blasting this statue of Jesus. If I'm the only guy left in the world, I can think of a lot things I would do, but vandalizing a church in a dirty slip (if you ain't going to wash it, at least get yourself a new one) is pretty far down the list.
Luckily, he's grown out of his transvestite phase by the time he meets up with the only woman survivor of Operation Flashlight. Joanne shows astonishingly bad taste in clothes in spite of having the entire shopping district of whatever big town is in New Zealand at her disposal. If the world has ended, do you really want to be caught up in it wearing a pastel colored window paned pantsuit? Already, I could see civilization receding in the rear view mirror. They're glad to see someone else and immediately split up to search for other survivors. I began to have my doubts about the survival of the human race when she suggested that they search for people in places where they might be trapped or in hiding, like in prisons and mental hospitals. Schizos and cons. Just the thing to start rebuilding with. Pass the pills and hard liquor, Zac.
In the course of their search, Zac gets captured by Api. I think Api is Maori, the indigenous chaps of New Zealand. He looks less like a grubby Briton than the other two and manages to play the race card in spite of the fact that it's pretty hard to be a minority when you have a woman, a white guy, and a native guy. Especially considering that Joanne pretty much drops Zac once Api shows up (there's a hitch in things when she thinks that Api killed his friend's wife, but they smoothed that over long enough to get it on while Zac was out on his suicide mission to reverse Operation Flashlight's effects). Glad to see that regardless of what happens to the world that a woman is still going to behave like you would expect. She pretended to like Zac when she thought he was the last man on Earth, but once it became clear he was just the second-to-last man on Earth, she switched over to "leading him on" mode. That's okay, because by the end of the movie, he sure fixed them! At least that's what he was probably thinking when he wasn't wondering how he ended up somewhere near Saturn.
Since there wouldn't be much of a story if the rest of the movie was about how Zac got dumped by Joanne and was left to go back to driving his El Camino through malls collecting provisions for no reason, they have Operation Flashlight start to act up again. The sun is pulsating and Zac has figured out that the effect is going to happen again sometime soon. This had to do with stuff like him discovering that the charge of an electron was no longer at its accepted constant but was now shifting between two different values. I was already trying to figure out how to reroute the auxiliary power to the warp core and recalibrate the phase arrays to read low frequency particle emissions when I realized that this wasn't one of those Trek episodes that had ended up with Kirk in the Wild West or something. The confusing combination of bogus science and thick accents prevented me from understanding exactly what Zac's purpose was beyond destroying one of the satellite stations involved in Operation Flashlight. I'm guessing though that the way things turned out, it didn't go according to plan.
I remember first seeing this one on video back in the late 1980s and liking it a lot more than I did upon seeing it this time. While it is able to generate a very good deal of atmosphere on a limited budget (there aren't that many people in New Zealand to evacuate for your "empty city" shots, so how hard could it have been?) and the lack of happy ending is to be admired, the whining about how the Americans were at fault, the bickering amongst the characters about everything, and Zac's feeble attempt to do something about Operation Flashlight (weren't you kept in the dark by the Americans on a lot things related to the project? Then how could you expect to know enough to change it?) hamper things. The movie's rather heavy handed attempts at symbolism (the scene at the church, the business with the cardboard cut outs) as well as Joanne constantly complaining that the other two think of themselves as God also make for some needless slogging by the viewer. An okay post-apocalypse flick that could have been better if the filmmakers would have toned down the self-important posturing and preening and amped up the end of the world survival action.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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