Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) is a scientist in New Zealand who works for Delenco, a consortium working in conjunction with American scientists on a project called “Project Flashlight”. The project is trying to create a wireless global energy grid. He wakes up one morning and begins his day. As he is getting ready for work, he finds out that the radio isn’t picking up any stations. Driving to work he sees abandoned vehicles littering the streets as well as the smoking remnants of a crashed plane. He sees no people anywhere, even in the body of the plane.
When he gets to the laboratory he finds the building empty except for the body of his boss. He also sees that Project Flashlight had been activated. A malfunction in the program caused a catastrophic event that wiped out humanity. Zac believes he is the only one alive. A radiation leak causes the facility to lock down. Zac creates an explosion to escape the lab.
Zac attempts to contact anyone who may be still alive, but his radio calls get no response. Eventually he gives up and his mental health begins to deteriorate. He contemplates suicide but stops himself. After a while he settles into a new normal. Then he meets Joanne (Alison Routledge). Then another person, Api (Pete Smith), an indigenous native, shows up. Tensions ebb and flow as they work to find their new normal.
As they learn to coexist, Zac begins to worry that the event that caused the people to disappear may occur again. He also learns that the Sun’s radiation output is fluctuating. He believes that when the effect occurs again, the Sun will collapse and destroy the Earth. He begins to believe that he must destroy the grid and hopefully stop the event from happening again.
“The Quiet Earth” was released in 1985 and was directed by Geoff Murphy. It is a New Zealand post-apocalyptic science fiction dystopian movie. It is the first science fiction film that New Zealand ever produced. The movie was loosely based on the 1981 novel “The Quiet Earth” by Craig Harrison.
I’m not a big fan of “last man standing” kinds of movies, but this one was done better than most and worth a watch. There is some humor interjected among the stark nihilism. The movie poses many questions but gives up few answers. Eventually you get the general idea of what happened, but the reason for the “event” is not the main point of the film. The movie is mostly character driven, even though there are only three main characters in the film. The focus is on Bruno Lawrence’s character Zac.
The ending to the film is a little ambiguous but full of possible meanings. It is a twist, but in the scope of the film, it is a reasonable yet mind-bending twist. Some found the ending confusing, but others found it a great jumping off point for their imagination. The ending is what you let it be. Also, the reason that these three people were the only ones alive after the initial event was an interesting plot point that came in handy for the ending of the film.
One of the film’s producers, Sam Pillsbury, has a cameo as a dead person lying across the hood of a car in an accident scene.