Little ditty ‘bout Zach and Joanna. And Agi. And the end of the world.
Zach Hobson is a government scientist, who wakes up one day to discover he’s the only man left on the planet. He keeps his head about him long enough to record a message that he sets up to broadcast over the radio on a loop. Dawn of the Dead syndrome kicks in, and he goes nuts driving trains, looting malls, smashing buildings with huge construction vehicles (okay, so they didn’t do that in Dawn, but you know they wanted to), moves into a mansion and tries on women’s clothes. Stage three of being the last man is apparently setting up cardboard cutouts of historical figures and celebrities, rigging up a PA to play pre-recorded applause, and giving a speech from the balcony of your mansion.
Once the spazziness is out of his system (and the power goes out as all the power plants shut down from lack of maintenance), he sets about collecting fuel, gardening supplies, and a generator. And then Joanna shows up. They grab a couple of vehicles and search the city for more people, where they meet Agi.
Betwixt the expected interpersonal tensions of the last two men and the last lone woman, we discover that the mass disappearance is partially Zach’s fault. He was involved in a program called Project Flashlight, an international attempt to tap the electromagnetic energy grid surrounding the Earth and transmit that energy to power the world. Except when they turned it on, it teleported every living human out of existence. Wait, living human, you say? Then how are our characters still extant on this plane? They all died at the moment Project Flashlight was activated. Agi was drowned, Joanna electrocuted with a hairdryer, and Zach was a suicide.
Now Zach’s instruments indicate that Project Flashlight was so powerful it affected the sun as well as the Earth. Now the sun is pulsating, and it’s bouncing the Flashlight effect back to Earth. The disappearance will happen again, and the human race, as well as every other form of animal life on Earth, will be extinct. Deciding their only hope is to blow up the New Zealand Project Flashlight transmitting station, they load Agi’s truck with explosives and head toward the source of the effect. When they arrive, the entire area within a mile radius is practically glowing in the dark with radiation, and if they reach the site they’ll never get back alive. Leaving Joanna and Agi to repopulate the planet, Zach grabs Agi’s truck and barrels toward Project Flashlight.
Unfortunately, Zach’s calculations that they had until morning until the next pulse were off by a few hours. The truck explodes right at the moment of the second pulse, disappearing Agi and Joanna, and leaving Zach to look out over the horizon at a forest of mushroom clouds. Oops.
The Quiet Earth plays like a feature length “Twilight Zone” episode. The initial feelings of loss and loneliness that Zach experiences are replaced by elation at discovering that he’s not alone, which is soon overshadowed by an atmosphere of foreboding that never lets up until the end, when the human race gets kicked in the nuts for good and all. That atmosphere comes more from the idea of what’s going on than how it is actually portrayed, however. The tone of the movie is uneven most of the time. Either New Zealanders experience emotions very strangely, going from gun-pointing paranoia to I-love-you hug-fests at the drop of a hat, or it can just be chalked up to extreme emotions in an extreme situation, but the characters behave oddly to say the least.
To be honest, I couldn’t care less about what happens personally to the three last humans alive. They’re realistic people, which is nice. If this were an American movie, the last three people alive would be Will Smith, The Rock, and Angelina Jolie, and you wouldn’t believe it for a second. The problem is, as unbelievable as that would be, at least the characters would be interesting. Not nearly enough time is spent talking about Project Flashlight, which I found fascinating. Every time Zach would wander off alone with his instruments and his Dictaphone, that’s when the movie really grabbed me.
Flashlight is one of the best science fiction plot devices I’ve run across in a long time. Not satisfied with just another doomsday bomb, the human race has discovered a way to tap into an energy so powerful that its effects will ripple across the entire universe. So basically, we have the solarmanite doomsday scenario played out by competent writers and filmmakers. Although, perhaps it’s better left vague, as I get the feeling that piling too much made-up techno jargon on Project Flashlight would change it from an enigmatic universal horror to a goofy, overwrought “Star Trek” episode.
If I was grading on pure ideas, The Quiet Earth would be five stars, no questions asked. I still have a funny feeling in my stomach from thinking about the possibilities raised in the movie. Consider for a moment that there may be, as you’re reading this, a group of scientists in a remote compound working with energies they barely understand. Energies so awesome that, if they were unleashed, they wouldn’t cause anything so mundane as a fiery holocaust, but the absolute and final erasure of all animal life on Earth as well as the accelerated collapse of the sun, leading to the destruction of our entire solar system, with possible repercussions throughout everything in existence.
Unfortunately, when you dilute that pure and terrifying idea with the petty day-to-day problems of three ugly New Zealanders in a sometimes awkwardly handled series of vignettes, it loses a bit of effectiveness.
The Moral of the Story: There’s a good reason the Doctor never opened the Eye of Harmony. Now, stop tampering in God’s domain before Dudley Manlove lays the smackdown on your bitch asses!
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