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82% buy the item featured on this page: The Quiet Earth CDN$ 11.97 |
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6% buy Ever Since the World Ended CDN$ 22.99 |
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4% buy Cult Fiction: The Quiet EarthCDN$ 17.99 |
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4% buy Logan's Run (Widescreen/Full Screen) |
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Product Description
From Amazon.com
The "last man on Earth" sci-fi sub-genre is reasonably well represented by director Geoff Murphy's The Quiet Earth, a 1985 film from New Zealand that earned plenty of Kiwi kudos in its day but still fails to measure up to the great expectations engendered by its premise. Bruno Lawrence is Zac Hobson, a techie who's involved in "Project Flashlight," a vast energy grid that allows war planes to circle the planet without ever refueling (leave it to "the Americans," who are blamed for the whole ensuing mess, to come up with such a diabolical idea). When what Zac drolly describes as "a malfunction" (thereafter known as "the Effect") occurs early one morning, he awakens to discover that he's apparently the only survivor, human or otherwise, of a catastrophe that has altered the very fabric of the universe. Lawrence is terrific in these early scenes, which find him gradually losing his marbles as the gravity of his situation sets in; wearing nothing but a woman's slip, he stands on a balcony and grandly addresses an "audience" of cardboard standups (from Queen Elizabeth and Hitler to Bob Marley and Alfred Hitchcock), declaring himself "president of this quiet Earth." But effectively sustaining such weirdness is tough, and although Murphy, to his credit, doesn't over-rely on special effects and scientific gobbledygook, the film isn't up to it. Turns out Zac isn't the only survivor, and when first a pretty young woman (Alison Routledge) and then a Maori man (Peter Smith) appear, the director tries to balance the human dynamics with the sci-fi elements (seems the Effect may not be over after all) to awkward and unsatisfying effect, and the film loses most of its momentum. As for the ending, well, safe to say that it will leave some viewers perplexed, others feeling that they've been bamboozled, and still others thinking that its mystery and lack of explicable closure are perfect. --Sam Graham
Review
With a premise that invariably recalls the various screen incarnations of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, Geoff Murphy's The Quiet Earth (originally released in New Zealand in 1985) also concerns the unraveling routines of a single human living among the suddenly abandoned remains of society, but it follows its doomsday logic to a place more cerebral and chilling than the ever-present menace of night-walking zombies. The title says it all, and that very absence of noise is what makes the planet inherited by government scientist Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence), a gruff pragmatist, so unsettling. As with the hero in the Matheson adaptations, Hobson has ties to the "effect" that seems to have wiped out everyone but him, and the details reveal themselves in a way that's eerie and satisfying, even when relying on relatively flimsy science fiction. He addresses the first hours of his isolation with almost a comic stoicism and unwillingness to panic, as though it were a short-term nuisance needing to be resolved. But as he begins to indulge in his unchecked id -- driving oversized construction equipment into buildings, for example -- it taps into that universal question of how we ourselves would disengage from our learned behaviors in the same setting. And Lawrence carries off this gradual descent with fearless naturalism. Of course, that's just the opening act of what becomes an exercise in precarious social dynamics, made all the more intense by the sparse size of the cast. Blissfully unspoiled by Hollywood over-thinking, The Quiet Earth is a cult treasure for those who prefer intelligence to pyrotechnics in their visions of the apocalypse. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
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