Good science fiction is less a product of eye-popping special effects and gigantic budgets than it is of ingenuity and a tenacious belief in the material. How else do you explain The Quiet Earth, a wonderfully weird little science fiction film from New Zealand with visual effects that can only be described as wonky? Shots in which the Universe is unraveling consist of nothing more flashing lights, tilted cameras, and slowed motion. Yet so firmly does this film believe in its premise that we too buy into it, million dollar budget and all.
Bruno Lawrence stars in the film, along with co-adapting the screenplay from a Craig Harrison novel of the same name. In it, Lawrence plays Zac Hobson, a man who wakes up one morning to find that everyone else on Earth has vanished. This is explained via an attempt to create an international “energy grid” which airplanes could tap into in order to stay up in the air indefinitely. Something in this attempt went awry, and every human with the exception of Zac, who was working on the project, disappeared. Despite the scientific explanation, the sight of Zac with a shotgun and wearing a dress in a church, threatening to shoot a statue of Jesus unless God answers him, the parallels with the Rapture are undeniable.
Zac wanders this Earthly limbo, which has the antipodean sensibilities of Mad Max with all the buildings in tact and sans the marauders in fetish gear, reveling in his vast freedom and despairing in his extreme loneliness. He drives a car through the mall, raids stores, and dresses like Julius Caesar and declares himself God. Thoughts of suicide cross his mind, but the sight of fires rising from an explosion causes him to reconsider. Perhaps he sees the flames of hell awaiting him in the afterlife.
Zac’s solitude is interrupted by the discovery of two other survivors, a redheaded woman named Joanne (Alison Routledge) and a physically imposing Maori man named Api (Pete Smith). It is here in which the film begins to get lost in a burgeoning love triangle, which is as contrived as it is dull. With the physical constants of the universe shifting, there are frankly more important and interesting things to worry about. Thankfully does not push it too far into the foreground, opting to head towards an ambiguous ending which further escalates the inherent tension between a scientific and religious explanation for this film.
The film straddles this line between the hubris of man and the wrath of God deftly, but it is unclear it has much to say about either. It is content to simply posit both options and to let the viewer decide which is correct. That the film never tries to do too much is one of the keys to its success. The low-budget look of the film only adds to its raw, survivalist aesthetic and Bruno Lawrence convinces as the man trapped in a sort of existential netherworld, racked with guilt and anger and moral angst. The performances by the other two actors leave quite a bit to be desired, though Lawrence is enough to see the film through to the end. Not having survived an apocalypse or a Rapture myself, I couldn’t tell you how it feels or what the minutia of your thought process would be like in such a crisis, but I imagine it would feel something akin to that of Zac. Unbridled terror, self-righteous joy, and a whole lot of fun in malls.
4/5
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