Thursday, June 12

The Quiet Earth--Some thoughts so far..

I'm about 30 minutes in to The Quiet Earth and all I can say is..WOW. Unlike some of my favorite B-list disaster movies, this one is fantastic. Unlike the recent Will Smith atrocity, this film is not at all fluffy or overdone. It begins when Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) wakes up in hid bed to find that he is (seemingly) the last man on earth. At first he drives around his hometown searching for people, and then ends up at the lab where he worked. At the lab we find out that he was involved in some type of weapons (?) project called Flashlight, and that this has something to do with the disappearance of all the people. He finds his boss dead at the computer, and then has to escape the radiation contaminated lab by planting a bomb. As the film progresses, Zac begins to slowly lose his mind due to the isolation and fear. At this point in the movie, he is driving around in a tractor wearing the remains of woman's slip. In addition to the general post-apocalypse nuttiness (abandoned houses, silence, etc), I have really enjoyed the film's approach to loneliness. At first Hobson does everything in his power to find other survivors, and as he become more despondent he seems to go temporarily insane. He gives speeches to paper people, and tried on a woman's slip and touches himself in the mirror (not sexually, just in despair). He also shoots a statue of Jesus on a cross in what seems like an appeal for god or some being to either strike him down or save him, and puts a gun in his mouth before some type of human impulse makes him want to survive.

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