There is a scene early on in The Quiet Earth – a film about a man who thinks he is the last human left alive on the planet – where he takes a big truck and drives it through a small convenience store, smashing it to bits. My dad, or maybe my uncle, rented the film when I was 12 or 13 years old. I thought that scene was the coolest. Me and my cousins decided that’s exactly what we would do if we were the last people on Earth – destroy a bunch of stuff. We already liked breaking glass bottles and blowing up Coke cans with firecrackers. So how cool would it be to drive a truck through a building?
I don’t think I finished the film back then. I probably thought it was boring after that. But that scene has stuck with me all of these years. I’ve often thought about it and wondered what the film was. Some two decades later and here I am looking at lists of science fiction films and I come across it once again. The film is so much better than that one scene, there is a lot more to it.
That man is named Zac Hobson and he’s played by Bruno Lawrence. We first see him lying in bed naked. The time is 6:12 AM. His alarm goes off and Zac seems confused to be there. He turns the radio on and finds only static. His clock is stuck at 6:12. He gets dressed and drives to work. On the way, he stops at a petrol station. Nobody is there. Nobody is on the road either, though there are some cars just randomly stopped here and there. The city is empty of people.
He works at a scientific station. The building is empty. He uses his computer to send messages to other stations across the globe, but he gets no reply. He finds a man dead in a chair next to a bank of terminals. He looks burned by radiation. He reads a screen that says Project Flashlight took place that night.
His company destroyed the world.
He goes to a radio station and records a message for any survivors to contact him. He drives around using a bullhorn to search for others. He starts to drink. He’s slowly losing his mind.
Then he meets Joanne (Alison Routledge). She somehow also survived. They are thrilled to find each other.
Collectively, they systematically begin looking for survivors. Being a scientist he’s constantly trying to understand exactly what happened, and what other changes this event might have wrought.
It is a slow, meditative film. It spends a lot of time pondering what someone would do if they thought they were the last people on Earth. Before that scene in the truck smashing a convenience store, Zac goes through a whirlwind of feelings. He goes shopping. He moves into a large house. He puts on a woman’s slip. He goes into a church and questions God (then blows a statue of Jesus on the cross to bits with a shotgun). He declares himself the president of the world.
With Joanne, he keeps his sanity. There are questions about what they will do next. Will they try to repopulate the world? Should they travel farther away in case people in other countries survive? The film mostly leaves those unanswered. It doesn’t always even ask them. But it leaves the audience time to ponder them. Eventually, things do get moving at a faster clip and there becomes a need for urgency, but those things are best left unspoiled. It ends with one of the most beautiful closing shots in all of cinema.
themidnightcafe.org 