The Quiet Earth: Retro Review
Silence… This is probably the first of the “wakes up from a coma into the apocalypse” movies. After following “The Last Man on Earth” it’s good to see a non-comedic version of a similar situation. What a situation like this can do to a man’s psyche is readily apparent here. Where the things Phil Miller went through were pretty hilarious early, Zac Hobson’s action are actually pretty terrifying. The pool scene in particular is pure gold. He plays pool with himself and talks to himself as if they’re old friends. The camera work is the precursor to the “Lord of the Rings” scenes where Gollum talks to himself.
He starts to freak out and puts on a woman’s nightgown and gets really close to eating his own shotgun. Then he goes even farther and preaches to a bunch of cardboard cutouts of celebrities, announcing his new role as president of “this quiet earth.” Then he goes to a church and demands to be told the location of God and shoots the statue of Jesus on the cross when he doesn’t get an answer. After destroying him, he declares “And now I am God!”
He eventually makes his way into a daily routine, only to have things shattered by the arrival of Joanne. Having both spent so much time away from other people, they embrace lovingly, simply grateful to see someone. They fall into a loving relationship and a few days later they meet another person. A maori named Api.
I hate the character of Api and I think his entrance marks the beginning of a downward slope for this movie. He’s pretty much a complete psychopath. I can understand his caution upon first meeting Zac, but he pretty much spends the entirety of the movie d*ck measuring, for lack of a better term. As the last three people on earth you would think they would all strive to get along and live in harmony, but this guy is constantly challenging and threatening Zac. He almost kills him on the road and everything “Let’s give him a bit of a squeeze shall we.”
Even after Zac has proven his prowess as a scientist, he refuses to listen to anything the man says, simply because he wants Joanne. His presence even reduces Joanne from a pleasant character with lots of potential to a token female face that constantly complains about the male ego, but someone also constantly feeds into it.
Zac is really the only character that maintains focus. After discovering his job is the source of “the Event” that caused the disappearance of everyone on the planet, guilt drives him. He even continues to look at the data and study the situation to discover the inevitability of a second event. He sacrifices himself in the end, while those a**holes Api and Joanne are off doing it somewhere. The funny part is when he says he’ll be back in two hours and they hear the truck after sex. Api asks “how long has it been?” Joanne replies, “About twenty minutes.” I burst into laughter because they talked, had sex and had cuddle time by the time Zac got back in twenty minutes. Maybe that’s childish of me, but I found that to be hilarious.
I actually liked the ambiguous ending a lot. It was very similar to the beginning, creating a cyclical effect and it makes you wonder what Zac will go through now that he is potentially alone again. This time he has no purpose, so where could it go? We discovered that death is why the three characters survived, so why wouldn’t death be the gateway to something else entirely. Perhaps everyone who died on Earth is in this place now and they were held back because they were already between life and death. The possibilities are endless and could be a very appealing topic of discussion for people who care to think about it.
The explanation behind the Event was interesting and made sense. The only weird thing was the lack of explanation as to why they found two or so bodies lying around when everyone else simply vanished. Maybe those people survived the Event too and died later or something. The best part of the movie is before Zac meets anyone else. The exploration of what solitude can do to a human mind was fantastic.
Jonathan Thomas Jones is a speculative fiction author and founder of geekhavenreviews.com. He has been passionate about all things geek for his entire life. See more about him at jonathanthomasjones.com and follow him on twitter @jtgloryjones.
