!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY THE ENDING!!
After a series of short films and television episodes, New Zealand director Geoff Murphy made his feature film debut with the comedy western Wild Man (1977), cast with members of the musical and theatrical co-operative Blerta that he’d helped to found with actor Bruno Lawrence in 1971, before scoring an international hit with action thriller Goodbye Pork Pie three years later. Drama Utu, a Māori Western, followed in 1983 before Murphy made this offbeat end-of-the-world drama, again with Lawrence. While the rest of the world seemed to be intent on ripping off the post-apocalyptic stylings of Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2 (1981) from across the Tasman Sea, Murphy was taking cues from earlier films in the genre. Indeed, the basic plot of The Quiet Earth is not dissimilar to that of Ranald MacDougall’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959).
Lawrence stars as Zac Hobson, a scientist working for Delenco on part of a secret international project dubbed Operation Flashlight which hopes to establish a global wireless energy grid. He wakes one winter morning in a non-descript home near Hamilton to find that he’s apparently the only person left on Earth. In the city, he finds a crashed airliner but no sign of any bodies, and there are no traces of any animal life either. At the Delenco labs, he realises that Operation Flashlight was successfully activated and concludes that a malfunction has caused the disappearances. After going slowly insane, dressing in a woman’s nightgown, wandering through the rain playing a saxophone and addressing an audience of cardboard cutouts of famous people, declaring himself “President of this Quiet Earth,” he makes another startling discovery – there’s another survivor, a younger woman named Joanne (Alison Routledge). They form a relationship based more on need than genuine attraction, a relationship unsettled by the arrival of a third survivor, a Māori man named Api (Pete Smith). They realise that at the moment of what Hobson is now calling “The Effect”, all three were at the moment of death, Api being drowned during a fight, Joanne being electrocuted by a faulty hairdryer, and Zac having taken an overdose in a suicide attempt. After some relationship business is resolved, Hobson begins to fear that “The Effect” will happen again and that the only answer is to destroy the still-active Flashlight Grid. While Hobson drives a truck full of explosives into the facility, The Effect happens again and Hobson wakes to find himself on an alien beach watching a huge, ringed planet rising over the sea. The fates of Joanne and Api remain unresolved.
Despite excellent performances from Routledge and Smith, The Quiet Earth is at its best in the first half, when it just follows Hobson through his eerily deserted hew world (ambient sound was stripped out in post-production to create the stillness) trying to hold onto his fragile sanity. It’s a terrific opening reel, full of indelible images that seem to have been quite influential – that crashed airliner might have been a point of reference for a similar scene in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) for example – but it’s really all about Lawrence’s excellent performance. His emotional meltdown, culminating in his address to the cardboard masses (a scene later echoed in the Will Smith-starring I Am Legend (2007)) and acts of senseless destruction are unforgettably odd, as is a surreal moment during “The Effect” involving a spatially odd corridor that may have inspired a very similar moment in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010).
But for all the fine performances, the emotional turmoil and the weirdness of “The Effect,” what most people remember is the bizarre finale. We may all have different ideas about what we’ve just watched – is Hobson dead and in the afterlife? Has he been bumped into a parallel universe? Or is he on an alien planet? There’s been some debate over the years – but it’s a hard moment to forget. The film opens with the sun, a very recognisable celestial body, rising over the sea (there’s talk in the film that the sun may be about to collapse at any moment) and ends with a very alien object rising slowly into view, and it’s both beautiful and faintly terrifying. Curiously, the film’s advertising team felt no compunction in plastering this surprising ending all over the posters, which seems, in retrospect, like a bit of an own goal.
Those looking for an easy solution to the mystery will inevitably be disappointed. We never learn what happened to Joanne and Api nor quite where Hobson is, but then that’s part of the film’s considerable appeal. Like the enigmatic ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or the central mystery in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), it’s something that you can have fun decoding for yourself. There’s probably no right answer to the mystery. Writers Bill Baer, Lawrence and Sam Pillsbury, liberally adapting a 1981 novel by Craig Harrison, may even all have had different ideas of what was going on. Watch it, make up your own theories and argue them with others. We don’t need every film to spell out every single thing for us surely?
In the decades since its original release, The Quiet Earth has become a cult favourite, and deservedly so. It’s a haunting, sometimes painful, occasionally moving and ultimately baffling film that rewards as many rewatches as you can bear to tease out its finer nuances. In 2017, speaking after a screening at the Museum of Modern Art, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson had high praise for the film: “I’d never before seen a main character who was so casually fluent in science and engineering,” he said, noting that he was “deeply appreciative that a scientist could be a main character and just be casually doing experiments like it was just another day at the office.”
In the wake of The Quiet Earth, Murphy relocated to Hollywood where he got ended up making sequels (Young Guns II (1990), Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), Fortress 2 (1999)) before returning to his native New Zealand to shoot second unit on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. He died at the age of 80 in 2018, and while his American career was less than stellar, his films made on home ground, and particularly The Quiet Earth, remain some of the best films ever produced in New Zealand.
The EOFFTV Review 
The Quiet Earth is indeed offbeat which is a big part of its fascination. I always appreciate the seemingly eccentric atmospheres for foreign-country science fiction, which is how I so easily got into British sci-fi shows starting with Doctor Who. The 80s were certainly a good decade for a film like The Quiet Earth, just one year after The Brother From Another Planet which also proved how unconventional approaches to sci-fi films at that time could benefit by loosening up from traditional formats. In the wake of the Star Wars and Star Trek films, Blade Runner and The Terminator, that says a lot. I had my dad to thank for convincing me to see The Quiet Earth when I was 15 and to this day, it’s still refreshingly enjoyable. Thank you, Kevin, for your review.
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Mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand some of the scenes always stuck with me after seeing it when much younger – that ending is haunting. On the other, I recall it feeling slightly odd, perhaps because Aus / NZ movies at the time felt ‘Western’ but not quite. I also think that for a deserted planet type story, NZ is a bit too lightly populated for it to hit home as hard as it would in somewhere like London or New York. On a recent re-watch I found myself less impressed than I was when younger, but that may be because I’d built it up in my mind. It’s not perfect – a little light on actual events, and a little light on character development (considering we only have three), but for a low budget ’empty earth’ movie it still works well.
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