SF & Fantasy Sunday: The Quiet Earth
You wake up and find that everyone has disappeared, that’s the premise of this New Zealand science fiction classic. Bruno Lawrence is Zac Hobson, the man who finds himself seemingly alone, is he the only man on the planet and is the Project Flashlight he was working on somehow responsible?
The answer to the first part of that question is no, as he finds first a woman, played by Alison Routledge, and then a Maori man, portrayed by Pete Smith. The answer to the rest of the question depends on your interpretation of the film. One thing is abundantly clear and that’s the moral of the film. This is a parable for the dangers of nuclear war, of playing god with nature and of the individual’s responsibility for his actions. It’s also interesting to note that it’s the American’s, the country really behind project Flashlight, who are the bad guys, withholding information on the nature of the experiment. You almost expect the USA to be the bogeyman in modern movies (particularly foreign ones) due to there questionable foreign policy but to see them as the bad guys in a film that’s over twenty years old, at a time when the Soviet Union were still the villains of choice, is a tad surprising.
