The New Zealand apocalyptic film is made for “Explained” threads on Reddit, but not because of its – at least in itself coherent – nonsense physics, but because the ending is so beautiful, and so beautifully unclear (and in unwise “Planet of the Apes” – manner is already revealed on posters). “Quiet Earth” is “cult” precisely because nobody understands it, but everyone loves it. A “mad scientist” depopulates almost the entire world with his experiment and wants to reverse this with a new experiment. The decisive factor is less whether he succeeds than the idea of what happens to us when we are really all alone. Zac (Bruno Lawrence) walks through empty high-rise canyons, becomes the supposed sole ruler of the country, shoots down a statue of Jesus and shouts: “And now I am God!” But at some point we realize that Sartre was wrong: Hell is not the others – they Hell is loneliness.
In 1985, with a budget of one million US dollars, director Geoff Murphy mastered one of the greatest technical production challenges of any film: the realistic depiction of a wild but empty post-apocalyptic world. His eye for imaginative landscaping would also serve him well in what is perhaps an even more important job fourteen years later as second unit director for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The now remastered version will show that Murphy has made no compromises in this respect – please try to find even one bird in the sky in “Quiet Earth”.
Star astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson praised the film, which is not hard sci-fi, a little too effusively, spoke of credible “portals” and wormholes. But the ending is more intriguing when we interpret the fate of the explorer who wanted to play God as a punishment – the man who wants to play God walks through purgatory until he understands his place in this world. (Plaion Pictures)