Quiet, Please

I remember the first time we didn't watch The Quiet Earth (1985). We went to the City to see James Joyce's Women - Fionnula Flanagan's tour de force, ending with Molly Bloom's soliloquy. The other screen in the cinema was playing The Quiet Earth and I said something like, oh, science fiction, we'll have to see that some time. So we finally did.

It starts with a sort of zap, and then a naked Bruno Lawrence wakes up. He groggily goes about his morning, but nobody is around. He finds wrecked cars, trucks, and the wreckage of a plane, but no bodies. He makes it to his job at an experimental physics lab, to find no one but the corpse of a colleague. One of the computer screens reads "Project Flashlight complete". It looks like whatever he was working on caused everyone in the world to disappear except him.

So he goes crazy for a while. He moves to a mansion, dresses in women's clothing, runs around downtown, the usual. Then he discovers there is another survivor, a young woman, Alison Routledge. A beautiful, free-spirited woman. They soon wind up in bed. 

Then, he finds one more. This is a New Zealand movie, and the third survivor is a Maori man, a rough and tough one, although he seems friendly enough. Routledge, in fact, is quite taken with him. So it's the old The World, the Flesh and the Devil situation: a romantic triangle with racial undertones.

But this isn't what's really bothering Lawrence. It's that he knows he is at least partly responsible for this catastrophe, and that he doesn't think it's over.

I kind of wish I'd seen this back in the 80s when it came out. I've seen a few more movies since then, and also heard a few reviews of this movie. That sort of spoiled the twists for me - although some of the twists are expected tropes. Still, I can't say I remember much about the movie we did watch. And I'm sure I would have remembered the iconic last shot, which you can see in every promo poster for This Quiet Earth.