The Quiet Earth
Those who are born think about dying. We the born know it's coming, few know the time, place or method and even then they don't like it. So we fantasize death to defang it, to defrock it's terrible majesty, to whistle past its witching-hour graveyard.
The earth is a born thing, cobbled together of weird dust and gases, spinning and wobbling in space until...it won't. Until it dies.
We are born things on a born thing. All things must pass.
When? How? Why, Dammit?
These questions are part of the theological inquiry called Eschatology, The End Times.
Me? I'm just gonna write about an old sci-fi movie I watched last night as my way to deal with the eschatological. And be banging my head to tunes played very loud in my alcove work station. Jesus and Mary Chain? That's my eschatology, baby.
The Quiet Earth is about something created for the common good that goes very wrong. It's adapted from a book I haven't read, but I'm thinking of Nikola Tesla's earth energy grid project that his capitalist financial backer quashed because, free energy for everyone? Hell no! But Project Flashlight is such a joint project between the Yanks and the Down-unders.
Film opens with a molten yellow sun rising in an orange sky over a red ocean, sea birds wheeling and crying in the July dawn. Where I live it's called summer, but we're in New Zealand so it's...my January? (Just because I'm confused doesn't mean you have to be.)
And there's a beautiful, well-arranged piece written by John Charles and performed by the NZ Symphony Orchestra.
Zac Hobson, a nicely built guy who sleeps in the buff, wakes for his job at the installation with the big satellite radar dish thingy on top. He's in Project Flashlight. But at 6:12am something blasts light, and there's a shake and a shimmer. And just like that, all the people, animals and bugs are gone.
It's as Zac has feared, a “malfunction with devastating results” from “a project of such phenomenal destructive potential.”
The Last Man On Earth trope runs through the scenarios. I like the one where he goes into a cathedral, still wearing a lady's slip he scored in a posh closet, with a rifle, and is yelling for God to show Himself. “Where are you? If you don't come out I'll shoot the kid!” and he points the rifle at at a plaster Christ on a cross. Blam, blam, blam! Got your eschatology right here!
Then, what plot device happens next? A girl? No! A pretty girl? No! That would be too obvious – YA THINK?
And I'm done spelling eschatology.
So Zac and JoAnn cavort, explore, make the best of, really, not a bad situation once you get over the eerie quiet and the uncertainty. Zac is noticing the sun is oscillating and will soon collapse; “the unit value of an electron has changed, operating between new values” he can't measure. “The fabric of the universe has not only altered but is highly unstable.”
Speaking of unstable...
A third person, a strapping handsome Polynesian (?) bloke, Api, turns up. Turns out the three survivors have something in common – they all technically died at the moment of the Project Flashlight incident: JoAnn was blowdrying her long lush curly red locks and was electrocuted; Api was fighting over a woman and her husband drowned him; Zac took a bunch of meds before bed.
Zac thinks he can interrupt the coming disaster by driving a double truck trailer loaded with explosives into his facility before the final oscillation.
Big badda boom.
What? You want to know how it ends? Don't we all...