Saw The Quiet Earth (thanks, whoever you are!) It was a quiet sci-fi about a man who wakes up one day to find himself the last man (possibly the last mammal) on earth. Luckily he's some kind of government-employed physicist who was intimately involved with the terrible experiment which may have caused everyone to vanish, so explanations are soon forthcoming. This is a kind of frustrating film to discuss because like a mystery half of the fun is seeing how the explanation and events unfold. Thematic events happen at the half-way mark which dramatically change the tone and thrust of the film. At what point do they stop being twists and become plot points? For the first half of the film anyway, he's merely trying to live on his own without losing his mind. This alone is a deep and interesting subject, but the film moves on.
This is a slow and contemplative sci fi, owing more to Andrei Tarkovsky than to George Lucas. It deals with the terrible cosmic event on a human level, examining the pathos of the scientist who has toiled for years for the benefit of a general public who regards him with suspicion and hostility. There's also the good old sci fi trope of the little man who has meddled with things he doesn't understand. The film greatly aggrandizes the powers of scientific folks, by the way. This generally bothers me very much in sci fi because it is either fatuous, audience-congratulating nerd-flattery or equally stupid fear-mongering and boogeyman-creation. But such is the cost of watching a sci fi made in the shadow of the atomic bomb I guess. So the science-fetishism found in this film did bother me a bit but I suspect it was only my own pet peeve. No one else will care or notice.
For the most part the film is warm and human, exploring an existential crisis on a lonely planet.
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