Column Science Fiction Film Club The Quiet Earth: Alone and Together at the End of the World Three survivors of the apocalypse navigate their isolated new reality… By Kali Wallace | Published on June 18, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The Quiet Earth (1985). Directed by Geoff Murphy. Written by Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence, and Sam Pillsbury, based on the novel of the same name by Craig Harrison. Starring Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge, and Pete Smith. What would you do if you were the last person on Earth? I don’t know what I would do. As I was watching The Quiet Earth, at first I thought, “Well, I couldn’t just give up. I still have to take care of my cats.” I have priorities, okay, and the abrupt disappearances of all of humanity wouldn’t change that. Then I realized that in the film all the animals are gone as well, so I wouldn’t even have my cats to provide purpose and structure to my initial days. What would I do? Look for others? Try to figure out what happened? Lose my mind? I’m not sure. It’s one thing to imagine it as a fictional scenario, but it’s very different to think about what I would do in the real world. Even more difficult: What would you do if you were the last person on Earth, and you were pretty sure it was at least partly your fault? And you never intended to be alive to see what happened? People have been using the real or apparent isolation of post-apocalyptic scenarios to explore society and the human psyche for about as long as there have been people. Ancient myths and folklore from around the world deal with the idea of everybody being swept away and only a few remaining—usually, but not always, in the context of angry gods punishing all but a handful of deserving survivors. Like a lot of ideas that would evolve into sci fi favorites, the trope remained strongly religious in nature until the modern era, when Romantic and Gothic writers got into the mix. That’s when we get books like Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), and of course H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). The genre’s popularity only grew throughout the 20th century, thanks to the anxiety-inducing trends of global urbanization, industrialization, and of course all the war going on everywhere all the time. The Quiet Earth sits comfortably within the boundaries of Cold War-era atomic sci fi, although it might be the only one of that vast array of films that opens with a surprise shot of full-frontal nudity. (I was surprised, at least, but only because I momentarily forgot that the 1980s were just Like That sometimes.) But it has roots that go back quite a bit farther. Exactly how much farther is a matter of some debate. The film is directly based on the novel The Quiet Earth by Craig Harrison, which was published in 1981. But it is also widely acknowledged to be an unofficial remake of the American film The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), which was written and directed by Ranald MacDougall, who is perhaps better known as one of the screenwriters behind Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963). The World, the Flesh and the Devil stars Harry Belafonte as the man who wakes up to find himself completely alone in an inexplicably empty world, Inger Stevens as the young woman he meets after going a bit mad in isolation, and Mel Ferrer as the third survivor who shows up to complicate things. That movie was, in turn, was based on two acknowledged sources: the 1901 novel The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel and the short story “End of the World” by Ferdinand Reyher. I am really struggling to find any information on the Reyher story—if anybody knows anything about it, please let me know in comments!—but The Purple Cloud is more well known. I haven’t read it, but apparently both H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft loved it, and it sounds completely bonkers. A polar explorer is the last man left on Earth after a mysterious purple cloud kills everybody else, and he travels the world living in palaces and burning cities to the ground; then he meets a beautiful woman, because what’s the point of being the last man on Earth if you don’t get a beautiful woman out of the deal? The Purple Cloud was picked up by a Hollywood studio for production in the ’20s, but there wasn’t much movement on the project until 1940. Then, of course, WWII intervened, and afterward people interested in stories about the end of the world didn’t need fictional purple clouds. They had very real atomic mushroom clouds that would serve the same purpose. The trouble was that in the aftermath of WWII everybody and their brother was making films about the end of the world. We’ve watched several of those movies in this film club! So it was set aside for a little while longer, and when it was finally brought to life again it had another angle: the American civil rights movement and the film The World, the Flesh and the Devil. That movie’s producer was Sol Siegel, who was white, and he wanted to focus the story on the very topical theme of racial tension in the United States. So he reached out to Belafonte, who was at the time at the peak of both his entertainment career and his prominence in the civil rights movement, and Belafonte ended up co-producing the film with Siegel. It didn’t quite turn out the way anybody wanted, as the cast, much of the crew, and nearly all critics felt that the film failed in its goal of thoughtfully exploring racial tensions in a post-apocalyptic setting. It’s a bit hard to figure out from articles about the film exactly what changed in the process, but MacDougall, the film’s writer and director, was vocally unhappy about the ending, which shows the three characters (a Black man, a white woman, and a white man) peacefully walking hand-in-hand down the street, all conflict between them apparently resolved. I have not read Craig Harrison’s novel The Quiet Earth, but from its “too long or excessively detailed” summary on Wikipedia, it seems like the novel doesn’t share much with The World, the Flesh and the Devil. To me it looks like the film The Quiet Earth took the characters and setting from the novel and slotted them into a movie structure borrowed from The World, the Flesh and the Devil, and we get an odd hybrid adaptation/remake as a result. This is not unusual in sci fi, and especially in sci fi films; people are always remixing and reusing sci fi premises for different purposes. The “last man on Earth” trope is constantly being remixed, because humans will never get tired of imagining what we would do in situations where both the comforts and pressures of our social existence are removed—and often what we would do when that isolation is interrupted by other survivors, and we are faced with the challenge of relearning both humanity and community. (Quick aside: Like many American children in the ’80s, my first introduction to this trope was the posthumously published 1974 novel Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien. O’Brien also wrote Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, a book I reread one million times as a child. I did not reread Z for Zachariah one million times because I found it very unsettling. People have noted similarities between The Quiet Earth and Z for Zachariah, but I honestly think that’s just an example of everybody thinking about the end of the world during the Cold War.) Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Quiet Earth is that all that shuffling and remixing of inspirations resulted in quite a good movie. Murphy was established as a respected director in New Zealand when he made it; he had recently directed Utu (1983), a critically renowned and commercially successful historical film about a Māori warrior on a quest for revenge. The switch from a historical epic based on real historical events to a post-apocalyptic sci fi film with three characters might seem a bit odd, but it works out. I do think The Quiet Earth has some trouble translating the already wobbly racial commentary of The World, the Flesh and the Devil from ’50s America to commentary on ’80s New Zealand, and there are some weak spots toward the end. (It’s very hard to care about a love triangle when reality is about to collapse.) But overall, the film is incredibly unnerving in a way that I very much enjoyed. The film opens with scientist Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence, a longtime collaborator of Murphy’s) waking up in his home, driving through town, and heading to work, all while slowly realizing that all the people have vanished from the world. Hobson’s manner is baffled but not as hysterical as one might expect—which only makes sense much later in the film, when we learn that he had intended to kill himself that morning and didn’t expect to wake up at all. Hobson figures out very quickly that whatever happened—”the Effect”—was due to an American-led international energy project he was working on. Knowing what caused the Effect doesn’t change Hobson’s situation, nor does it help him figure out why he remained when everybody else vanished. He goes through a series of sensible actions in order to find other survivors, such sending out a radio broadcast and painting signs everywhere, but when none of them work he begins to break down. Understandably! What becomes of a person’s mind when there is nothing in their daily life that matters? Unlike most other post-apocalyptic scenarios that we see in film or read in books, Hobson is not presented with any obvious dangers. There are no zombies, no roving bands of cannibals, no aliens, no mutants. He’s alone. He’s completely alone. He drives through the countryside alone. He wanders the city streets alone. He’s not wanting for resources. Even when the power grid fails, he has the knowledge necessary to rig up generators. He’s simply very alone, and stewing in guilt, and slowly becoming unhinged. Lawrence’s performance is great, evolving from a fairly flat affect that we don’t initially understand to a nadir of hysterical desperation, before that finally breaks and he settles into a more determined survival mode. That’s when he meets Joanne (Alison Routledge), another survivor, who is bubbly and friendly and shifts the mood of Hobson’s survival completely. The two of them start looking for others. Or, rather, Joanne looks for others, while Hobson secretly researches the Effect without telling her. There are eerie details sprinkled in here and there about their mysterious survival. While most of the world is empty of corpses—even of animals and insects—Joanne mentions finding the body of an infant in a hospital, and together they find the bodies of car crash victims. It’s only after Hobson encounters Api (Pete Smith), a Māori man, that the three of them figure out that they survived because they actually died at the moment of the Effect. All the while Hobson is still studying the Effect, because they all sense that reality is destabilizing. Hobson’s theory is that if they destroy the energy grid that caused the Effect, they can stop it from happening again, and they can keep living. It’s a marked shift from Hobson’s perspective early on, when he swung wildly between reckless uncaring and active suicidal tendencies. And it highlights what I think is the most interesting aspect of this film: the answer to the question “What would you do in this situation?” is always, “Well, it depends.” It depends on what’s left. It depends on whether you’re alone, and if you’re not alone, it depends on who you find. One person is a survivor. Two can be a team. Three? Three is a community, and communities are complicated. People want different things in different ways, and that is true even when there are only two or three of you left in the world. So many post-apocalyptic stories add complication by expanding the number of people, by having survivors encounter groups of others or find existing communities. The Quiet Earth doesn’t do that. The apocalypse was global, but the human complications remain intimate. I really like that approach, because I like that the way it frames all of the big things we explore in post-apocalypse stories—how to survive, how to cooperate, how to think about the future—all comes down to individuals and their thoughts, feelings, and desires. Even though I think the movie is at its most unsettling and unique when Hobson is alone and so many questions remain unanswered, I still like what happens when that isolation is broken. There is no space in this story for the choices of these three individuals to be obscured by the actions of a larger group, or for any violence or selfishness to be blamed on communal action. As for what happens at the very end… Well, people have been discussing it for forty years. (You can watch the ending here, if you don’t mind spoilers.) Hobson’s final scene on the beach is left unexplained on purpose. He doesn’t know what happened, and neither do we, and how we interpret that scene depends on the perspective we bring into it. Is it another world? The same world but in a different reality? Is he actually dead this time? Or has he died at the moment of another Effect and now he’s got to go through it all again? There is no firm answer from the people who made the movie, which is exactly how it should be. What do you think is going on in that ending? And about the movie as a whole? Where does it sit in your personal ranking of “last man on Earth” stories? Next week: Let’s head over to Hong Kong for Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, where we might be in the past, and we might be in the future, and even the most devoted film critics fumble when trying to describe the structure and plot. Watch it on Amazon, Fandango, or Microsoft.[end-mark] The post <i>The Quiet Earth</i>: Alone and Together at the End of the World appeared first on Reactor.