Movie Review: The Quiet Earth

Thanks to NetFlix I've finally been watching some movies I've heard about for years but never seen. Most recently that means "The Quiet Earth".

So this Bruno guy wakes up one day. He brushes his teeth, takes a shower, gives us more full frontal nudity that I care for in a guy. (male nudity > zero = bad) He gets in his car and finds the streets largely empty. No people. Not even bodies. A few wrecked cars. A highway line painter that draws a line right into a tree. There's nobody at the office. He's all alone.

He paints signs telling anyone who sees it where to find him. He goes to the radio station and makes an automated broadcast that does the same thing. He moves into a much nicer house, plays pool with himself, collects TVs, fills the yard with cardboard cutouts of celebrities so he can give speeches to them.

Eventually, he meets a woman. She moves in and he hits on her with zero success. They search for other people and find one, a large black man who is a wee bit on the homicidal side and still thinks whitey is out to get him.

Bruno thinks that an experiment that he helped setup may be responsible for whatever happened. They don't really know if everyone else slipped into another dimension, whether the three of them slipped into another dimension, whether they're dead, whether everyone disintegrated, or just what happened. But this global energy net experiment that would have allowed planes to fly anywhere without fuel may be responsible.

The sun is acting weird. Bruno thinks it's related to the experiment and that it's a sign that whatever happened before might happen again.

We find out that these three seemed to survive because they were either dead or damn close at the time that things went wonky.

In the end Bruno has to blow up a research station to make the energy net collapse so the other two can live their lives.

Since this movie came out they've gotten a lot better at showing empty cities and making them creepy. This movie treated it like a joke. It was too wacky and silly to be unsettling.

I'm glad I saw this movie. It's come up too often as a recommendation. I wouldn't buy it. I didn't even rip a copy to keep. But I'd recommend putting it on your NetFlix queue or a cheap rental somewhere else.