Something to watch tonight: The Quiet Earth

After two well-received fea­ture films in cinemas, Goodbye Pork Pie and Utu, Geoff Murphy clearly felt that he’d earned enough respect to cred­it him­self as Geoffrey Murphy¹ on his next film, the adapt­a­tion of Craig Harrison’s acclaimed loc­al sci­ence fic­tion nov­el, The Quiet Earth. This was a prestige pro­duc­tion, a ser­i­ous piece of cinema, after all.

Scientist Zack Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) wakes one morn­ing to find the glob­al exper­i­ment he has been work­ing on has caused all life on Earth to instantly vapor­ise. As he searches Auckland for signs of any oth­er sur­viv­ors, he gets more and more unhinged, even­tu­ally pro­claim­ing him­self President of the World from the bal­cony of a loc­al mansion.

It’s a typ­ic­ally bravura per­form­ance by Lawrence, rendered all the more impress­ive by how he dials it back when he finally comes across a couple of oth­er people – young fem­in­ist Joanne (Alison Routledge) and Māori hunter² Api (Peter Smith).

Hobson’s obser­va­tions sug­gest that “the Effect” that caused the anni­hil­a­tion is ramp­ing up to the fin­ish the job unless they pack the New Zealand Army’s entire stocks of gelig­nite on to the back of a truck and des­troy the facil­ity that’s key to the glob­al net­work, but before that he has to reck­on with the twist­ing rela­tion­ships between the unlikely allies.

In the mid-80s, we were all pain­fully aware of how close we were to glob­al nuc­le­ar cata­strophe but there was also the fear of the “Neutron Bomb”, an American inven­tion inten­ded to wipe out humans while leav­ing irra­di­ated infra­struc­ture intact. Cities emp­tied of life but still func­tion­ing – at the time that seemed like the worst kind of war crime.

Watching Murphy’s film for the first time last night (it screened at the Wellington Film Society but wild weath­er kept us home so we sim­ul­tan­eously watched Umbrella’s superbly restored Blu-ray), I was taken by how mid-80s it was – so much a product of its time. For a while our prot­ag­on­ists hold up in an 80s mod­ern­ist white con­crete man­sion over­look­ing the Hauraki Gulf, a house that would be seen as deeply aspir­a­tion­al not long after in TV shows like Gloss.

Murphy (and writers Bill Baer, Sam Pillsbury and Lawrence him­self) wer­en’t to know this at the time but what they were mak­ing was a meta­phor for New Zealand itself in 1985. One coun­try – the con­ser­vat­ive one led by the author­it­ari­an Rob Muldoon – was rap­idly dis­ap­pear­ing to be replaced by some­thing else. But what?

Perhaps they did sense it. You can read the film as a pre­dic­tion that the stale white middle-class males would become extinct and the future would be led by groups that old New Zealand had con­sciously mar­gin­al­ised – women and Māori³.

That was­n’t entirely mis­placed – David Lange’s fourth Labour gov­ern­ment made genu­ine attempts to open things up socially, for example with the expan­sion of the Waitangi Tribunal’s remit and homo­sexu­al law reform – but the real win­ners from the seis­mic shifts in New Zealand in the mid-80s were the same people who always seem to win.

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Where to watch The Quiet Earth

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Streaming on Prime Video

Canada: Streaming on Tubi or Cineverse (both free with ads) or Midnight Pulp

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on The Roku Channel, Cineverse (free with ads) or Midnight Pulp

UK: Streaming on Arrow Video

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Further listening

It’s been a busy old time for radio gigs recently, hence why sit­ting and typ­ing here has­n’t been a priority.

On Sunday 30 August, I joined Perlina Lau on RNZ Culture 101 to review Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, James Ashcroft’s Netflix thrill­er The Whisper Man, and the new doc­u­ment­ary Lomu.

Then, last Thursday I was chat­ting to Susana Lei’ataua on RNZ Nights about the 35^th anniversary of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The West Wing finally arriv­ing on New Zealand’s ver­sion of HBO Max, and the superb kiwi goth­ic hor­ror Mārama on Māori+.

And – two Sundays in a row! – last week­end, I was on Culture 101 with Perlina Lau once again to talk about some female-focused genre films: Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant!, Fall 2: Deadpoint and The Runner.

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1. For a vivid por­trait of the lar­rikin world that Murphy, Lawrence and the Blerta col­lect­ive inhab­ited in the 1970s, I com­mend Nick Bollinger’s book about the New Zealand counter-culture, Jumping Sundays. In it he tells a story of Murphy, between jazz and film gigs, tak­ing a job as a Wellington primary school relief teach­er and grow­ing 30 marijuana plants in the classroom as a sci­ence exper­i­ment. ↩︎
2. That’s a hunter who is Māori, not a hunter of Māori, to be clear. ↩︎
3. The sequence where the trio rest up in the wharenui of Api’s home marae was espe­cially touch­ing. ↩︎