MovieChat Forums > The Quiet Earth (1985) Discussion > Another Movie Fails To Reach Its Potenti...

Another Movie Fails To Reach Its Potential

posted a month ago by avortac4 (3610)
3 replies | jump to latest

All movies, it seems, are doomed to fall into their own hybris sooner or later.

This movie, just like the old 'Unearthly Stranger', has a lot of potential, lovely 'feel' (mid-1980s has the most potent atmosphere, of course), and it works as a 'time capsule' in many ways, showing so many shockingly obsolete ways of doing things.

Shockingly, because these things change so subtly, you don't notice the changes until you suddenly see a movie like this and realize no one has REALLY used vinyl records or all kinds of tapes or film the way shown. They even have rotary telephones in this movie..

Of course the premise itself is one of the oldes clichés in the book - what would Bart Simpson do if all limits were removed. That's basically what it always amounts to. All obstacles removed, you are the King of the World, huzzah!

Now what?

A kid revels in this idea, because suddenly he 'owns the whole planet', and 'can do anything'. The ultimate freedom that every kid dreams of.

An adult mind finds this premise depressing, stressful and scary. All alone in the whole world? Infrastructure would fail, every grid would eventually fail, gas would go bad, electricity would stop working unless you know how to go produce it.. plumbing would stop working, no one maintaining it. All food would go bad, unless you were to farm your own food somehow..

I mean, you would basically have to learn everything about how to maintain modern 'civilization' infrastructure, and that's quite a heavy burden.

It would not be the 'Home Alone' fantasy if being able to eat ice cream whenever you want.

It would be the nightmarish 'absolutely NO sources of heat or light when it's cold night for 12 hours in a row'.

Of course you could start a fire and keep it going, or learn how to start fires without matches/lighters (although I am sure you could hoard enough matches to last for a literal lifetime)..

The thing about this particular premise is that you can't REALLY do much with it - after the initial stages, it's just boring and uneventful. They even artificially try to create excitement in this very movie by the 'Alarm that requires him to rig explosion, and for some reason he still uses the waiting time to talk to tape his thoughts'..

The initial stages are always the same.

1) The Curiosity and Investigation of the 'lonely world', leading to
2) Shock of the realization that you are all alone
3) To try to find other people
4) Realization you can do anything you want, so you live in a mansion and eat junk food and drink yourself to stupor, 'King of the World' fantasy
5) Doing wacky crazy stuff (after ice cream, jumping on mom's and dad's bed, essentially, just in a more adult or larger scale)
6) Going insane, becoming a lunatic of sorts
7) Sobering up, trying to figure out things and find other people even more

Now, after this, movies usually give up and make it an action movie, romance story or horror of some kind. You can't keep up this premise for long, because after these stages, you have exhausted all the possibilities (sort of).

What is left? Absolutely nothing.

This means, you HAVE to make it into a more 'ordinary movie', so now there's the injected romance, the jealousy and all that jazz, because OF COURSE every gosh-darned 'supposed SCI-FI' movie has to turn into one of the formulaic stories. Sigh.

Of course the discussion boards and forums also follow formulas.. everyone is going to either talk about 'the girl' or wonder about the 'bald guy', and ALWAYS, inevitably, ask 'what would YOU do' and think they are so clever for thinking to ask that. Sigh sigh sigh.

I can play out a 'realistic' scenario of that kind of premise... but people probably won't like it.

First, you would have to gather all the resources for survival possible. You know plumbing is going to fail, so you learn to always use a different toilet, which means you don't even have to care if it flushes or not, because you are not going there again (there are enough toilets to last a lifetime).

One pretty interesting moden scenario would be to find a solar panel farm that produces enough electricity automatically to be able to power up and charge a fleet of electric cars and motorbikes. That way, as long as they work, you could always have transport, at least. Gas would go bad, but electricity might last a bit longer that way. Then you would only have to find all similar places to be able to travel inbetween those spots, to see different cities or whatnot. Perhaps you could treck through Europe or USA/Canada that way.

If you learned to farm your own food and hoard enough matches, you could live rather comfortably for an extended period of time. If you could also harness the electicity from those solar panel places and keep them running somehow, you could live in those places or whatever houses/buildings those places are set to power up.

[–] avortac4 (3610) a month ago

Of course, realistically, people living in better worlds, would not leave a planet this empty, they would come, land, and help you or take you to a better world.

Maybe they would let you help clean up this one and build a good world here.

In any case, the 'lone survivor' would sooner or later start seeing UFOs more and more, until the planet is populated again. It would be a sin to waste a whole planet and not populate it, wouldn't you think? This means, no one could stay alone for long on a planetary scale.

It would, of course, be quite funny to think that there might be people elsewhere, but since you can't really cross the sea alone (unless you are some kind of madlad), you would never know about it.. perhaps HAM radio stuff might let you talk to them.

I wonder how long you could survive on whatever you find in supermarkets, though.. it's an interesting thought. It wouldn't be very healthy to never get any fresh vegetables or fruits, but canned food should last you a long time.

In the end, this is kind of a boring premise, even if it promises a bit of luxury at first. Being alone is not a problem for anyone that doesn't hate themselves too much, but it would be a lot of work to survive in a world without infrastructures. Then there might be animals, so that could be dangerous. Being woken up by a slap from a Bear claw is probably not fun for anyone.

In the end, it's like a boring version of Survival Man, that has no possibility to go anywhere interesting without other people (which is why they had to inject the other people into the story).

There are more interesting 'SCI-FI' premises out there, I don't really find this one particularly fun to think about longer than about half an hour. After that, it's just same old routine every day, just to survive.

The important point in that situation, of course, besides hoarding the matches, electric cars and such, would be to find guns (probably easiest in USA), so you can end the 'experiment' when you want.

[–] cv1cv (432) a month ago

BEWARE! Avortac4 is a troll trying to waste everyone's time with such idiotic comments. Look at his posts. He doesn't think anything in any film makes sense. His post may seem like it makes sense in the first sentence or two. But he always quickly wanders off into a completely idiotic idea, and then writes a wall of text that makes no sense. And his sole purpose is to waste your time, thinking he's cute for doing so. Don't feed the troll. If you write a comment, you're giving this troll EXACTLY what he wants. Don't comment after my comment.

[–] Kementiri (52) a month ago

TTLDR skimmed because you wrote a pile of nonsense. Trust me they DID use rotary phones in 1985 as well as vinyl, 8 track tapes and yes the RADIO. I'm not sure how old you are (I am guessing you are gen z or something ) but from your attempt trying to analyse the movie you failed to understand it completely. Of course you would to all the things he did. You do everything you were probably never allowed to do and then some that you only imagined you might do. Then reason would set in. He's also a scientist so I'm sure he knows more than the average person does. It was a GREAT movie its time. Too bad you couldn't enjoy it for what it was.