68 - The Quiet Earth

    A man wakes to find himself alone on Earth.  After spending some time alone, he gradually starts to lose his mind.  Eventually he finds another survivor, then a third.
    It’s hard to give a sense of this movie without giving more of the story away.  It reminded me heavily of Dawn of the Dead, with a long sequence of a character exploiting the emptiness around him.
    These kinds of stories are always interesting, because there’s only so much that can happen with an individual in isolation.  When there’s a lack of conflict, stories tend to fall apart.  This story is handled differently, in that there’s an effort to explain what happened.  There’s no twist to the ending, or completely outlandish explanation.  We get clues dropped periodically about what they think has happened.
    It’s also nice that there’s an obvious setup for a love triangle, but the story resists playing that for obvious tension.  It gets handled realistically.  The characters accept their situation.
    There’s another big point that I love.  After spending a long time alone, when the characters meet each other, they’re genuinely happy to see another person.  This has been something that’s been bugging me in Walking Dead; when there are fewer people, there should be more interest in accepting more of them.