THE TEST OF SUPERHUMANITY: “The Quiet Earth” and “1917”
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In the Cinemasophy column, there are two stories about a person who, in one case, passes, and in the other, fails the test of superhumanity. The New Zealand sci-fi film The Quiet Earth offers an extraordinary subjective experience of total loneliness through the story of a scientist who one day discovers that he is the last and only person left on Earth. 1917, by English director Sam Mendes, is a benchmark war drama that portrays the stagnant Western Front without a single cut. On screen is the crater-scarred, ravaged Old Europe, realizing that the age of the individual has ended and the age of the masses has begun — a vast human hive. What would later be called trench mud and camp dust.
THE QUIET EARTH (New Zealand, 1985)
Director: Geoff Murphy
Starring: Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge, Pete Smith
A
New Zealand scientist named Zac Hobson (Lawrence) goes to bed as usual, only to wake up the next morning and discover that he is the only person left on the entire Earth. Everyone else has disappeared as a result of a scientific experiment gone wrong. Abandoned gas stations, cars, someone’s half-finished, still warm coffee, completely empty houses, shopping malls, and railway stations. Wandering through a metropolis that was still overcrowded just yesterday, Zac experiences both absolute euphoria and despair from his non-existential solitude.
His quiet life in every sense — a life he begins to “play”, like a child left without parents — is disrupted by the appearance of another last remaining person on Earth, a woman (Routledge), with whom he embarks on an apocalyptic romance that, without warning, turns into a love triangle: the newly formed Adam and Eve of the deserted Earth encounter yet another survivor, an aggressively minded Māori man.
An adaptation of Craig Harrison’s novel of the same name, lost among the Hollywood blockbusters of the 1980s, captivates with an extraordinary atmosphere of total loneliness, something cinema had scarcely seen before. The depopulated world captured on screen does not aspire to the laurels of a new 2001: A Space Odyssey with its auteur experiments and futuristic documentary style. Yet it offers a somewhat similar visual experience — one that avoids verbal constructs and allows entry into the human subconscious, with its emotional and philosophical depth.
The Quiet Earth is a powerful subjective experience capable of reaching the deepest layers of our consciousness, almost like music. Director Geoff Murphy uses a minimum of dialogue to describe what is happening (the soundtrack was re-recorded in the studio to remove all signs of external life), which, however, does not make it any clearer. And, in fact, it doesn’t need to. What matters far more is a human being left one-on-one with themselves, not with a supercomputer named HAL 9000, as in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, but with their own self.
In the finale, the scientist undergoes a transformation. But into what? A superhuman — or a subhuman, destroyed by a vanishing civilization? Zac’s gradual descent is conveyed through a series of striking images: he walks around in women’s underwear, drives a locomotive as if it were part of a toy train set, wanders in the rain, and plays the saxophone.
Without relying on major studio special effects, The Quiet Earth emerges as an intelligent, life-affirming, and truly uplifting film about how a quiet desire of a weary scientist to be alone can turn into a real brought on by the void that has formed.
1917 (UNITED KINGDOM, USA, INDIA, CANADA, SPAIN, 2019)
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Dean-Charles Chapman, George MacKay, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth
In the damp, bone-chilling spring of 1917, there is no change on the Western Front: a British trench freezes knee-deep in mud opposite a German one, while the war itself has already changed everything. Coughing, lice, and utter hopelessness, total disbelief. America has only just declared war on Germany, but what does that change? The old world has already breathed its last, and from here on, as we know, things will only get worse. From the tragedy of 1914, a quarter of a century later, 1939 will be born, and with it — a new tragedy, that of the Second World War. But for now, two corporals, Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Tom Schofield (George MacKay), undertake an almost infernal journey through the very heart of darkness of this monstrous slaughter, in which there are no victors. All are victims.
Command (General Colin Firth) has lost contact with the battalions, and intelligence reports that the Germans have retreated to lure the British into a trap prepared over an entire month. By morning, one and a half thousand royal subjects are preparing to advance, unaware that certain death awaits them. The slaughter can only be stopped by a written order, which the two messengers must carry across the German front line. Blake is sent because he reads maps better than the others and knows the terrain. And also because his own brother is in the distant battalion, which means he will surely make it. Tom Schofield goes along as support, as a safeguard. The commanding officer places his bet on Blake. Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Skyfall) — on Schofield. And here lies the key to understanding the true story that exists beyond the main plot, as simple as a video game.
1917 is one of the most acclaimed (a mountain of awards, including two Golden Globes and 10 Oscar nominations) and at the same time most controversial films. Its artistic boldness has been widely praised: director Sam Mendes and the great cinematographer Roger Deakins (a longtime collaborator of the Coen brothers, also behind Blade Runner 2049 and much more) shot two hours of screen action as if in a single continuous take, barely ever cutting the camera. The same feature, however, has also drawn criticism, with some seeing this artistic feat as a formalist experiment. If viewed as a grand, showy war drama, 1917 may disappoint. Mendes is neither the first nor the last filmmaker to attempt a “one-shot” film.
Another Englishman, Alfred Hitchcock, pioneered this trick back in 1948 with Rope, long before digital technology — using film reels that at the time allowed no more than 15 minutes of continuous shooting. After Hitchcock, about a dozen major directors ventured into these waters. Of course, one could argue that Mendes went further than all his predecessors, telling a story built on two scripts: one narrative, and the other technical — mapping every camera movement and actor’s mark, far more complex than the first. One could also mention the natural lighting, which ruled out artificial film lighting, the hours of waiting for the sun to disappear, the monumental sets, six months of exhausting rehearsals, and so on.
But Mendes is not Sergey Bubka — he is not setting records. He is speaking about a human being lost a century ago, in those trenches of the Western Front where, together with the individual, classical culture was slowly breathing its last. This is both the secondary and the central narrative of the film. Behind the backs of the heroes, moving along the slushy channels of trenches and craters, rages a maddened reality: bodies pressed into the mud, former people gone insane and stripped of the ability to move, their faces no longer recognizable; mountains of rotting corpses exuding a terrible stench; abandoned homes and farms; a life slowly fading away. Mendes observes all of this with the wise sadness of someone who knows the price of time’s relentless passage.
1917 is a pure celebration of overcoming boundaries. Horizontally, the plot moves from trench to trench, from crater to crater, in real time. Horizontally, the camera glides, embracing people in one graceful, wide, and continuous gesture. The camera here becomes a third полноценный hero, documenting everything in a manner reminiscent of Remarque. Like his great novel All Quiet on the Western Front, 1917 is a frontline diary written in the present tense, intensifying the illusion of immediacy and ensuring complete immersion. The entire action, always on the verge of ignition, is infused with Tolstoy’s device of defamiliarization: everything is seen as if for the first time, through an inexperienced eye. These are the eyes of a young man, not a seasoned soldier — even one decorated for bravery at the Somme.
Mendes’s film is rich in everyday details (corporals dream of a proper meal, rummage through a German dugout among rats, and soldiers who have lost faith read aloud prayers of their own making) and marked by the limited understanding typical of any infantryman of what is happening in the larger war — on the map lying before the officers of the general staff. From this arises a terrifying sense of the absolute madness and meaninglessness of what is unfolding.
1917 is neither a pacifist film nor a story about coming of age, about turning a boy into a man; it is free from both cynicism and a satirical взгляд on war. In Mendes’s vision, the First World War is only partly a stage for existential choice. For him, war is a catastrophic rupture leading from the old world to a new one. The director portrays World War I as a wild situation in which the human being is no longer needed. On screen is a crater-ravaged, trench-scarred Europe, realizing that the age of the individual has ended and the age of the masses has begun — a vast human hive. What would later be called trench mud and camp dust.
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