Aww, I liked Quiet Earth a lot -- it's character-driven, the three leads turn in great performances (from what I'm remembering -- I saw it decades ago) and it doesn't depend on spaceships going boom or monsters going blaah, 'just' the horror and wonder contained in ordinary people.
From what I remember, the ending is --
SPOILER
SPOILER
SPOILER
Zac was one of the scientists who was working on the energy project. He tries keeping this from the other two people, but it's why he went mad in the first place. He steals the truck and sets off to kill himself, destroy the laboratory and kill the quantum effect that made everything go fuckedy in the first place. But he fails -- the truck blows up, he dies, the generator or antenna or whatever it is blows up, but this makes the grid freak out _again_ and he isn't dead, but alive by himself somewhere absolutely else. We don't know what happened to the other two people or everyone else back on Earth (or wherever it was they went). Once again, he's the only survivor. I've always seen it as a kind of commentary on the atomic bomb and how the scientists who set it off saw it as a great scientific achievement (Oppenheimer's oh-so-famous quote notwithstanding -- we read a Los Alamos casebook at my Santa Fe junior high school, and most of the scientists were not standing around feeling griefstricken, and there is a huge defensiveness about "the bomb saved more lives than it took" NO RLY around there to this day) -- and how the people it actually affected had no choice in the matter and no idea what was going on. Rather than leave the grid alone, or try to figure out some way of dealing with it other than BLOWING IT UP, he just has to mess with it. It's miles away from the acid-trip fruitbat crap at the end of 2001. Plus, it has a gorgeous score I've been trying to find for years and years.
My two cents anyway....I just love the movie so I'm probably defensive about it. I would chime in more on this topic but the kind of thing I think of is "The Magus," which is about six years long and which nobody else has ever seen, ever.
Also yeah, that's Altered States, altho it makes more sense if you read the book (which I read because it was by Paddy Chayefsky). The combination of the LSD and sensory deprivation, which was taken rather more seriously back then, somehow magically physically turn him into Early Man (this also happens to the dude wayy early in the first fifteen minutes or whatever of the book/film), and then he actually transforms into primordial GOO, and only the love of Blair Brown restores to us the hunky William Hurt. Stupid, yeah, but the famous slamming-himself-back-into-reality-against-the-hallway-walls sequence at the end has been copied and parodied in other films/commercials/music videos dozens of times.
no subject
From what I remember, the ending is --
SPOILER
SPOILER
SPOILER
Zac was one of the scientists who was working on the energy project. He tries keeping this from the other two people, but it's why he went mad in the first place. He steals the truck and sets off to kill himself, destroy the laboratory and kill the quantum effect that made everything go fuckedy in the first place. But he fails -- the truck blows up, he dies, the generator or antenna or whatever it is blows up, but this makes the grid freak out _again_ and he isn't dead, but alive by himself somewhere absolutely else. We don't know what happened to the other two people or everyone else back on Earth (or wherever it was they went). Once again, he's the only survivor. I've always seen it as a kind of commentary on the atomic bomb and how the scientists who set it off saw it as a great scientific achievement (Oppenheimer's oh-so-famous quote notwithstanding -- we read a Los Alamos casebook at my Santa Fe junior high school, and most of the scientists were not standing around feeling griefstricken, and there is a huge defensiveness about "the bomb saved more lives than it took" NO RLY around there to this day) -- and how the people it actually affected had no choice in the matter and no idea what was going on. Rather than leave the grid alone, or try to figure out some way of dealing with it other than BLOWING IT UP, he just has to mess with it. It's miles away from the acid-trip fruitbat crap at the end of 2001. Plus, it has a gorgeous score I've been trying to find for years and years.
My two cents anyway....I just love the movie so I'm probably defensive about it. I would chime in more on this topic but the kind of thing I think of is "The Magus," which is about six years long and which nobody else has ever seen, ever.
Also yeah, that's Altered States, altho it makes more sense if you read the book (which I read because it was by Paddy Chayefsky). The combination of the LSD and sensory deprivation, which was taken rather more seriously back then, somehow magically physically turn him into Early Man (this also happens to the dude wayy early in the first fifteen minutes or whatever of the book/film), and then he actually transforms into primordial GOO, and only the love of Blair Brown restores to us the hunky William Hurt. Stupid, yeah, but the famous slamming-himself-back-into-reality-against-the-hallway-walls sequence at the end has been copied and parodied in other films/commercials/music videos dozens of times.