Review of The Last Wave (1977) by Bryan W — 03 Mar 2011

Like many genre films made in the seventies, this movie depends more on tone than it does on plot. Though this in itself does not damn a movie to obscurity, it comes awfully close.

The warning signs are everywhere; though the first fifteen minutes are appropriately ominous, they really fail to give the viewer a sense of the film's plot or characters, an error that could have easily been corrected by placing one of them in this opening sequence. When the protagonist is introduced, we never really get a sense of him as a person beyond the fact that we're lead to believe he's the person for whom we should be rooting. Writer/Director Weir summed up the movie in an interview by saying 'what if someone who viewed the world in a pragmatic way had a premonition?' Well, since we never see the protagonist's pragmatism or even an iota of skepticism, it makes everything that happens to him in the rest of the film seem like a norm for him.

Of course, these things that happen never fail to unsettle; he has several dreams that would easily disturb anyone, and as he continues on his inevitable spiral, the events in the plot become only more ominous and terrifying without being outright scary. This sense of place that was sorely missing from the first part of the movie reminds us of what the makers could have done to our expectations by giving us a pure sense of the characters before throwing us headlong into apocalyptic imagery and metaphorical ramblings.

Though next twenty minutes after the first fifteen minutes is fairly boring, this film truly takes you for a ride through the surreal, and while the average viewer might enjoy this distortion of reality, an aspiring filmmaker could find some useful vocabulary for making the natural order truly frightening.