It’s an Australian movie, I think. A middle-aged guy wakes up and finds that everyone has disappeared. Apparently into thin air, as at one point he finds a crashed airliner and all the seats are empty but the seat belts are all still buckled. He eventually finds a young lady and they have romance until they also find a handsome young man. This causes friction and Mr. Suddenly Third-Wheel leaves. I remember at the end he also suddenly teleports and the last shot of the film is him standing on a beach looking up at the alien sky above him full of planets and moons.
I remember watching that. But in that film I think they make it clear that there was a nuclear war. In the OP film, it’s a big mystery where everyone went.
I was also going to say The Quiet Earth. I saw it when it came out. Good movie. And there’s another DVD I’ll have to dig out from wherever SWMBO put it!
By the way, I actually own a copy of THE BOOK that it was based on. At the time I had acquired it, it was one of the hardest tomes to track down, since so few copies were printed (NZ market is rather small). If you’re interested, here’s a synopsis of the book.
Aye; me too. I remember Siskel & Ebert reviewing it and it went on my list. I saw it at the Art Towne Theatre (at least I think it was re-named Art Towne by then).
I know right where my copy is; I just watched it last January.
I think I was thinking of The Wall, though, if you consider it, there is also Last Woman on Earth and plenty of other lone-survivor-of-an-apocalypse-until-they-run-into-somebody-else films.
The big deal in the movie was IIRC some strange energy field that passed over the Earth. If you were already in the process of dying (or being murdered), you were spared. Everyone else living was snatched away to destination unknown. So our protagonists were all getting killed or otherwise dying…then were suddenly spared…then found themselves almost alone in this abandoned Earth.
Can anyone explain the ending, how the guy got transported? Did he try to kill himself by driving a car into a wall or something? Memory is fuzzy on this point.
Aye; he died driving a load of explosives into the project that caused the Effect. But just like the previous time he tried to kill himself and a massive scientific anomaly coincided with his death he actually survives and this time is moved across time and/or space to someplace entirely new to him.
It’s a little more sinister than that. A company/consortium/whatever is implementing a worldwide power grid. IIRC, it was a system where power was freely available from the ether. ‘Freely’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘free’; just that it was a worldwide system that could be tapped into to provide power. I think it was meant to solve the problem of pollution in addition to power inaccessibility.
You’re correct about the global energy grid. Hobson was involved in it’s development and tried to commit suicide due to his guilt over not speaking out about his concerns about Project Flashlight
I believe the book sheds more light on what happened to everyone. Something to do with animal DNA vs. plant DNA and living vs. dead tissue. It’s also mentioned somewhere that The Effect cannot penetrate water i.e. fish were not affected.
The ending is left to your own interpretation a new world, the after-life, purgatory, a dream, etc… The book has him wake up in bed at 6:12am again.