10 Sci-Fi Movie Endings No One Understands
8. The Quiet Earth - Where Is The Beach?
Released in 1985, the Kiwi sci-fi film The Quiet Earth is a still-underrated slice of post-apocalyptic action.
The film follows the fate of three survivors after the end, a scientist, an Aboriginal man, and the love interest who the pair are soon competing for the affections of in a love triangle that turns metaphysical fast. At first the film’s tense and interesting action is fairly easy to follow, with the unlikely trio attempting to survive as well as trying to understand what happened to their devastated planet.
Then comes the film’s infamously strange ending, wherein our hero crashes a truck rigged with explosives and wakes up on a dark beach, watching cloud formations as they emerge from the ocean in front of him.
The imagery in this one may feel impossible to decipher, but the director insists it’s a pretty easy-to-uncover metaphor for purgatory. Maybe it helps if you share his (lapsed) Catholicism, but luckily said director also conceded that “enigmatic is good”.
Just as well he thinks so, given that fact that almost no viewers understand what's happening there.