Seeing as how this film has a budget of $3 million in 1985 - which was a lot of money at the time, especially for a New Zealand film - this movie actually turned out looking really good.
The very limited cast and the creation of a wasteland where almost everyone on the planet is dead because of messing about with science a bit too much, well, that couldn't have been easy to pull off especially in the scenes where they are in what was probably a populated area in real life.
The story here is that a scientist named Zac (it takes a while before we even learn his name) is working on a project named "Project Flashlight" and one day he wakes up to go to work and notices that nobody else is around. Nobody is on the roads, nobody is in the shops, nobody is anywhere. To him, it is just another day but then he starts to notice crashed vehicles that have no people around them. He knows that something is terribly wrong when he sees a crashed commercial airliner with no bodies and nobody about.
When he makes his way to his lab he discovers that not only is his local area decimated of population, but when he tries to communicate with other science locations all around the world nobody is responding at any of those locations either.
At first he is enjoying this freedom because he can go anywhere he wants, just take whatever he wants from any shop, do anything he wants without consequence. But as one would expect, loneliness and madness starts to set in after a certain amount of time being completely alone in the world.
He discovers by digging into his own company that the project he was working on had an unintended side-effect of wiping out nearly the entire living population of the Earth and he discovers a few bodies, the main one being his superior in the sub-basement of his lab, who is dead at the controls and there are notes indicating that in the night they executed "Project Flashlight" and it was a success. Of course succeeding in this regard managed to accomplish the elimination of almost all life on Earth.
A bit later he discovers a couple of other survivors and they are able to surmise that the reason why the 3 of them are alive now is because all three of them were briefly brain-dead when the event that wiped out the planet's life struck. They were already dead at just the right moment and therefore were able to carry on.
They form some sort of community with one another but I did find it amusing that this partnership is almost immediately threatened by the fact that both of the men are competing for the affections of the world's one and only female. Friggin women haha.
Zac is the only living person that understands science at a high level and he discovers that because of the actions of Project Flashlight, the sun is now behaving erratically and they must act fast to prevent a 2nd catastrophe that will eliminate what little life remains on the planet.
Ok, now this movie is over 40 years old and it kind of shows. This should not be a surprise to anyone that ends up watching this. A great deal of it is dated, but thankfully they didn't attempt to use much CGI, which in 1985 was a load of crap anyway. Instead, they went for practical effects and some pretty elaborate settings and scenes that probably ate up a lot of their overall budget pretty rapidly. Getting entire football stadiums and entire downtown areas that didn't look like studio sets for use in a film with nobody else around, couldn't have been easy or cheap to pull off.
Unfortunately this film was a dead flop and never even managed to get to a cinema outside of New Zealand and USA when it was released. The fact that it made only $600,000 back on its investment was probably really bad news for the independent producers at the time. $3 million was a huge amount of money for a film back then. Star Wars only had a budget about 4 times this amount and at the time it was seen as a ludicrous amount of money to spend on a film and its budget was 7 times that of all of George Lucas' film combined prior to its release.
The average big-budget film in the early to mid-80's was around $8 million. Therefore, an unknown group in New Zealand coming up with 3 million to play around with was a pretty amazing feat. Unfortunately it fell flat and most people never ended up hearing about this movie at all. Even though I am a big sci-fi fan I never heard of it until last week.
Apparently it has a big cult following and many famous scientists including Neil deGrasse Tyson have said it is one of their favorite films because of its accuracy as far as the science side of things is concerned.
It is rated by one source as being the number 10 New Zealand film of all time.
Should I watch it?
This seriously depends on what kind of person you are. I personally enjoy the evolution of science-fiction in cinema as the technological capabilities of the film industry started to improve right around this time and therefore I really liked it. To me it was very interesting to see what they were able to do with a very interesting, almost Black Mirror like plot over 40 years ago.
To the average person though that needs a film to move quickly and be action-packed, this one might seem a bit dull. Movies that are 40 years old can rarely hold the attention of the modern audience.
For anyone that is a fan of sci-fi though, this might be one of the more important films ever made.
tl;dr: This one will be a winner for sci-fi fans. For all other people though, it will probably bore them.
