The Last Wave (1978)

Memorable, crazy movie

Good movie but grossly overrated

As Good As It Gets

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

First few times I saw this I saw it as a fun mystical apocalypse I was sorta into apocalypse masochistic thinking in the 70s. Weir does set a hell of a mood.However I see an agenda here...white people disillusioned loosing faith in their own science, religion and mystical rites turn to foreign exotica. Add to this guilt for something their ancestors did. This time its not just to the Brit convicts the anti-hero is descended from but we goes back thousands of years to a white culture that survived an apocalypse, moved to South American and built the Mayan civilization then moved to Australia!Our anti-hero is the sole survivor of Atlantis! Odd that no whites are depicted anywhere in South American Indian art as shown in this movie, perhaps that civilization was wiped out and all evidence?Well back to the agenda, there is a strong apologia for Aborigine ritual murder, (its tribal so its legal!) (Just like the ritual rape of nubile females by tribal elders in the outback as part of their coming of age...now that's really self serving male porkchopery!)Finally the 300 foot wave comes and I guess wipes out Sydney and drowns the whites....so do the aborigines escape or do they sacrifice themselves for the other tribals in the outback?

I love the old P. Weir films, this and Picnick are my favorites and absolute masterpieces I carry in my heart + have seen many times without loosing fascination. Many have described this story-line , so I won't....Just saying great, great, great film. Good good good good good ( I must fill 5 lines......but words are useless...) good good good.

The Last Wave is an excellent example of a director taking a subject that I couldn't be less interested in and making it mildly worthwhile. The bland Richard Chamberlain stars as David Burton, a lawyer in Sydney who has to defend five Aborigines against a murder charge. This could have been a compelling thriller, with themes of racial injustice and the works, but instead it focuses so heavily on the fact that the murder was a ritual one by their tribe and it delves deep into the supernatural element of it all.The film goes heavily into this tribe and an epic prophecy about the rain coming and all of that, but I honestly got incredibly lost in the whole thing. Maybe it was my lack of interest in the subject matter that led me to fall so far behind, but I don't think the script did a solid job of getting the knowledge across. So when the epic final sequence came, I was impressed on a technical level but still didn't understand much of what was happening. Some of the blame could be removed from the script though and placed on Chamberlain, who is such a dull lead performer that it would be hard for anyone to focus on this character. There are some moments built around Burton's family that could have been touching, but when you don't care at all about the character it's kind of hard to care about his struggles with his family.Still, I'm giving the film a slightly positive rating thanks to Weir's direction, which despite my lack of interest was able to impress several times. It takes a lot to leave me thinking about a film whose story I couldn't care less about, and that goes to show the skill of Weir's work here. As with all of his films, there are several powerful sequences that are staged with expert precision on his part. Throughout the film Burton experiences terrifying dreams of the Aborigines and these sequences get right underneath your skin and create an eerie sensation for the whole picture. They are appropriately chilling and set up the entire tone, constantly leaving you in suspense. I just wish that the story itself had been half as gripping as the individual sequences.

You know the people in the movie are in for it when king-sized hailstones fall from a clear blue sky. In fact, the weather stays pretty bad throughout this atmospheric thriller, and only lawyer Chamberlain has the answer. But he's too much the European rationalist, I gather, to get in touch with that inner being that only reveals itself through dreams.Darkly original mystery heavy on the metaphysics from director-writer Peter Weir. Already he had proved his skill at flirting with other dimensions in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Here it's the arcane world of the Australian Aborigines that confronts that the tightly ordered world of the predominant whites. Something strange is going on inside the Aborigine community when they kill one of their number for no apparent reason. Yuppie lawyer Chamberlain is supposed to defend them in a white man's court. But the more he looks into things, the more mysterious things get, and the more interested a strange old Aboriginal man gets in him. And then there're those scary dreams that come and go at odd times.Well structured screenplay deepens interest throughout. One reason the movie works is the background normalcy of Chamberlain's wife and little daughters. Audiences can readily identify with them. And when their little world runs into forces beyond the usual framework, the normalcy begins to buckle, and we get the feeling of worlds beginning to collide. Chamberlain underplays throughout, especially during the underground discovery tour where I think he should have shown more growing awareness than he does. After all, it's the picking up of the mask that holds the key (I believe) to the riddle, yet his reaction doesn't really register the revelation. Of course, the notion of nature striking back has a certain resonance now, thirty years later. In the film, the notion is wrapped in a lot of entertaining hocus-pocus, but the subject itself remains a telling one. One way of bringing out a central irony is the symbolism of the opening scene. A big white SUV barrels past an aboriginal family, leaving them in the historical dust. The terrain looks like an interior tribal reservation of no particular importance to the coastal fleshpots where industry dwells. Yet, it's also a region most likely to survive anything like a destructive last wave. Perhaps there's something about past and future to think about here.Anyway, this is a really good movie that will probably stay with you.