The Last Wave (1977)
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Peter Weir, Tony Morphett, and Petru Popescu

Richard Chamberlain, who once winked at me seductively when I was an intern at CNN, plays David Burton, a tax lawyer in Australia who ends up defending a group of Aboriginal men accused of murdering one of their friends. Thing is, none of the whites can figure out how or why the guy died, and the Aboriginals aren't talking.

Mother Nature, however, is talking, with freak hailstorms in the desert, double rainbows, and downpours of raw petroleum and frogs. What Mama Earth is trying to say concerns David Burton quite a bit. Especially since he's having strange, hypnotic dreams that might signal the end of the world.

The Last Wave is thick with atmosphere and dread, but unfortunately thin with clarity, plot, and logic. What starts as a convincingly creepy psychological thriller slowly… slowly … slowly … verrrrry slowly … transforms into what is basically a personal vision quest for the main character.

But without Matthew Modine from 1985's Vision Quest to wrestle his way into our hearts, The Last Wave ends up feeling more like an academic experiment than a character piece.

It's satisfyingly sinister from start to finish, visually brilliant, and falls into a roughly similar category with movies like Altered States and 2001, but as with those films, the conceptual ideas end up being more important than the characters, who float through the story without real purpose.

All of the essential questions—why is he having these visions, what is their ultimate meaning, what's the connection with the murder, was it murder, are the Aboriginals hiding signs of the apocalypse, why did Richard Chamberlain wink at me—are answered, but in such a confusing, laborious fashion that it's hard to know where we and Burton stand at film's end.

Was it all just a personal awakening, or was the world really coming to an end? What was I thinking following Richard Chamberlain into that CNN bathroom?

Maybe the point, in this film that's so intrigued by ancient mythology, is really that it's all about the journey. And it's an interesting journey, but the film—like the $20 bill Chamberlain haughtily dropped on my fetally-positioned body after finishing his dirty business—mostly left me feeling cold and confused.

Review by Crimedog