Word: weire
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Picnic At Hanging Rock. Peter Weir's metaphysical mystery about the disappearance of several adolescent girls from a Victorian boarding school is often hilariously overdone, but the subject is eerie and the idea has potential. Weir is a wild Romantic, he gives every shot of nature stark religious overtones piled on to the point of silliness. The beginning is obvious but fun. There is no doubt as to what happens to the girls, but there follows more than an hour of ponderous, redundant "evidence," the result of an Agatha Christie-type structure which, Weir irritatingly enough, never fulfills. Weir...
Such is the basis of Peter Weir's new film The Last Wave, a rather stodgy thriller involving Aborigines, magic, secret underground cities, and Mother Nature at her most perverse. This is Weir's fourth film, the first to be released in this country, and in it he shows a keen sense of how to create suspense, and an unnerving inability to deliver. His first talent makes Weir one of the more innovative filmmakers around, with a vivid imagination and the ability to infuse the most commonplace events with an eerie sense of the unknown. His second talent, however, consistently...
...this point Weir gets in trouble. Chamberlain goes to see an expert on Aborigine life, and she explains to him that the Aborigines believe in a dream time, a world of dreams in which the living communicate with the dead, a world in tune with time, nature and life, which is as real as our present-day reality. Things begin to tie in: Chamberlain's dreams... the Aborigines... the strange events in the weather. But it's too easy. Weir has spent a great deal of time building tension, creating atmosphere, invloving the audience, and to resolve the entire plot...
...this tends to make the film increasingly silly. Weir gives up on making the characters anything more than symbols, points on the line between evil white and primitive good. A few scenes of the ghetto in which the Aborigines live are lifeless, the city has no character, and the film disintegrates into stock effects. Chamberlain discovers a secret Aborigine city beneath Sydney, and learns that an ancient white civilization was destroyed by a giant tidal wave, and that another one is due very soon. Some sort of eternal justice will destroy the white man's injustice. At the very...
...WEIR SEEMS TO THINK that this quick view of the apocalypse is enough to have an impact. But aside from the fact that one never sees the wave hit Sydney, the reasons given for its appearance aren't too terribly plausible. There is a magnificent scene which sets up the wave, the highpoint of the film: Chamberlain is in his car and daydreams that the wave has hit and as he looks outside he sees well-dressed pedestrians floating beneath the blue-gray water, groceries floating slowly upwards. But this scene occurs three-quarters of the way through the movie...