The Last Wave (1977) presents two very surprising firsts for Down Under Flix: it’s the first David Gulpilil film I’ve examined on the site, notwithstanding his cute cameo in Dead Heart, and also the first Peter Weir film I’ve covered. It’s especially surprising I’ve not reviewed a Weir film until now, having covered films by most of his contemporaries—Beresford, Schepisi, Armstrong, Miller—but then again films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli are quite well-trodden critical ground, as are his international productions, several of which—Green Card, Master and Commander, Witness—I especially adore.
In another first, I’m going to fly the spoiler flag high upfront. I don’t often dabble in spoiler territory, but I don’t think I can provide an authentic assessment of The Last Wave without entering that terrain. If you want the quick version of the review before checking out, I think The Last Wave is perfectly made, impeccably crafted, and maddeningly dissatisfying.
If you’re still reading … David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) is an affluent lawyer, happily married with two daughters, in soggy rain-soaked Sydney. David is tasked with representing a group of Indigenous men accused of murdering another, and through his investigations and conversations with one of the accused, Chris (David Gulpilil, billed here as Gulpilil), he begins to suspects this was a tribal killing. Through further investigation and through dreams and visions, he gradually learns the secret this tribe is protecting, of a coming natural apocalypse.
Gallipoli is typically held up as the moment where Weir shed his ‘Peter Weird’ label, but I would say that process began here. The world The Last Wave unfolds in—contemporary, urban, and anchored by a recognizable leading man—feels much more grounded than the goofy small-town milieu of The Cars That Ate Paris or the otherworldly outback and boarding school milieu of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Having said that, the film is absolutely of a piece with Picnic at Hanging Rock in its ecologically minded message that nature is untamable, inhospitable, and has the potential to destroy us all, also a theme of Colin Eggleston’s film Long Weekend, released the following year.
Like Burning Man, The Last Wave contrasts the natural and urban, the organic and industrial. Score and sound design evoke both modernity and something ancient, mixing synth and didgeridoo. The film is laudable as one of the first high profile Australian feature films to grapple earnestly with the colonial legacy and its ongoing repercussions, showing Indigenous cultures marginalized in urban environs but still deeply connected to radically altered yet unceded land. At the same time, The Last Wave utilizes Indigenous culture in a mythic sense, not unlike the use of Indian burial grounds or paganism as "return of the repressed" tropes in American and British genre films.
The film is also laudable on the technical front. I can only imagine the production and continuity headaches of dealing with voluminous quantities of water and rain effects, but the results are impressive on screen in the film’s moody and atmospheric visuals. Cinematographer Russell Boyd (returning from last week’s Almost An Angel) and the film's sound designers were rightly awarded with AFI trophies for their work on the film, and the film is masterfully directed by Weir.
Gulpillil, a few years after his breakthrough role in Walkabout, does nice work in a rare urban-set performance, but the audience avatar here is Chamberlain. Chamberlain was a great TV star across multiple decades, and also a great movie star of the 1970s in the transatlantic, international sense (see also David Hemings, another transatlantic star who not only acted in but directed Australian films during this period). Chamberlain’s 70s filmography includes, among other things, Ken Russell’s Tchaikovsky biopic The Music Lovers, Richard Lester’s delightful The Three and Four Musketeers, and, most relevant to The Last Wave, two Irwin Allen disaster blockbusters. The Towering Inferno and The Swarm occupy opposite ends of the disaster film spectrum—the former an Oscar-nominated blockbuster hit, the latter a critical and commercial miss—as do Chamberlain’s turns in their starry casts: in the former he’s the ne’er do well whose sabotaging ways contribute to the disaster, in the latter a hapless scientist whose warnings of calamity go unheeded. His demises in both films are fairly memorable and campy: I’ll give the edge to The Towering Inferno, but that’s no stinging indictment of The Swarm.
To the degree that a burgeoning national cinema constructs itself in counterpoint to the dominant commercial cinema of Hollywood, Chamberlain’s intertextual casting in The Last Wave creates both echoes and contrasts to the American disaster films of the era. The film’s penultimate effects shot of a wave building on the horizon in the closing minute of the film would be the end of Act 1 or midway turning point in an Irwin Allen, or later a Roland Emmerich, disaster extravaganza. Here, it closes the film, and is pointedly oblique as to whether it is the destructive wave foretold throughout the film or just David's artful premonition.
While a neat genre subversion, the conclusion is also vexing. A certain irritation actually started creeping in earlier—as often the case when you realise a film’s remaining running time won’t be sufficient to deliver on its promises—as Chamberlain’s David pieces together well-telegraphed revelations with nobody to bounce off onscreen and no means of acting meaningfully upon them. I don’t particularly need or crave closure as a viewer, so I’m not suggesting Chamberlain should tear through the streets alerting the public of the coming flood (ala Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or give the wave a flu to defeat it (ala ID4). And I understand the symbolism, obvious but effective, of David emerging from the sewers into bright daylight at film’s end, the veil lifted and seeing the world anew. And yet the obscurity of the ending is ultimately dissatisfying. The Last Wave is still worthwhile viewing, technically impressive and very well executed, but never—for this viewer at least—the coherent sum of its parts.
Ben