About.com Rating

Marking an independent director's first step into Hollywood, with big-name stars and bigger production values, Craig Zobel's Z is for Zachariah stands as a very different kind of post-apocalypse: The world has ended, and we are in the silence after the whimper that came when it all finished. Based on Robert C. O'Brien's posthumously-published 1974 novel, it starts with stillness and quiet as a figure in a hastily-made hazmat suit picks through the muddy, burnt-brown ruins of a deserted town -- finding books, careful to note the end of an hour's time.

Then she crosses a ridge and descends into a valley that's still green and growing and alive, shrugging off her protective armor to reveal a woman -- a girl, really -- underneath the plastic and tape. Her name is Ann, and she may be the last human alive. She certainly thinks she is.

As played by actress Margot Robbie (Focus, The Wolf of Wall Street), Ann maintains her family farm -- planting crops, fishing in uncontaminated water, trying to go on. When another figure in protective gear crosses into her valley, Ann's hesitant to help him at first -- until she sees that he's bathing in water that comes from outside the valley, and exposes herself to warn him that he's at risk. The man, John (Chiwitel Ejiofor) is a scientist who came from the north in the high-tech prototype survival suit he was working on, and all his weeks of caution have been undone by a thoughtless moment: Ann, under his guidance, helps him back to shaky health, and welcomes him into her home. The valley is, somehow, protected from the fallout and radiation and other things that happened after what Ann only refers to in passing as "The Mistake," and Ann and John begin to plan better and bigger ways to not just survive but thrive.

Soon the last two people on earth are joined by a third, the dirty and beat-up looking Caleb (Chris Pine), who tilts Ann and John's tentative pairing into a triangle.

It's funny how much the nuclear apocalypse has gone out of style, even if our nuclear weapons haven't; nowadays, a nuclear war is usually a prelude (Terminator, Red Dawn) or foregone entirely in favor of other, hipper world-ending scenarios. But there's something stark and eerie about the more rigorous scientific reality of Z is for Zachariah, one that evokes great lesser-known films like 1983's Testament, where the wind and water and world are invisibly, inevitably deadly. And much like another example of the genre, 1959's The World, The Flesh and the Devil, civilization may be gone, but its constructs -- race, religion and romance, among others -- still linger with potentially deadly results.

What elevates this from B-movie hokum isn't just the caliber of the acting -- although the acting is excellent across the board. Ann is the diametric opposite of the brash, brassy broads Robbie's played so far, a plain-spoken and pious young woman trying to adapt to the inconceivable. Ejiofor is also superb as ever; John seems smart and good-hearted, but his cleverness can verge on the calculating. And Pine, as Caleb, delivers a finely-tuned piece of work: Is Caleb friend or threat? Or both?

Yet while the film only shows three characters, director Zobel is assuredly the fourth figure in this film working hard and working well to make the movie as good as it is. Zobel isn't afraid of silence, or stillness; his actors give wordless glances or make momentary pauses that say as much as reams of dialogue would have in their place, and constantly maintains the film's tension while also quietly ratcheting it up, scene by scene, inexorably. (A hunting trip fraught with unseen danger, from without and within, is a great example.) And Zobel's eye for the pastoral -- crops, trees, fields, streams - makes the movie lush and dangerous, harsh yet beautiful. This is a sensuous film, in every possible meaning of the phrase; when there's an impromptu turkey dinner, you can almost smell it; when a man looks through a door at just Ann's legs curved and cloaked in shadow, it's a moment you feel along with the character. 

Screenwriter Nissar Modi has made extensive changes to O'Brien's novel, and yet the film works even better for those alterations; no one in this film is what they seem to be, and each of them has secrets they keep and stories they don't share. As Joan Didion famously noted, "we tell ourself stories in order to live," but that doesn't mean those stories are necessarily the whole truth. The characters act like people -- Ann has a moment of weakness with ramifications, John hisses out an insult with centuries of history in it, Caleb is either truly sincere or working some sharp angles. Much of Z is for Zachariah  is left for the viewer to contemplate, which is both an implicit challenge to the audience but also an implied compliment. The last human beings alive will still be human; that reality, and that realism, is what makes Z is For Zachariah both compelling and worth seeing.