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Hot on the heels of NBC's live televised remake of Fail-Safe comes this two part Showtime adaptation of
Nevil Shute's post-apocalyptic classic On the Beach. (Let's hope this mini-boom in
Cold War-era retreads ends before we get Robin Williams playing multiple roles in a remake
of Dr. Strangelove.) Updated to the year 2006, after a
Chinese invasion of Taiwan has sparked a nuclear war, this version of On the Beach
is remarkable only for how unremarkable it renders the prospect of worldwide annihilation.
Armand Assante (The Mambo Kings, Hoffa) is American sub commander Dwight Towers, who
finds himself a man without a country after nukes wipe the U.S.A. off the map. He and his
Navy crew make for Melbourne, Australia, one of the last remaining pockets of
civilization. Melbourne itself is threatened by an encroaching radioactive cloud, so
Towers agrees to undertake a mission to the frozen north of Alaska, which scientists
theorize may have come through the global catastrophe unscathed. But one of their ranks -
cynical Julian Osborne (Bryan Browne) - disagrees. Osborne is trying to make up with his
ex, Moira (Rachel Ward), before the end arrives, but Moira's eyes are only for Dwight.
The ensuing love triangle consumes much of the first installment of On
the Beach, with the end of the world relegated to backdrop status. In fact, no one
really seems to notice or care that most of the human race has been rendered extinct,
which makes for a sluggish, uninvolving apocalypse indeed. The dramatic justification for
this blase treatment is evidently that the characters are in denial, but this leaves
little of interest beyond the usual soap opera treatment of human relationships. This
proves to be a major problem because, quite frankly, these are not the people most of us
would want to spend the end of the world with.
Assante's Dwight Towers is a quintessentially square-jawed, hard-assed
career military man who reveals occasional flashes of emotional depth (he's lost his
family in the nuclear holocaust). He's certainly preferable to Julian - played by Bryan
Brown as a whining twit - or Moira, a self-satisfied cipher in the hands of Rachel Ward.
The romantic entanglement of these characters is a no-win situation: we're supposed to be
rooting for Dwight and Moira to get together, when it truth it's Julian and Moira who
deserve each other. It's a relief when the second half begins and the romance takes a back
seat to submarine adventure.
Dwight and his crew head north, and at first the results are
encouraging. Sonar buoys reveal that the level of radiation is dropping, and a garbled
transmission intercepted from Anchorage indicates that life does go on. But once all hopes
are finally dashed, the crew must make a decision whether to return to Melbourne as
ordered, or to finish out their days in the ruins of San Francisco (where many members of
the USS Charleston crew hail from). At this point - over two-thirds of the way through the
miniseries - the weight of the cataclysmic events finally emerges and the story picks up
considerably. Unfortunately, it's a case of too little, too late.
Director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander) lends an eerie atmosphere to several
scenes: one in which Dwight and his second-in-command take a walk through the deserted,
snow-dusted streets of Anchorage is particularly effective. But too often he ignores the
opportunities afforded by the material, bypassing a sense of impending doom in favor of
the dramatic tension of a poker game or the cheap thrills of a helicopter ride. The recent
independent film Last Night,
which also features characters reacting matter-of-factly to the end of the world,
nonetheless managed to convey a convincing doomsday atmosphere on a limited budget. Such
moments are fleeting here, shunted aside for turgid melodrama. By the time one character
decides to stay behind in irradiated San Francisco and do some fishing, it's almost as if
he's got the right idea.
- Scott Von Doviak
