Cheap The Last Wave - Criterion Collection (DVD) (Richard Chamberlain) (Peter Weir) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Last Wave - Criterion Collection

Eerie, evocative, and haunting
Our modern, rational culture floats like a small boat on a huge, dark ocean of unguessable depth. Richard Chamberlain, in perhaps his best role ever, is a lawyer specializing in the arid technicalities of corporate taxation who is, by chance [well no, not really, as it turns out] drawn into the Shamanic world of the tribal aborigines who, unknown to most people, still inhabit Sydney, Australia. Little by little, the comfortable everyday world in which Chamberlain's character lived starts to dissolve, or at least become transparent, before the unguessably ancient and very different world around it. Meanwhile nature is acting very strange, paralleling the breakdown in Chamberlain's character. A wonderful movie, full of rich metaphors and images (including the final one) that remain in the mind long after the film is over. Even the soundtrack: some aboriginal instruments, some very nervous-sounding Australian-Irish dance music, and some spare but oh-so-telling chords, can stay with you for days. What are dreams anyway and what do we buy by living in a daylight world where we cannot see them? Weir suggests some provacative and disturbing answers.

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"A dream is a shadow...of something real"
"What are dreams?" asks lawyer David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) of his client Chris Lee (David Gulpilil), an Australian Aborigine on trial for manslaughter.

"I will show you a dream," he responds. "A dream is a shadow...of something real."

And, when you think about it, so are films. They are literally shadows of something real - recorded on transparent strips and projected onto screens with bright lights. Watching a good film is like dreaming while awake.

Peter Weir's The Last Wave has very much the texture of a beautiful, disturbing dream. Before going Hollywood and losing his artistic teeth, he made evocative little gems like this one - full of unformed dread and pregnant with the possibility of mythic revelation.

The plot concerns a routine bar fight between some Aborigines in Sydney, Australia, that ends in the death of one of them. Lawyer David Burton is called in as a Public Defender. No big deal - except that the case seems to involve a lot more than a Saturday night celebration gone horribly awry. It may, in fact, have everything to do with an ancient prophecy marking the End of the Current Age - and a catastrophe of alarming proportions. Can Burton unravel the mystery of the prophecy - and of his own true nature - in time to avert the End of the World as we know it?

Like a dream, The Last Wave unfolds with its own kind of logic - a logic that finds only a vague counterpart to our everyday sort of concrete reasoning. It's persuasive, too, the way any powerful dream always is. It makes us believe dialogue like I quoted at the top of this review, even though people never really talk that way in real life. It also forcefully reminds us that there is more than one culture in the world, and that we assume we are superior simply by virtue of our technology and science, at our own peril.

In many ways, The Last Wave makes me think of Werner Herzog, who also makes deliberately paced, dream-like films about cultural clashes. If you enjoy Herzog, give this film a look.

As a final note, The Last Wave probably deserves a thoughtful DVD release with a decent commentary track. Hint, hint, Criterion...

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disappointing
the story was just ok and the acting was fair but the quality of the vhs tape wasn't very good. actually the sound was terrible!!!!
actually worse than a homemade movie.