A post-apocalyptic movie doesn’t always need to have cities collapsing in giant CGI mess-a-thons, infected giant monsters going wild, or huge screaming crowds. Sometimes, less is more. And this particular movie focuses very hard on the less part, because while it has a starry main cast, that’s the whole cast. And what’s more, we’re willing to bet you’ve never even heard of this movie. That’s what makes it so interesting.
Set after a mysterious disaster has devastated most of the world (they’re always mysterious, aren’t they?), Z for Zachariah follows Ann Burden, a young woman who believes she might very well be the last survivor. She lives by herself on her family farm in a valley that seems to have been spared from the radiation in the surrounding areas, but her isolated life changes when John Loomis, a scientist, arrives in a protective suit. Then Caleb appears, and the fragile balance between them begins to shift. Z for Zachariah stars Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street) as Ann Burden, Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) as John Loomis, and Chris Pine (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) as Caleb.
Yep, that’s the whole cast of the movie. Three top actors bringing their A-game to a movie that could actually be a stage play as much as a major movie, and that intimacy gives the movie a tension that oozes out of the screen, because the question is: can these people actually last the movie together without utterly ruining what they’ve got?
Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.
You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.
The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.
You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.
Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.
The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
Not really, at least not commercially, but there’s a fairly big caveat with it. It only grossed around $121,000 at the U.S. box office, but that’s because the film only had a limited theatrical release and was also released on video-on-demand the same day, so it was never going to be a blockbuster.
Critically, though, it did fare much better, as the film has an 80% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus saying it draws some very strong drama from a simple premise, even if that slow pace is much more the speed of critics than a general audience. And Rotten Tomatoes proves that, because the Popcornmeter audience score is much lower at 44%, which tells you pretty clearly that critics were warmer on it than general viewers. And that’s never usually a good sign for a film doing well. Metacritic gives it a 68/100, meaning “generally favorable” reviews, based on 28 critic reviews.
Z for Zachariah leaves Prime Video on May 31.
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