Z for Zachariah is a post-apocalyptic snoozefest

Z for Zachariah, just your ordinary every day post-apocalyptic love triangle flick, is one of those Sundance entries thats all subtext and lingering glances and atmospherics and call it Z for Zzzzzz.

This dull, slow movie represents a major step back for director Craig Zobel, who looked like he was ready for the big time with his deeply unsettling Compliance a couple of years ago. The new one is, Im afraid, though competently executed, pretty much a waste of time.margo

But its a step up for the hugely talented 24-year-old Australian Margot Robbie, by far the best element of Wolf of Wall Street, who this time does an Appalachian accent as a farmgirl living alone in a valley that is naturally insulated from the effects of a nuclear disaster that seems to have wiped out nearly all of humanity.

She gets by setting traps and farming a bit, but she has no electricity and seemingly no prospects for storing enough food to get her through a winter.

A drifter named Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor) happens by, and she saves him from the effects of taking a bath in a radioactive waterfall (you can scrub radiation right off your skin, like coal dust? I did not know this).

Hes harboring a secret, plus hes literally the last man on Earth, so the two fall in love. Except they dont; shes mad for him, but he keeps her at a distance.

When a second wanderer, Caeb (Chris Pine) comes by (both men happened to be underground when the nuclear event occurred), the way seems to be clear for her to hook up with Caleb, and Loomis even tells her its okay with him. Yall be white people together, he says, in virtually the only witty line in the script.

It turns out that her fathers church has to be ripped apart in order for Loomis, an engineer to make a mill thatll provide hydroelectricity and get the lights turned back on, and the chief dramatic energy of the film comes from her holding onto, then finally letting go of, her fathers legacy in order to save her life.

The love triangle, though, is a wet firecracker: Ejiofor is a good actor but hes miscast here; he isnt a romantic lead, and at no time does Loomis (who has a bizarre and pointless drunk scene) seem particularly interested in her, though Robbie does a very sensitive portrayal of a woman desperate for a human connection.

The ambiguous and unexplained final minutes essentially amount to a giant shrug that leaves the audience walking out of the theater wondering what the point of it all was. Well, the point is that Robbie is a major star in the making, but we already knew that.

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Z for Zachariah is a post-apocalyptic snoozefest