A poignant and powerful essay cum film review by Myles Harris asks:

… Why do we not despair when as children we learn we are eventually going to die? The film gives this conundrum an extra twist by examining how the whole human race copes with learning it is about to die, and very soon…

… The final shot is of the Sawfish leaving Melbourne with Ava Gardner standing on a promontory watching its departure. Then there is silence.

Watching On the Beach you are seized with the frailty of human existence and how we, a few billion creatures clinging to a fragile planet, cannot afford to have delusions about our vulnerability. But there are 20,000 nuclear war heads stored in the world’s missile silos, and every day you hear ‘experts’ prepared to take a chance similar to tossing a coin on global warming.

We seem to determined to either blow ourselves to bits or choke ourselves to death. Yet we may be the only talking, intelligent species in our galaxy, possibly in the universe.

We simply do not know. But once we are wiped out a great silence will descend, a silence that may last a billion years, even for ever.

Silence