On the Beach is a 2000 apocalyptic drama television film directed by Russell Mulcahy and starring Armand Assante, Bryan Brown, and Rachel Ward.

Towers places his vessel under the command of the Royal Australian Navy and is summoned to attend a briefing, partly regarding an automated digital broadcast coming from Alaska in the Northern Hemisphere.

A crew member who is from San Francisco abandons ship, planning on dying in his home city, and is left by his shipmates after it is argued that the length of time he has spent outside has already made him irreversibly sick with radiation poisoning.

Towers attends his old friend in his dying days and ultimately, at his request, euthanizes the man as his deteriorating condition causes him to experience extreme suffering.

As the people of Melbourne realize that the inevitable nuclear cloud will soon reach their location, their impending doom begins to unravel the social fabric; anarchy and chaos erupt.

Osborne races around the Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit and finally crashes his car at Turn 10, resulting in a fiery death.

[5] As much as it resembles the plot of the movie and of Shute's novel, however, the book gives only an incidental reference to the Whitman poem,[6] and the phrase "on the beach" is a Royal Navy term that means "retired from the Service".

As a result there is a greater degree of emotional resonance to the characters than the 1959 film had ... Mostly the mini-series works satisfyingly as a romantic drama, which it does reasonably depending on the extent to which one enjoys these things.

Crucially though the mini-series does manage to work as science-fiction and Russell Mulcahy delivers some impressive images of the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust.

Rachel Ward was nominated in the Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television category for her role as Moira Davidson.