`BEACH': IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

OK, I think we're all agreed - as ideas go, the end of the world is a bummer. But the folks who have tossed together the remake/adaptation of ``On the Beach'' have turned it into an execrable spectacle noteworthy mainly for its crushing tedium. For all the debates on how the world will end - in fire, in ice, with a bang, with a whimper - this may be the first document to imply that our planet will end with a long, unstifled yawn.

Nevil Shute, who died not long after writing the book in 1957 (and just after it was turned into a compelling, controversial film starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins in 1959), was tackling something that carried a shocking urgency 43 years ago - global annihilation and nuclear winter. Today, we've sort of assumed that our world leaders are a little too sane to resort to global nuclear war to settle differences, if only because science has developed even more ghastly, biochemical ways of putting down the entire human race.

Which is not to say that nukes don't still haunt our reveries: The film ``Deterrence'' examined the issue earlier this year, as did a TV remake of ``Fail-Safe'' (which, pointedly, kept its story in the early '60s). Last year's little-seen but utterly winning Canadian film ``Last Night'' also imagined the world's last hours, though doom came from an ostensibly external source; nonetheless, it was at its best imagining how we'd all mark our final hours, something this production handles in a particularly lead-footed fashion. (The genre reached its apotheosis in the '80s, with the film ``Testament'' and the TV movie ``The Day After.'')

This day at the ``Beach,'' an hour-plus longer than Stanley Kramer's original film, unwisely updates the action to the near future, where the United States and China clash over the latter's conquering Taiwan. This is where the film first threatens to lose its audience, in its first two minutes, when a talking head grimly intones, ``The mood of the American electorate is very strongly pro-Taiwan'' - huh? The American electorate can't make sense of today's bloodbath in the Congo without a detailed scorecard.

But anyway, the last surviving American submarine docks in Melbourne, Australia, the only continent not yet affected by the drifting fallout, though it's on its way. Sub commander Dwight Towers (Armand Assante) has lost his family but is still game to help a few Aussies survive, if possible. Hard-drinking, anti-social math whiz Julian Osborne (Bryan Brown) is certain there's no hope, but there's the small matter of an enigmatic signal of hope - dispatched from Alaska - that radiation levels there have dropped to the point where humans could survive.

Towers takes his crew - plus Osborne, plus upright Aussie liaison officer Peter Holmes (Grant Bowler) - beneath the Pacific to see if salvation does, in fact, exist. But not before, of course, stepping into a mini-soap opera: Towers falls for Moira (Rachel Ward), a cynical (but gorgeous) floozy who is Julian's former lover and Peter's sister-in-law (small continent, that Australia).

One problem crops up most decidedly in updating this story: That signal from Alaska would nowadays be a simple e-mail that would hardly need to be ambiguous (sent repeatedly and only at certain times, with major corruptions? Repeating only the same few words? - nah).

Nonetheless, on the plus side, this ``On the Beach'' does offer the spectacle of a toppled Golden Gate Bridge, and Assante and Bowler turn in laudable performances as military men with breaking hearts. On the other hand, Brown and Ward are nonstop bluster, and the final 40 minutes are utterly excruciating, relating in minute, manipulative detail its characters preparing for the inevitable - and making it seem oh-so-fashionable and existential and romantic and upscale (a cherry-red sports car figures in prominently amid the doom and gloom).

Naturally, at this point, the filmmakers count on viewers reflecting on how they, themselves, would spend their own last days on Earth to give those scenes added resonance. Well, I pondered that. But I also had time to think about that Internet Traffic School I had to attend to. And I devoted some thought to the Lakers' chances against Portland. And that shopping list my wife just handed me. And a couple of books I'd like to get to soon (including ``Horse Heaven'' - you know, that Jane Smiley looks just like my mom if she were a blonde!). And how carpal tunnel syndrome affects my already desperately sorry jump shot. And ...

The facts

--The show: ``On the Beach.''

--What: Apocalyptic drama based on the acclaimed Nevil Shute novel.

--The stars: Bryan Brown, Rachel Ward, Armand Assante.

--Where: Showtime.

--When: 8 tonight; also May 30 and June 9.

--Our rating: Two stars

CAPTION(S):

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Photo: The world ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but a yawn, in Showtime's ``On the Beach,'' at 8 tonight.