VIRUS

VIRUS. John Bruno, dir. USA: Universal (dist.), 1999 (release). Dennis Feldman, Jonathan Hensleigh, Chuck Pfarrer, script (from Pfarrer's Dark Horse graphic novel). Gale Anne Hurd et al., prod. Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, stars. Production company: complex arrangement, no "author" cited at end of credits. Design: Jaymes Hinkle credited as Art Director; several people worked on set design (IMDb). Cover story for Cinefantastique 30.4 (August 1998): 19 f., by Chuck Wagner, our initial source for this citation.

The "virus" in the film is a "digital life form," according to C. Pfarrer, and "Its purpose, like any virus, is to replicate itself" (Wagner 22); it is also us, humans, from the point-of-view of the alien. Wagner quotes Bruno as not wanting to do a computer virus, but "an electrical lifeform that hits" the Mir space station "during a transmission," from the Mir to an tracking ship far off regular sea-lanes (Wagner 20, 23 [and RDE, after seeing film]). The lifeform "gets into the electrical system, gets into the computer[,] and instantly figures out ones and zeros . . . [and learns] about a dimensional place: the ship and where the ship is. It learns that there are lifeforms all over this planet. So it's got everything. It's got maps; it's got languages and everything you could imagine that'd be in a big, computerized spy ship." So the alien "starts to manufacture itself—using parts of the ship and crew—into a dimensional thing." As with H.R. Giger's biomechanicals in ALIEN (film) the creature evolves in stages, realized in filming by "these fantastic little droids . . . . it's about robotics basically! But the creature still lives in the computer. All these droids and all these machines are operated from the computer on cables. So if you cut the cables, you can cut them off. Each one of them is an ROV: remotely operated vehicle" (20). The Virus comic cover pictured shows a clearly insectoid "biomechanoid" (21 [also "bio-mechanoid"]), while other of the film's creatures are more subtly insectoid, or crustacean (24-25, 26). "BioAlexi" is a Terminator-style combination of the dead Russian captain and metal parts. Note that only a few of the explanatory subtexts offered in the Cinefantastique article come through upon viewing. For the plot, cf. Agatha Christie novel and play, filmed under the title TEN LITTLE INDIANS (1975, vt AND THEN THERE WERE NONE)—and the Slasher-film tradition where an isolated group of teenagers are killed off until there is left only The Last Girl (most famously played by Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN [1978]). For the watery situation, cf. and strongly contrast ABYSS; for the imaging of the alien threat, cf. and contrast the deadly cyborgs in the TERMINATOR films and the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation; cf. also HARDWARE, ALIEN(S), and other po-mo, cyberpunk biomechanical threats. For the small "droids," cf. the insectoid small machines in RUNAWAY; for the largest machines, cf. the Swamp Thing from the comic book, and possibly the 1982 SWAMP THING film by Wes Craven. For machines building machines and evolving machines see under Fiction the works of P. K. Dick (esp. "Autofac") and S. Lem (esp. The Invincible and "The Upside-Down Evolution"). A pretty bad film, but usefully studied for what has now become the cliché of the biomechanical threat, here expanded to include junk and garbage—with garbage including zombie-like, Frankenstein's-Creature garbage—set in a mise-en-scène that is strongly marine Junk-Yard and (capital "I") Industrial trash. VIRUS is briefly and insightfully reviewed by Stuart Klawans in "Revenge of the Pod People," The Nation 268.6 (15 Feb. 1999): 34-36.