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"The four-day history of a major American scientific crisis," just an alien organism's brief pit stop in the Southwest. "Some dead burg" in the New Mexico desert, corpses with powder in their veins, a crashed satellite found in the doctor's office. (The camera focuses on a fallen villager's dusty face, then tilts up to frame researchers looming in hazmat suits and a helicopter against cobalt skies.) A government team is swiftly rounded up: Exposition-dispenser (Arthur Hill), surgeon (James Olson), splenetic biologist (Kate Reid), semi-retired doctor (David Wayne). At the Nevada underground base, numerous color-coded levels of sterilization capped by Reid's double-take as she discovers that the coat of chalk covering her body is the charred remains of her outer skin layer. Geezer (George Mitchell) and baby are the sole contaminated survivors, in the lab the extraterrestrial visitor is visualized as an olive splatter which dilates into origami patterns on computer monitors. "I never went in much for science fiction." An analytical reading of Michael Crichton by Robert Wise, pointedly between The Day the Earth Stood Still and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Metallic chambers and curved corridors, laser beams and nuclear countdowns, enough of an antiseptic environment for the characters to get crushes on pre-recorded female voices. Fleischer is a stylistic precursor with Fantastic Voyage and The Boston Strangler, to the procedural Wise adds split diopters across the Panavision screen plus the ominous electronic lettrism of Douglas Trumbull's solarized abstractions. "Language is a virus from space," says Burroughs, the continuous flow of data builds to a simple solution, mutatis mutandis. Bringing Vietnam and cover-ups to the mix is a job for Romero, "establishment gonna fall down and go boom" (The Crazies). With Paula Kelly, Ramon Bieri, Kermit Murdock, Richard O'Brien, Peter Hobbs, and Eric Christmas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |