|
Synopsis: In the year 2019, the
Earth is under threat from an asteroid called Galileo's Child, which is
on a collision course. Insisting that the military’s plan to blow up the
asteroid will simply result in a no less dangerous meteorite shower,
scientist Dana Shaw (Caroline Barclay) successfully argues for an
alternative plan to divert the asteroid’s course by setting off massive
explosions deep within it. Drilling teams, already at work at
established mining colonies in space, are sent to the asteroid and put
to work. Dana, too, travels to Galileo’s Child, and finds that the
drilling operation has fallen badly behind schedule. Clashing violently
with Ryan (Xander Berkeley), the leader of the drilling teams, Dana
insists on longer work periods. Unbeknownst to Dana, the teams have
fallen behind schedule because Ryan and his partner, Potter (Duane
Whitaker), are taking time out to mine for platinum and other valuable
substances. During the drilling, Luke Harrison (Brian Krause) hits
something that his drill cannot penetrate. Explosives expert Samantha
‘Nuke-em’ Rogers (Barbara Patrick) blasts through the obstruction, and
the team members find themselves within a strange chamber. The
fossilised remains of a huge carnivorous animal are discovered inside,
along with numerous humanoid bones. The chamber is made of platinum, and
Ryan demands that the work be temporarily halted, and the men allowed to
salvage the precious metal. Dana objects, and can only listen in horror
as Ryan tells his people that their mission is pointless anyway, doomed
to failure from the start; and that in the end, the threat of Galileo’s
Child will be dealt with by the military blowing the asteroid up. Dana
argues her own case passionately, and succeeds in drawing the
drill-teams to her side. A compromise is reached, with the salvage
operation allowed to proceed in exchange for still longer work periods.
While the men set to work collecting the platinum, Dana takes numerous
photographs of the fossil. Ryan tries to lure Dana into his own
financially-motivated schemes by offering to extend the work-break still
further, to give her time to collect the specimen, but she
contemptuously rejects the idea. Later, after the chamber has been
stripped and the men have retired for their rest period, Potter shuts
down the oxygen generator that produces the camp’s artificial
atmosphere. The chamber slowly fills with the asteroid’s natural
nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and the fossilised remains begin to take on
flesh....
Comments: An asteroid
hurtles towards the Earth; a team of drilling experts lands upon it,
racing against time to plant explosives within the body of rock; while
back home, the military plans to deal with the impending threat by
nuking it out of the skies…. Sound familiar? Of course – except that
instead of being the inevitable post-blockbuster clone, Within The
Rock was released two years before Armageddon. Whether this
represents simple coincidence, or another example of a low-budget
knock-off beating its big-budget model into release, like Rocketship
X-M and Destination Moon (or perhaps more to the point,
Carnosaur and Jurassic Park), is unclear, but the fact
remains that the resemblance between Within The Rock and
Armageddon ends with their plot points. It isn’t the highest praise
in the world to say of a film, “I’d rather watch such-and-such than
Armageddon any day!”, I guess, so I’ll say this instead: whatever
its shortcomings, and it certainly has plenty of them, Within The
Rock is finally an inoffensive, even mildly entertaining, piece of
science fiction – and it never once makes you feel as if some
sadist had tied you to a chair and strapped a jackhammer to your skull.
Although many of the film’s choices were undoubtedly dictated by its
budgetary restrictions, it repeatedly comes across as simply more
sensible than its blockbuster cousin – even aside from such
technical details as being able occasionally to hold a camera shot for
longer than three seconds. For example, Within The Rock has its
killer asteroid detected when it is a good six months from Earth, rather
than having it melodramatically “discovered” at a time when by rights it
should have been – and would have been – visible to the naked eye
weeks earlier. Apart from the plain common sense of this, it also
allocates a more realistic time-frame to the story’s action, while still
allowing for the inevitable race against the clock as it draws to its
conclusion. The question of who might be equipped for dealing with such
a threat as that posed by the asteroid is taken care of by shifting the
film’s setting to the not-too-distant future (rather too
not-too-distant, if we’re honest), a time in which space travel is taken
for granted, and large corporations have set up mining platforms
off-planet. The people sent to Galileo’s Child to carry out Dana’s plan
to divert the asteroid away from the Earth are thus not just qualified
for the job, but already out in space earning their livings at it.
Within The Rock also wins points for steering clear of a few of the
more obvious clichés. We are spared, for instance, having to listen to
how the asteroid is [*sigh*] “the size of Texas” – although at
one point, Dana does insist that the military’s plan for blowing
up Galileo’s Child will result in “a shower of rocks the size of
Kansas!” She was probably
just upset, though.
Rational script choices such as these help
to carry Within The Rock over its rough patches – and it cannot
be denied that there are a lot of them. Here again, the budget
comes into play. The setting of the story in a mining camp does allow
Within The Rock to get away with some pretty basic set design – and
there’s also this in the film’s favour, unlike many of its low-cost
brethren, it at least was not flagrantly filmed in a factory or an oil
refinery. An imaginative touch is the “oxygen generator”, which
supposedly creates a breathable atmosphere around the camp, and thus
negates much of the need for elaborate gear. (Although when the
generator breaks down midway through the film, the crew’s pre-generator
breathing apparatus is resurrected, and the work continued, without
delay.) However, as you may have gathered from my comparatively brief
synopsis, a little too much of the film’s running-time is passed first
in scenes of underground drilling, and later in sequences of the various
characters creeping around in dark tunnels, either hunting for the
creature that they inadvertently release, or running away from it.
Within The Rock also falters badly at the story level, suffering
both from an inevitable sense of over-familiarity, and from never quite
being able to make up its mind what kind of film it actually is.
It starts off as an Earth-in-peril story, passes briefly through a
science-versus-the-military plot, then ends up being an Alien-esque
nasty-monster-on-the-loose movie. Then, just when we’d almost forgotten
that the Earth was in danger, suddenly we’re worrying about that
again.
Within The Rock’s biggest
disappointment, however, is its monster. The film opens with an
intriguing wordless sequence (set “two million years ago”) depicting the
trapping of the creature by the denizens of an alien civilisation, and
its launching into space in a solid platinum case. It is this case that
the drilling team encounters within Galileo’s Child; later it is
realised that the asteroid actually formed around the object. Affixed to
the case is a seal covered with regular markings. The crew takes little
notice of this until much later, when computer expert Archer sees Dana’s
notes of her discoveries within the chamber, and realises that these
markings represent a form of binary code. (In a fairly ridiculous
moment, these markings left behind by an ancient alien culture are
swiftly translated into near perfect English.) It is thus that the
humans – their numbers by this time somewhat depleted, thanks to the
creature’s activities – discover just what their adversary is. It is the
Vorous, the “Reaper”, the “Angel Of Death”, a freak-of-nature
carrion-eater that laid waste to the population of its home planet until
finally being lured into a trap baited with decomposing corpses and
jettisoned into space.
(One of the things left unclear by the
screenplay of Within The Rock is whether by the time of the
story’s setting we on Earth are already aware of the existence of alien
life-forms. If not, everyone’s mighty casual over all these revelations.
Although, granted, they do have a few other things on their minds
at the time….)
Alas, few movie monsters could live up to
such a build-up, and the Vorous certainly does not: the creature is
never more impressive than when we first see it, a shadowy, threatening
fossil embedded in the chamber wall, its claws and teeth glinting by the
light of Dana’s torch and flash-photography. Once it has taken on flesh,
director (and special effects man) Gary Tunnicliffe chooses to hide it
from us, allowing us only glimpses of a clawed and scaly foot, or an
imperfect image on a shaky video feed. But finally there comes a moment
when the thing cannot be concealed any longer – and to our dismay we
realise that this Angel Of Death, this destroyer of civilisations, looks
like nothing so much as the Creature From The Black Lagoon’s land-lubber
cousin, who – how shall I put this? – had an accident while wandering
through a sewerage treatment plant. The other problem with the Vorous,
given its fearsome history, is the question of how our human characters,
with their limited resources and still more limited numbers, are going
to be able to kill it, considering that a whole other – and fairly
advanced, we infer – culture was unable to do it. (There another nice
piece of common sense here, when the remaining characters must and do
face the fact that it’s not merely a question of evading the creature;
that the thing is a hunter and a killer by instinct, and will continue
to come after them until they do kill it.) The answer to this
puzzle is disappointingly simple, if satisfyingly gross; and we are left
to wonder why, if the inhabitants of the Vorous’s home planet were smart
enough to build the platinum trap, capture the creature, and fire it
into space, they weren’t smart enough to work out that you could kill it
by driving something long and pointy through its guts.
Gary Tunnicliffe has had a long and fairly
distinguished career in the field of special effects. Within The Rock
represents his debut in both writing and directing – the irony being
that the film is ultimately more praiseworthy for its direction and
screenplay than it is for its effects. This shouldn’t be regarded as too
strong a criticism: with, patently, such restricted resources at hand,
there is a limit to what anyone could have done. On the other hand, the
film’s direction is solid enough, although with all that running around
in dark tunnels, the opportunities for artistic flourishes were rather
limited. It is, however, in the writing that Within The Rock
manages to surprise the viewer; not at the story level, certainly, but
with its characters. This is where writing a review of a movie like this
gets a little bit tricky. When you are as rapacious – and omnivorous – a
devourer of movies as I am, inevitably you watch a lot of crap; so that
when you stumble across something that quite unexpectedly qualifies as
not-crap, the temptation is to get carried away and oversell it. I don’t
want to do that here. I’m certainly not claiming that there is anything
brilliant about the characterisations in Within The Rock, merely
that its script manages to offer up something that painfully few films
do these days: a surprising, and very welcome, absence of irritating
jerks. You all know what I’m talking about, right? Lord knows I’ve
complained about it often enough, the apparent inability of genre
writers to create characters who aren’t comprised wholly of the
most unattractive human qualities: annoying at best, and intolerable at
worst. How many times have you spent a film’s running-time just
begging the monster or the psycho-killer or the natural disaster to
kill off the entire cast as quickly as possible? And sure, sometimes
that’s the point; but very often, sadly, it isn’t. Within The Rock
wins a place in my affections simply by serving up a cast of believable,
fairly likeable people. How pathetic that this should make it
stand out from the pack!
But any film like this needs a bad guy, of
course, and in this case it’s Ryan, who’s a bastard. Yet even here
Within The Rock eschews the obvious. Ryan’s bastardry is not
assigned to the usual movie reason – namely, just coz – but to
understandable if not exactly admirable causes. Ryan’s motives are, in
the end, fairly mixed. Certainly he enjoys having the drill-crews
utterly subordinate to himself, and even more certainly he does not
like having to take orders from a young woman; but as it turns out, his
willingness to hinder Dana’s critical mission is due not any homicidal
or suicidal impulse on his part, or to a desire to line his own pockets
so extreme that he is prepared to risk the very future of the world to
feed it, but to misinformation received from back home. When Within
The Rock opens, Dana has succeeded – just – in convincing the
government to employ her strategy for diverting Galileo’s Child away
from the Earth, rather than following the military’s plan of just
blowing it up. In this, she is backed by the corporation for whom the
miners work. However, unbeknownst to Dana, in her absence the
corporation has been argued over by the military strategists and has
given up on Dana’s scheme, seeing the drilling operation as an
opportunity for profit instead. Ryan, reassured that the drilling
operation is doomed to failure anyway, immediately, and with the
blessing of his employers, sets about making as much out of it
financially as possible. And he’s not alone in this. One of the nicer
touches in this film is that it declines to make an interest in earning
a buck a sign of eee-vil-ness, or to consign anyone displaying
such an interest to an automatic death. All of the characters,
except Dana, are in it for a buck; it is made fairly clear that no-one
in their right mind would take on such dangerous, dirty, exhausting work
for any other reason. When the platinum cage is discovered, the other
crewmembers no less than Ryan want the opportunity to salvage it for
profit; and since all their information regarding their mission comes
from Ryan alone, they see no reason why they shouldn’t stop the work and
do just that.
The discovery of the chamber, and the
fossil that it encloses, forces a showdown between Ryan and Dana. Like
Ryan, Dana is more of a shaded character than she initially appears to
be. She is terribly self-righteous, of course, as young female
scientists in the movies tend to be; but in her defence, she has both
science and logic on her side – and in the end, none of the story’s
deaths can be laid at her feet, not even indirectly; which is certainly
not always the case. It is not long before it becomes clear that much of
what we see of Dana is a façade: be she ever so right about the Earth’s
ultimate fate, she is in over her head on Galileo’s Child, and all too
aware of it. Having, in theory, all possible authority, in practice she
has none whatsoever. When she clashes with Ryan over the suspension of
work for the salvaging of the platinum, the head driller takes the
opportunity to reveal that Dana has been sold out back on Earth. She, in
turn, appalled and terrified by the danger to the Earth that she
perceives so clearly, launches into a passionate speech intended to
recruit the other drillers to her cause. This scene is the pivotal
moment of the film, as it forces the other characters to take sides, and
to reveal themselves as characters in the process. Ryan himself
is the first to do so, exposing himself as the kind of cynic so very
cynical, he is unable to believe that everyone else isn’t secretly just
as bad as himself. One of the film’s funnier moments comes when, after
having suffered another scornful tongue-lashing from the indignant Dana
when he offers her the time to claim the fossil within the chamber, he
returns to the chamber to find the thing missing. Delighted to discover
that, as he supposes, Dana is just as venal as he is himself, and a much
bigger hypocrite, Ryan proceeds to mystify the young woman with oblique
allusions to her secret activities, and then – she being obviously his
kind of woman after all – to make a pass at her. After this, well, if
Ryan’s death is the one obvious event of the film, it at least has the
distinction of following on from an absolutely classic Scenes We’d Like
To See moment when, having already established that the Vorous is
totally impervious to bullets, an hysterical Ryan continues to blaze
away like an idiot….and gets hit by a ricochet. YES!!
Amongst the others, there are two real
surprises in store. The first comes in the form of driller Cody
Harrison. Until midway through the film perhaps the most faceless of all
the characters, Cody suddenly comes into focus when he dares to take
Ryan to task for his manner towards Dana. Subsequently, he reveals
himself to be a fount of quiet courage. There is a hint here of Cody
having something to prove, even if it costs him his life – Ryan
retaliates against Cody’s expressions of disgust with a sneering
reference to some past blunder, and to Cody’s consequent demotion to be,
as he puts it, “just a grunt” – but the screenplay thankfully refrains
from any heavy-handed exposition on the subject. More unexpected still
are the sudden revelations made by the team’s explosives expert,
Samantha Rogers – more usually known as “Nuke-’em”. Making a friend of
Dana from the moment of the scientist’s arrival – and indeed, the sense
of relief with which the two young women gravitate towards one another
in the testosterone-soaked environment of the mining camp is quite
palpable – Nuke-’em, too, chooses to take exception to Ryan’s treatment
of Dana, but expresses herself more directly than Cody: she jams her gun
into Ryan’s crotch. Tough as nails, and almost frighteningly good at her
job – “I got compression charges, molecule charges, shape charges,
primacord, toluidine discs, a buttload of plastic, radio dets,
vibration dets – and a little cocktail of my own concoction,” she
memorably recites at one point, a most alarming gleam in her eyes –
Nuke-’em abruptly collapses after Dana’s emphatic speech about the
possible fate of planet Earth, unexpectedly revealing “Nuke-’em” to be a
mere fabrication, a persona manufactured to “keep the jocks at bay”, and
to hide a deep and crippling fear. Unfortunately, this emotional
vulnerability tags Nuke-’em – Samantha – as Within The Rock’s
Lambert substitute; and it is she who earns the film’s only truly stupid
death, when she puts a little too much faith in her own firepower and
instead of, say, staying at a safe distance and poking the supposedly
dead Vorous with a stick, she walks up and bends ri-ii-ight over
it….
Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about
Within The Rock is that it is, ultimately, a film without a hero.
While there are survivors at the end, you won’t necessarily be able to
pick them on the way through. There is a satisfying absence of
contrivance here. Instead of the usual post-Alien – and
post-slasher film – kill ’em one-by-one mentality, Within The Rock
disposes of most of its characters in two swift flurries of bloodshed.
The first takes place before anyone is aware of the Vorous’s
resurrection and are thus unprepared and vulnerable; the second, when
those not falling in the first round of slaughter underestimate the
creature’s powers. The individuals who are left standing are simply the
ones who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
(Okay, as the battle with the Vorous continues, there is a hint
or two of Death Battle Exemption©, but it’s not too
flagrant.) With so much at stake, those remaining do not hesitate for a
moment to put their own lives on the line. When the creature has finally
been defeated; when the charges have been set off, and Galileo’s Child
diverted from its path of destruction; when the survivors, adrift in
space, allow themselves to celebrate their victory and to mourn for
those who didn’t make it, there is a pleasing sense that this time at
least, the honour of saving the Earth from the threat of a killer
asteroid fell to some people who actually deserved it. |
