Akademik Vladislav Volkov, a Russian research vessel in the South Pacific, communicates with the orbiting space station Mir. A large energy source traveling through space strikes Mir, killing the cosmonauts and beaming itself down to Volkov. The electrical surge takes over the ship and attacks the crew.
Seven days later, the tugboatSea Star, captained by alcoholic Robert Everton, loses its uninsured cargo while sailing through a typhoon. Sea Star's crew, led by navigator and ex-Navy officer Kelly Foster and engineer Steve Baker, discover the engine room taking on water. When Sea Star takes refuge in the eye of the storm to make repairs, Volkov appears on their radar. Realizing that it could be worth millions in salvage, Everton orders his crew aboard.
On Volkov, most of the electronics have been destroyed and the Russian crew are seemingly missing. Everton orders Steve to help a fellow crewman, Squeaky, restore power to the ship. Immediately afterward, the ship's anchor drops on its own, sinking Sea Star with deckhand Hiko and first mate J.W. Woods, Jr. on board. Steve leaves Squeaky to guard the engine room, where he is lured to his death by a robotic, spider-like creature. Steve rescues an injured Hiko, while Woods comes out unscathed.
As Foster treats Hiko in the sick bay, Chief Science Officer Nadia Vinogradova, the sole surviving member of Volkov's crew, shoots at the crew and is subdued by Steve. Nadia is hysterical about "it" needing power to travel through the ship and implores the crew to shut down the generators. She attacks Everton and Foster, who subdues her and takes her to the bridge. Steve, Woods, and crewman Richie Mason go to the engine room to look for Squeaky, but instead stumble upon an automated workshop producing more of the strange robots.
The three are attacked by the robots and what appears to be a gun-wielding Russian crew member. The Russian is revealed to be a cyborg, but the three bring it down with salvaged munitions from the ship's small arms locker and take its seemingly dead body to the bridge. Nadia explains that the sentient electrical energy beamed from the Mir took over the ship eight days prior, scanned the ship's computers to find information on killing humans, then used the automated workshops to convert Volkov's crew into cyborgs; the one brought to the bridge was the ship's captain and Nadia's husband.
As the storm resumes, the crew head for the computer room. On the way, they are ambushed by a converted Squeaky and a giant robot that kills Woods. The survivors barricade themselves in the communications room, where Richie sends out a mayday; however, Everton shoots out the radio, unwilling to give up his salvage. Foster punches Everton and removes him from command. Richie uses the computers to talk to the alien (credited as The Intelligence); it tells them that it is "aware" and sees mankind as a "virus" which it plans to use as "spare parts." This drives Richie insane, causing him to gun down Squeaky and flee. When the remaining crew leave the room, Everton takes the opportunity to talk to the Intelligence, which recognizes him as the "dominant lifeform."
The crew discovers that the Intelligence has moved Volkov's computer elsewhere in the ship. Realizing that the ship is moving, they return to the bridge by going outside, where Hiko is lost to the typhoon. Meanwhile, Everton is guided to one of the workshops, where he makes a bargain with the Intelligence. Foster identifies Lord Howe Island as Volkov's destination, with Nadia surmising that the Intelligence wishes to seize a British intelligence station from which it could seize control of the world's military forces. As they decide to sink Volkov, the survivors are confronted by the now-cyborg Everton, which they defeat with a thermite hand grenade. They empty the ship's fuel tanks and set explosive charges.
Foster, Steve and Nadia run into Richie. A giant robot (piloted by the Intelligence) suddenly appears and attacks Nadia, Richie and Steve. The Intelligence captures Foster and tortures her for the location of the detonator. A mortally wounded Richie informs Steve that he prepared a jury-rigged ejection seat that can be used for escape. Nadia and Steve rescue Foster, and Nadia sacrifices herself by shooting a flaregun at nearby gas tanks to kill the Intelligence, however despite being damaged by the explosion it pursues the survivors. Foster and Steve make it out safely by using Richie's ejection seat escaping the merciless robot form, which triggers a series of pin grenades causing an explosion of the missile bomb and sinks Volkov, causing the sentient electricity to disperse in the seawater.
Upon regaining consiousness, Foster finds Hiko stranded, but he screams and lunges for her as a cyborg hybrid, however this was revealed to be a nightmare as Foster and Steve are rescued to safety by a U.S. naval ship.
Chuck Pfarrer initially wrote Virus as a screenplay and pitched it to Universal Pictures who rejected Pfarrer's pitch.[3] Pfarrer, liking the underlying concept, contacted Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Comics, for whom Pfarrer had previously written a comic book sequel to John Carpenter'sThe Thing titled The Thing from Another World.[3] Richardson agreed to publish Virus as a comic book miniseries, which was a great success with all four issues attaining sales of 100,000 copies per issue.[3] Pfarrer then took Virus to producer Gale Anne Hurd and the two of them returned to Universal who were now eager to do the film.[3]
After co-directing parts of T2-3D: Battle Across Time at the request of James Cameron who was preoccupied with Titanic at the time, John Bruno was contacted by Universal Pictures following the success of the attraction with an offer to direct Virus with Gale Anne Hurd as producer.[4] Bruno read the script by Pfarrer and didn't like it and also read Dark Horse comic that was expanded from the script and was initially planning to pass on the film.[4] Following his dives with Cameron to the Titanic, Bruno began to see the possibilities in making Virus work such as changing the vessel from being Chinese to Russian and incorporating a hurricane as a plot device after experiencing the inner workings of Russian vessels and hurricanes during the Titanic voyages. After taking some advice from Cameron to change the film so he liked it, Bruno left Titanic after finding a replacement and agreed to direct the film provided he could make the requested changes.[4]
An international co-production film between The United States, United Kingdom, Japan, France and Germany. The film was mostly shot in Newport News, Virginia, on a ship anchored in the James River. A horizontal bar on the ship was raised and lowered to conceal the horizon line, making it appear the ship was far out at sea. The ship used as the Akademik Vladislav Volkov was the retired Missile Range Instrumentation ShipUSNSGeneral Hoyt S. Vandenberg(T-AGM-10).[5] One of the ship's satellite dish antennas was intentionally damaged for the film's final scene where the ship was destroyed. Some of the Cyrillic lettering applied for the film was still visible on the hull before it was sunk on May 27, 2009.
Several lines of dialogue in Virus were improvised.[6] For instance, Richie's emphatic comment that the Volkov has a "fucked-up" antenna resulted from the actor's surprise at the condition of the Vandenberg.
Reception
Virus was a critical and commercial flop, grossing less than half of its budget and earning negative reviews. Based on 49 reviews, the film holds a 12% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 3.4/10. The site's consensus states: "Despite its great special effects, this movie's predictability greatly undermines its intensity."[7] On Metacritic, it holds a weighted average score of 19 out of 100 based on 17 reviews, indicating "overwhelming dislike".[8]
Most critics found the film derivative and unoriginal.[9][10][11]
Reviewers pointed out similarities with the 1998 film Deep Rising.[12][13]Roger Ebert gave Virus an even lower rating than Deep Rising, which he considered one of the worst films of 1998 and placed on his most-hated list.[14] Many echoed his complaint about the underlit cinematography.
Jamie Lee Curtis herself did not think highly of the film. In an IGN.com interview, Curtis had the following to say about Virus: "That would be the all time piece of shit...It's just dreadful... That's the only good reason to be in bad movies. Then when your friends have [bad] movies you can say 'Ahhhh, I've got the best one.' I'm bringing Virus". Curtis also stated in the commentary track of the 2014 Shout Factory Blu-ray release of Halloween H20 that she tried to get the director (John Bruno) fired because of how bad she thought the film was."[15]
Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C" on an A+ to F scale.[16]
Merchandise
A line of action figures, the Virus Collector Series, was developed by ReSaurus to promote the film. The line included figures of Foster, Baker, Richie, Captain Everton, Captain Alexi, Squeaky and the Goliath Machine (the Goliath set also included a Nadia figure). The captains and Squeaky were built with their cyborg implants, with parts included to restore their human appearance. All of the sets, excluding Goliath and Nadia's, included one or more firearms for their figure. Goliath also featured three sound clips of his lines from the film.
A Europe-only tie-in game, Virus: It is Aware, was also developed and published by Cryo Interactive for the Sony PlayStation. The game is a survival-horror title akin to Resident Evil in concept and to Tomb Raider in control. The game had little to do with the film, apart from the introduction and ending cinematics, which feature creatures infesting a ship and a space station, respectively. The actual game follows a female police officer, Joan, trapped in an infested hotel along with her partner Sutter. The game is generally poorly regarded and has since fallen into obscurity.
HMHSBritannic was the third and final vessel of the White Star Line's Olympic class of steamships and the second White Star ship to bear the name Britannic. She was the youngest sister of the RMS Olympic and the RMS Titanic and was intended to enter service as a transatlantic passenger liner. She was operated as a hospital ship from 1915 until her sinking near the Greek island of Kea, in the Aegean Sea, in November 1916. At the time she was the largest hospital ship in the world.
Vladislav Nikolayevich Volkov was a Soviet cosmonaut who flew on the Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 11 missions. The second mission terminated fatally. Volkov and the two other crew members were asphyxiated on reentry, the only three people to have died in outer space.
The Black Hole is a 1979 American science fiction film directed by Gary Nelson and produced by Walt Disney Productions. The film stars Maximilian Schell, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins and Ernest Borgnine, while the voices of the main robot characters are provided by Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens. The music for the film was composed by John Barry. With a production budget of $20 million, plus another $6 million for advertising, it was at the time the most expensive picture ever produced by Disney.
Ultron is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Roy Thomas and artist John Buscema, the character first appeared as an unnamed character in The Avengers #54, with his first full appearance in The Avengers #55. He is a self-aware and highly intelligent artificial intelligence in a robot body who develops a god complex and a grudge against his creator Hank Pym. His goal to destroy humanity in a shortsighted attempt at creating world peace has brought him into repeated conflict with the Avengers. Stories often end in Ultron's apparent destruction, only for the character to be resurrected in new forms.
Titanic is a 1953 American drama film directed by Jean Negulesco, and starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck. It centers on an estranged couple and other fictional passengers on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, which took place in April 1912.
"A Flight to Remember" is the tenth episode in the first season of the American animated television series Futurama. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on September 26, 1999. The title is a reference to Walter Lord's non-fiction book about the Titanic disaster A Night to Remember. This episode was written by Eric Horsted and directed by Peter Avanzino. Dawnn Lewis guest-stars in this episode as LaBarbara Conrad. The episode is a direct parody of the 1997 film Titanic.
Space Truckers is a 1996 science fiction comedy film directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Dennis Hopper, Stephen Dorff, Debi Mazar and Charles Dance. It was filmed at Ardmore Studios, County Wicklow, Ireland.
Charles Patrick Pfarrer III is an American writer, film producer, and former Navy SEAL. As an author, he has penned published screenplays, novels, comic books, and non-fiction works. His works deal with themes pertaining to the military. Pfarrer has worked on films including Navy SEALs, Darkman, and Hard Target.
Virus is a Dark Horse Comics comic book, written by Chuck Pfarrer, drawn by Canadian artist Howard Cobb and first published in 1992. The story is about an alien life form which takes over a Chinese Navy research vessel and reconfigures it—using both the damaged electronics and the dead bodies of the crew, it propagates itself by making various "creatures" created out of both organic and inorganic parts. When a salvage ship shows up they have to deal with the life form or be taken over as well.
The Titanic has played a prominent role in popular culture since her sinking in 1912, with the loss of over 1,500 of the 2,200 lives on board. The disaster and the Titanic herself have been objects of public fascination for many years. They have inspired numerous books, plays, films, songs, poems, and works of art. The story has been interpreted in many overlapping ways, including as a symbol of technological hubris, as basis for fail-safe improvements, as a classic disaster tale, as an indictment of the class divisions of the time, and as romantic tragedies with personal heroism. It has inspired many moral, social and political metaphors and is regularly invoked as a cautionary tale of the limitations of modernity and ambition.
RMS Titanic sank on 15 April 1912 in the North Atlantic Ocean. The largest ocean liner in service at the time, Titanic was four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, with an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an iceberg at 23:40 on 14 April. Her sinking two hours and forty minutes later at 02:20 ship's time on 15 April, resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.
Pandorum is a 2009 science fiction horror film directed by Christian Alvart, produced by Robert Kulzer, Jeremy Bolt and Paul W. S. Anderson, and starring Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster. Travis Milloy wrote the screenplay from a story by Milloy and Alvart. The film's title is a fictional slang term for a form of psychosis caused by deep space and triggered by emotional stress, leading to severe paranoia, delirium, and nosebleeds. Pandorum was released on 25 September 2009 in the United States, and on 2 October 2009 in the UK. The film was poorly received and a box office flop.
RMS Titanic was a British ocean liner that sank on 15 April 1912 after striking an iceberg on the ship's maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City, United States. Titanic, operated by the White Star Line, was carrying passengers and mail. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, approximately 1,500 died, making the incident the deadliest sinking of a single ship at the time. Titanic carried some of the wealthiest people in the world, as well as hundreds of emigrants from the British Isles, Scandinavia, and elsewhere in Europe who were seeking a new life in the United States and Canada. The disaster drew public attention, spurred major changes in maritime safety regulations, and inspired a lasting legacy in popular culture.
The Killing Star is a hard science fiction novel by American writers Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, published in April 1995. It chronicles a sudden alien invasion in a late 21st century technological utopia, while covering several other speculative fiction ideas such as sublight interstellar travel, genetic cloning, virtual reality, advanced robotics, etc.
Star Trek: Countdown is a four-issue comic book prequel to the 2009 film Star Trek by IDW Publishing. It follows the characters of Spock and the Romulan Nero during the year 2387, detailing the events that cause them to travel to the 23rd century. The story serves as both a lead up to the film, and as a continuation of the Star Trek: The Next Generation franchise.
Titanic is a musical with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Peter Stone. It is based on the story of the RMS Titanic which sank on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912.
Superman: Unbound is a 2013 animated direct-to-video superhero film based on the 2008 comic book story arc "Superman: Brainiac" by Geoff Johns. It was directed by James Tucker and scripted by Bob Goodman. It is the 17th film of the DC Universe Animated Original Movies. The film's sneak preview was included with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 and Injustice: Gods Among Us.
Virus: It is Aware is a 1999 action-horror video game developed and published by French video game developer Cryo Interactive. It was released on PlayStation in Europe, and localised for France, the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy. The game is a tie-in for the 1999 comic book film Virus based on the comic book from Dark Horse Comics.
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