Phase IV (review)

Lesko:

The war is over, Hubbs. They have the power. Only hope now is if they answer our message and we convince them we're worth keeping alive.

Hubbs:

I think I could locate the queen and kill her. Lock the tracker onto her voice when she speaks.

Lesko:

What makes you think she'd speak to you?

This epigraph comes from a quiet moment towards the end of Phase IV when our two male protagonists, James Lesko (Michael Murphy), a numbers and game theory scientist, and Dr Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport), an English biologist, try to strategise their next move in an inter-species conflict they are gradually losing. It articulates a central tension between the characters that underpins the entire thematic direction of a film that should feel dated and stale but which holds up remarkably well. Phase IV is much more than the sum of its parts and worthy of (re)visiting now that it has found second life on DVD.

Phase IV, written by Mayo Simon and directed by Saul Bass, an Oscar-winning filmmaker who specialised in title sequences for such luminaries as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, is a fascinating film whose intellectual merits compensate for its familiar subject matter. At first glance, it appears to merely be another entrant in a long litany of 'big bug' B-grade films that typically find humanity fighting monstrous hordes of mutated insects. The original film poster attests to the B-grade association: a hand, with an ant burrowing out of a blood-soaked wound, is superimposed over giant ants chasing a man and woman across a flame-soaked desert landscape; the tagline reads, 'The day the Earth was turned into a cemetery!' followed by the ominous 'Ravenous invaders controlled by a terror out in space . . . commanded to annihilate the world' (ellipses in the original). The large red ant gracing the DVD cover apparently promises yet another horror-laden conflict with insects, but the film is more interested in intellectually exploring species intelligence, evolution and human exploitation of the natural environment.

The film begins with a mysterious cosmic event triggering unprecedented communication and planning abilities among different species of ants, abilities that prompt Dr Hubbs to recommend immediate scientific investigation into what he calls a 'biological imbalance in an uplands Arizona valley'. The geodesic research facility is established in Paradise City; it is a derelict community described by Hubbs as 'just another desert development that did not develop', an un-ironic comment on urban planning and attempted human settlings of inhospitable landscapes. Hubbs is joined by James Lesko, a self-described 'pencil and paper guy' whose work has included studying the language of killer whales. The bulk of Phase IV follows Lesko's and Hubbs' individual attempts to decipher the ants' intentions and their individual responses, eventually positioning the two men at odds with one another, philosophically if not physically.

Phase IV is antiseptic and emotionally cold, while Hubbs and Lesko remain two-dimensional characters: they don't develop much beyond their function as chess pieces for specific intellectual arguments. The hubristic Hubbs is increasingly convinced his raison d'ètre is to prove humanity's superiority and defeat the insects, thereby exacerbating the human-ant conflict. Hubbs is unwilling (or unable) to accept that the subjects under microscopic observation are not the ants themselves but, instead, the humans barricaded in their observatory like rats in a maze. In a rage-filled delirium directed at a sole ant, Hubbs eventually trashes the facility, yelling at Lesko 'I am not helpless. I will not be humiliated'. Nigel Davenport portrays Hubbs as detached from any significant emotional register (notwithstanding the delirium), but Davenport makes it work as Hubbs sublimates any human emotion into his rationalising scientific observations. Hubbs begins the movie as an arrogant scientist, hilariously epitomised when he begins lobbing hand grenades at giant anthills to elicit some quantifiable response from the arthropod denizens, and then ends the film in pretty much the same fashion, eaten alive by the...