- Directed by Saul Bass
- Written by Mayo Simon
- Stars Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, Lynn Frederick, Alan Gifford
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 24 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-7-IVT2Tbg
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This has a lot of ants-in-action photography, scientific-sounding science, and weird visuals. The characters are almost the least interesting thing, but the rest of it makes up for it. It’s strange and atmospheric, heavily in the science fiction realm with horror elements. We’d recommend it.
Synopsis
Phase I
“That spring, we were all watching space and wondering what the final effect would be. Astronomers and engineers got excited. Mystics predicted the end of life as we knew it. When the effect came, it was almost unnoticed because it affected such a small and insignificant form of life.”
We’re told that Dr. Hubbs noticed and started investigating while our narrator, James Lesko, was busy number-crunching. “Ordinary ants of different species were meeting, communicating, and apparently making decisions.” As we hear all this, we watch footage of ants in their tunnels. Many, many, shots of ants in their tunnels silently communicating.
We cut to Dr. Hubbs writing a letter about biological imbalance in Arizona. He reports that all insects and other predators who prey on ants have suddenly vanished. We watch the ants eating a spider. He proposes a biological research station to study and potentially eliminate the problem. The station is built way out in the Arizona desert, and Hubbs and Lesko are assigned to it. As soon as they arrive, we see that the ants are observing them.
Lesko is a crypto-linguist who worked on trying to “talk” to whales in the past. They find a series of strange towers that have been built by the ants. These are new, never-before-seen structures. They check out a farm where there’s a huge, circular “bare spot” in the middle of a field with a perfect square inside it and dead animals scattered around, each covered in tiny bites.
The farmer, Mr. Eldridge, says that they have dug “moats” and filled them with gasoline to keep the ants out of his crops. He also explains that his neighbors have been pulling out for the past few weeks. The crops died, and even one farmhouse mysteriously collapsed. Hubbs says the Eldridges need to leave for a few days as they experiment. They aren’t happy, but they understand the necessity.
Phase II
The facility is near some mysterious towers. They settle in, and the research begins. Lesko gets all his computers set up and Hubbs works on other things. They have a lot of 1970’s computers.
Twelve days later, Hubbs’s boss complains that nothing has happened yet, but they can’t make the ants perform on command. To speed things along, Hubbs shoots the towers with rockets, blowing them up. He shouts, “Let’s see some activity!” Finally, Lesko is able to hear the ants making sounds.
That night, back at the Eldridge place, we see the ants crossing the moats on floating leaves and attacking the horses. They light the gasoline in the moat. The old farmer ends up shooting his horse. Then the house collapses. They all get into the truck and drive away. The traumatized old woman sees an ant on her husband’s head and beats him until the truck crashes.
Lesko explains his process to Hubbs as he watches the “ant signals” decoded by his computer. As he explains, their truck outside, which was acting as a generator, explodes. In response, Hubbs shoots yellow ant poison out of the sprinklers outside, drenching the Eldridges outside looking for help. Oops!
In the morning, the two men go outside in gas masks and protective suits and find the farmer and his wife dead out there. Hubbs is more fascinated by the fact that the ants made his car explode than he is that there are dead people on his doorstep. He says the yellow poison should keep the ants at bay for three or four days. The bodies have holes inside where ants have burrowed to hide from the poison.
The men find Kendra, the farmer’s granddaughter, hiding in a shelter and take her inside. Hubbs doesn’t want to call for someone to pick her up, as the authorities aren’t going to be happy about the casualties. Lesko wants to call the base, but Hubbs warns that that will end their mission.
Hubbs takes samples of the ants and starts experimenting on them. Kendra smashes the bottle, so they gas out the whole lab. Hubbs gets a venomous bite.
Outside, we see ants carrying samples of the yellow poison into the nest. One dies, and another takes over. A whole chain of ants sacrifices itself to get the poison to the queen, who adapts to breed new eggs that are immune to the poison. The eggs now come out yellow, and they’re poison-proof.
Hubbs talks to the base on the radio, and they warn him about a missing family. Hubbs pretends not to know anything about them.
Lesko continues to decode the ants’ movement language, and Hubbs hopes to predict their next move. Overnight, more than a dozen short towers spring up, built by the ants in a circle around the scientists’ base. They have a reflective surface, all at different angles that reflect light onto their dome, which starts to heat up.
Lesko talks to Kendra and shows her around, explaining what they do. Hubbs shows him the reflective towers and says the heat’s going to be a problem. He also sees that the ants are now resistant to their poison. Hubbs admits that he expected the ants to attack their truck; he left it out there as bait. Lesko figures out that Hubbs didn’t call for a helicopter. Lesko picks up the radio, and it explodes– the ants have destroyed it from the inside.
We see the ants crawling around inside the base’s air conditioning unit, chewing at the wires. Lesko figures out a sound that the mounds outside seem to absorb. He beams it at a high frequency and volume out to the towers outside, causing them to crumble. The ants fight a praying mantis in the electrical system, and they manage to short out the air conditioning. Outside, the sound shatters the towers, which collapse. It’s a war!
The computers overheat, so Lesko can’t keep beaming the sounds out. About this time, Hubbs starts feeling ill, as his ant-bite has become infected. We see lots of ant-carnage inside the collapsed towers. Lesko doesn’t understand how the ants could know which single machine everything else depended upon.
Underground, black ants start carrying away the corpses of the dead yellow ants, laying them out in neat rows, like a big funeral.
The temperature in the base cools enough to turn the computers back on at night. Hubbs thinks they are being allowed that on purpose. It’s also mentioned that he thinks the ants are going to dominate, first taking towns and then cities. Lesko tries to send a message to the ants using what he’s learned. It’s a geometrical figure.
When the sun comes up, it starts getting hot inside again. Hubbs is delirious with fever and trashes the lab looking for ant “spies.”
Phase III
Much of the inside of the base is now wrecked, Hubbs is still irrational, and they’re all still trapped in there. Hubbs rants about what would happen if the queen ant died. Lesko says the war is over, and their only hope is to get a message to the ants, convincing the ants that they’re worth keeping alive. They watch a rat outside and see how quickly the ants strip it to bones. They only have two suits to go outside.
The ants send Lesko another geographical figure as a message. He thinks it’s an intelligence test of some kind, but what does it mean? Do they want one of the people inside? Kendra goes outside, barefoot, to surrender herself to the ants, thinking they’re angry with her for breaking the sample container.
Hubbs says he’s finally located the queen’s location, inside a short tower. They’re all out of rocket grenades, so he needs to think of something else. He tries to put his boots on but can’t because his hand doesn’t work anymore. Lesko says that he’s figured out the ant’s message: they want Hubbs, who blew up their towers.
Hubbs then stomps outside, also barefoot, with a canister of poison, on his way to destroy the queen’s base. He falls into a pit, dug by the ants as a trap. The ants swarm over him and kill him.
Lesko, in an environmental suit, walks outside. He had hoped to communicate a truce with the ants but admits that it’ll never happen. He slides down into the huge tunnel into the queen’s lair. He watches as fingers rise up out of the sand; it’s Kendra, who’s not dead. “They wanted… us.”
“We knew then that we were being changed and made part of their world. We didn’t know for what purpose, but we knew we would be told.” What is… Phase IV?
Commentary
The opening shots, as the car drives to the research station, past all the abandoned houses and wreckage, make this feel like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but it’s not really, it’s just the desert. The apocalypse part is yet to come, probably.
These aren’t giant ants, they’re just smarter than the usual variety, and all the species of ants have teamed up. There are many shots of ants doing various things, and they’re all really well done, with real ants, edited in such a way that we can see that they have a purpose. The characters are pretty bland, but the situation makes up for that.
I saw this not long after it came out, and as an eight-year-old, I was impressed with the seemingly realistic scientists and equipment. Today, the technology seems very dated, but a lot of it holds up, assuming you believe something in space could make ants smarter.
The photography on the ants is really good; the setting is weird and unearthly. The technology is interesting. It’s a weird one, but it’s very cool.