- Directed by Robert Wise
- Written by Michael Crichton, Nelson Gidding
- Stars James Olsen, Arthur Hill, David Wayne
- Run Time: 2 Hours, 11 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMbSpnlOOtE
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is heavily science fiction, but there are some horror elements for sure. It’s steady and tense and a little low on action, but it never gets boring. It has held up over the years and is worth a watch.
Synopsis
We are told that what we are about to see is top secret, and based on an actual four-day long event. Credits roll.
A man looks at the little desert town of Piedmont in his telescope using night vision. He gets back into his van, and we see that it’s a satellite recovery vehicle, here to pick up what’s left after a satellite came down. They notice the town is being circled by buzzards. They call into Vandenberg Air Force base, and they report that there’s no sign of life in the town. There are lots of bodies on the ground. They are ordered to proceed to the satellite. There are screams, and then the radio goes dead.
Major Mancheck orders an air flyover. He confirms the whole town is dead. Mancheck calls his superiors and declares it a “Project Wildfire” situation.
Various scientists and experts are called in. Dr. Jeremy Stone reads the classified report on the way to the base. Dr. Charles Dutton is picked up in the middle of the night. General Sparks is in charge. Dr. Ruth Leavitt doesn’t want to cooperate with the soldiers, but is convinced. Dr. Mark Hall is interrupted in the middle of surgery.
We’re told that Stone predicted that something like this might happen several years ago. The next morning, Mark and Stone are in a helicopter checking out the town. The man in the copter briefs him that they think it’s some kind of space plague. The buzzards are eating the dead people; there is concern that they’ll fly off and spread the contamination, so they drop gas canisters to kill the birds.
Mark and Stone land on the ground, and it’s obvious that whatever killed most of these people was nearly instantaneous. A few seem to have gone crazy and lived long enough to kill themselves. None of the bodies appear to have bled at all; all their blood has instantly clotted and turned to powder. They find the satellite, opened in the doctor’s office. They do find one baby, alive, as well as an old man who isn’t doing so well.
The plan is to nuke the town to sterilize the site, but various approvals will take hours. No, the President refuses to give the order. Charles and Ruth arrive at Wildfire, a secret base in the desert set up because of Stone’s warnings a few years ago. It’s disguised as an agricultural research center with a secret elevator to the lab beneath.
Stone shows Mark how to use the special keys that activate the nuclear self-destruct device. There’s some theory that an unmarried male is the best choice for countermanding the destruct order, and he’s it. A bomb will go off automatically after a short countdown if a “leak” to the outside is a real concern, and only he can stop it if he decides to, with his key. They all go through various fairly invasive decontamination procedures. Then they all go to sleep.
Next morning, they all have a strange breakfast; real food can transmit diseases. Charles is concerned that the space bacteria may be intelligent, but the others don’t really care.
They all go into a room where Stone manipulates the satellite using robotic arms. They very quickly learn that the satellite is still contagious on a rat and a monkey.
The baby and the old man are plugged into a medical computer that knows everything. They do tests that show the disease transmits through the air. In the satellite, they find a single tiny grain of meteor with green stuff on it. That may be what caused all this. Then they find out that the green stuff is growing.
A jet flying over Piedmont crashes; the plague gets to the pilot within two minutes, we see his oxygen mask disintegrating into dust. The pilot is nothing left but a skeleton– it’s mutated into a form that consumes plastic and flesh. The secret Wildfire lab loses communications with the outside world due to a simple malfunction.
Ruth discovers that the particle can survive on literally anything. It can live in deep space and can eat anything. An atomic blast could feed it to the point of destroying the world– it can feed on energy. They make sure they don’t nuke the town, but it’ll take time to disable the nuclear self-destruct bomb in the lab.
Ruth and Charles find out that the base was designed to develop biological weapons and suspect the satellite was sent up to find samples on purpose.
Suddenly, a contamination alarm goes off. A seal has broken in the autopsy room. Charles is inside, but still alive. Ruth has an epileptic seizure. There are tense moments of deduction and guessing before Hall thinks he figures out why the baby and old man are still alive. But then they notice a lab animal in with Charles is still alive too. It’s mutated into a non-infectious form– but it still disintegrates some plastics.
The gaskets that seal off the rooms are decomposing. The base locks down and the bomb is armed with five minutes to go. If the bomb goes off, Andromeda will mutate a million different ways instead of staying harmless.
Mark has to climb into the core of the base to disarm the bomb manually, but there are defenses that he must avoid– gas and lasers. He gets shot in the hand and face with a laser, but keeps on going, even in shock. With only nine seconds left, he manages to insert the key and turn the bomb off.
Stone reports to the government that the crisis has been averted, but that it may easily happen again…
Commentary
The base is really cool and impressive, although it’s not very efficient to move around in. Did they really kill that monkey? That looked very real.
Some of the technology is made up of sci-fi and some is as mundane today as a touch screen using a pen. I would be tempted to call this more science fiction than horror, but there were all those dead bodies in the beginning, and the animal testing is pretty realistic.
It’s focused more on the technology and the procedures for containment and a little light on characterization. It’s very realistic and well-considered, tense and entertaining. There’s no action until the very end, but it never gets boring.