Director: Sam Miller
Writers: Richard Fell, Nigel Kneale
Stars: Jason Flemyng, Adrian Dunbar, Mark Gatiss, David Tennant
1 Hour, 37 Minutes
We start out with rocket stock footage. The first joint UK And Australian rocket has launched, but it veered off its path and all contact was lost… They’ve been lost 57 hours. Quatermass picks up the rocket on the way back to down, but they still can’t communicate with it. It’s coming from 567,000 miles out, way further than they allowed for. Where has it been? They regain control over the rocket and bring it down safely.
The rocket comes down in the countryside. Quatermass and his team assemble on the site, and the door pops open. One of the astronauts crawls out, but for some reason, he’s alone. There were three men aboard the rocket when it launched.
James Fullalove is a reporter who finds Quatermass’s evasiveness suspicious, so he investigates the returned astronaut, Victor Caroon. Victor is being cared for by his wife, Judy, who is also Quatermass’s longtime assistant. Victor is awake and speaks, but his words don’t make any sense.
Inspector Lomax has some questions that Quatermass can’t answer. The missing men’s spacesuits were sealed; there’s no way they could have been removed the men just sort of “went away.” Also, Victor’s fingerprints don’t match his records from before the flight.
They show Victor a film of the astronauts training; they try to jog his memory. Victor starts speaking German, which he shouldn’t be able to do. He seems to have memories from all three astronauts.
There’s some kind of biological matter on the inside of the ship, which they start to analyze while they go after the black box. They can hear a strange noise on the black box, that covers most of the voices, but it’s audio only.
Doctor Briscoe and Judy care for Victor while Quatermass holds a press conference. Victor gets up and starts roaming around the hospital room; he seems disoriented. He touches a cactus. Judy screams, and Victor runs away from the hospital.
Quatermass tells the press that Victor is gone, hoping to get everyone to search for him. Fullalove wonders if Quatermass thinks Victor is dangerous. Quatermass asks, “What if what’s out there is just the shadow of a man possessed by the thing itself, possibly undergoing some organic changes.” He’s starting to figure out that all three astronauts died, and this thing is not really any of them.
Victor runs into a child in an abandoned building, but scares him off. He then goes into a pharmacy and injures the druggist. Quatermass and Lomax interview the child, and he identifies that it was Victor, but that his hand had turned into a cactus. They investigate the pharmacy, and believe that Victor may have mixed a catalyst that would accelerate Victor’s change.
Lomax goes to investigate a call from the zoo. They start finding dead animals at the zoo, along with a severed human hand.
They track down Victor to a large art museum. They police evacuate the building. In 30-40 minutes, it’s going to release spores and kill everything on Earth. Quatermass gets on TV and admits that it’s all his fault, and tells the news that there’s an alien that might destroy the Earth. They have to destroy it before it releases the spores!
Quatermass’s assistant, John, goes inside the building. It’s in the fabric of the building itself, he says, then it kills him. Quatermass goes inside. He tries to reason with the men inside the creature. The monster screams in pain as the three mens’ consciousness fights back. It dies.
Commentary
This was broadcast live on April 23, 2005. It’s a fairly complex story with a lot of sets, so it’s pretty impressive in thar regard. On the other hand, it also looks very much like made-for-TV BBC soap opera. Due to being a live show, the special effects are nonexistent. The basic story is essentially the same as the 1955 film, except the big rubber monster from the original is left to the imagination here.
The rocket is much more realistic, smaller, and there’s a lot less “look, gee-whiz-bang, it’s a rocket!” Rockets alone don’t impress anymore. All the science-fiction elements have been updated to show legitimate modern technology.
Apparently, the astronaut’s mission was to go up in their rocket with no specific destination, which might have made sense in 1953 when no one had ever been in space before, but it’s not reasonable for 2005, when spaceflight is a regular event. There is a vague mention of scientific readings, but it’s also clear that things didn’t go according to plan.
It’s impressive as a live drama, but there’s a little too much drama and angst in the last twenty minutes, and not enough action. The monster is never seen. In the end, Quatermass bored it to death with his speechifying.