The crew of a sea-going tug, including Captain Robert Everton (Donald Sutherland), Kelly Foster (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Steve Baker (William Baldwin), find a derelict Russian science ship and claim it as salvage. Unfortunately for them, an electrical alien lifeform is onboard, creating robots and human-robot hybrids to start on its quest to wipeout mankind. They discover a single survivor (Joanna Pacula) who explains the situation, but Everton doesn’t care as he is suicidal due to his financial situation, and will do anything to take the ship in.
“Rubbish. It’s a pile of Russian Rubbish. And I, for one, am not going to listen to any more of it.” So says Captain Everton, and I couldn’t agree more (except for the “Russian” bit). Virus is a poorly acted and directed remake of ten better pictures. There is not a line of dialog, a plot twist, or even a shot, which has not occurred in a previous film.
A close sibling to the monster-on-a-ship Deep Rising from 1998, its parents are Alien and Moon Trap. From Alien it gets the salvage tug stopping to examine a derelict ship, and then things turning into a fight to the death as the blue collar crew are picked off one by one by a monster that moves about long, dimly-lit corridors. Not able to reproduce the artistry of the gloomy environment from Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Virus insufficiently lights the entire film and tints it a drab blue. Jamie Lee Curtis does her best imitation of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, and it isn’t good enough. Ripley was a tough, no nonsense, highly self-controlled officer who had a sense of humor and a heart. She was a complex and complete character. Curtis’s Foster is just a bitch. There’s also a nod to Aliens with Baldwin’s Baker being a substitute for Hicks and Pacula’s survivor sharing characteristics with Newt, along with the big, patched-together monster being an homage to the Alien Queen.
The debt to Moon Trap is just as substantial, though may be harder to notice because far fewer people have seen that low budget space thriller. But I have no doubt that director Bruno and script writers Pfarrer and Feldman have. In it, little alien robots graft together parts of dead people and whatever metal and electronics they can find to make fighting machines. They aren’t subtly like those in Virus; they are exactly like those in Virus. Not being content to swipe its monster from a seldom seen flick, Virus also has one cyborg that could be tossed into a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode as a Borg.
The massively derivative nature of the film could be forgiven if any of it was done with energy, tension, or even a laugh or two. But there isn’t a sign of life in it. There are a few laughs, but those come from Donald Sutherland’s salty-dog, sometimes-Irish accent. With all that, it is still a step above numerous other sad invasion movies.