Editorials
In Defense of ‘Virus’: Reflecting Back 20 Years Later
A big budget action horror film starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Sutherland sounds like a safe bet for the box office. So much so that a line of action figures was developed, and the original comic the movie was based on received an updated release with the movie’s artwork in promotion. But then the movie’s release date was bumped, from a cushy summer Blockbuster slot in 1998 to the following January, a month often considered a dumping ground for releases. Dropping into theaters on January 15, 1999, Virus was panned by critics and a commercial failure. To rub salt in the wound, it’s a movie that Jamie Lee Curtis has consistently rebuked in interviews, often referring to Virus as an “all time piece of shit.” While it’s far from perfect, it’s also undeserving of all the vehement hate.
Released almost exactly one year after Deep Rising, Virus continued the trend of following a ragtag team at sea whose boat is destroyed shortly after discovering a much larger sea vessel. One that’s seemingly deserted. In the case of Virus, it’s a salvage crew captained by Robert Everton (Donald Sutherland). When his crew loses their cargo in the middle of a hurricane and the tugboat starts taking on water, they hop on the nearest ship – a Russian research vessel, Volkov. Unbeknownst to them, the Volkov was struck by an alien energy source emanating from the Mir space station just 7 days prior, and the Volkov’s crew since disappeared. Uncovering what happened to them leads to a fight for survival, and all of humanity is at stake.
The biggest flaw in Virus, the reason it’s been so maligned, is that the character and dialogue work can be downright cringe-worthy. William Baldwin plays engineer turned hero Steve Baker, and he doesn’t really have the range to transcend bad dialogue. He’s established right away as the moral superior to Everton’s manic leader corrupted by greed. But with lines like, “You figure it out,” after threatening Everton to see what happens if he ever pulls a gun on him again, well, it doesn’t make him look like the tough guy he’s supposed to be. Luckily, Virus has two additional heroines alongside Baker. There’s Joanna Pacula’s Nadia, the sole survivor of Volkov’s inciting event, who plays double duty as exposition deliverer and secondary heroine with fighting spirit. Then there’s ex-Navy officer Kelly “Kit” Foster, Curtis’ character. Even when starring in a film she hates, she still gives it her all.
The characters spend a lot of time bickering amongst each other, and doesn’t even attempt to subvert the order in which they’ll die. But it doesn’t matter much when the alien lifeform begins to make its appearance. It’s an electrical presence that inhabits tech and crafts robots out of found objects. What it desires most is to wipe out humanity, deemed a virus, and use their flesh for spare parts. It leads to a lot of gooey, gory bits that painfully blends man with machine.
Directed by prolific visual effects artist John Bruno (Poltergeist, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Batman Returns), with effects handled by award-winning visual effects artist Phil Tippett’s studio, Virus is one of the rare ‘90s spectacles that holds up pretty well. Example: I love Deep Rising, but the climactic CG reveal of the sea creature is very, very dated at this point. But Virus is heavily practical, and the CG work blends in. The manborg-like creatures are gory and grim, making for a few fun jumpscares and a lot of bloody sequences.
Like many action horror films that have come before and after it, Virus borrows from notable films like Aliens, The Thing, Hardware, and Event Horizon. It makes some really wacky choices with its character work and does take a while to really kick into gear. But it’s difficult to be bored when Sutherland is playing Captain Everton with this odd blend of suicidal, greedy, and gleefully sadistic. Or when other characters make equally puzzling decisions amidst a human flesh assimilating robot race. And anytime the robot monsters terrorize victims on screen is a highlight. From a perspective of fun popcorn entertainment that showcases special effects, there’s a lot to like about Virus.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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