The Ants Are Coming

By J.C.

Directed by SAUL BASS Screenplay by MAYO SIMON

The best thing about science-fiction films is their opportunity for wonder, their ability to draw out and contain the most extravagant imagery. In Stanley Kubrick's great 2001: A Space Odyssey, themes and images reinforced one another. In most other futuristic films --and Phase IV is one of these--the force of the ideas cannot compete with the power of individual images.

Phase IV is good, eerie entertainment, with interludes of such haunted visual intensity that it becomes, at its best, a nightmare incarnate. It can also sometimes go quite wobbly, with ripely absurd dialogue and the most primitive sort of human characterizations. The movie is about ants, and it is clear that everyone involved was a lot more taken with them than with the Tinkertoy people provided by the script.

The tale begins with one of those un explained events in space so loved by, and necessary to, science-fiction writers.

"The effect," as it comes to be called, looks like a freakish, sinister eclipse. It has no immediate impact on earth until Biologist Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) notices some strange behavior in the ant world. The ants start to do, as Mathematician Lesko (Michael Murphy) puts it, "things that ants don't do: meeting, communicating, making decisions."

Wiped Out. Out of these insect caucuses comes an agreement to destroy all creatures that prey on ants. If the mantis and the spider are to be wiped out, can man be far behind? With all due secrecy and dispatch, Hubbs and Lesko set up a remote experimental site to find out. Their research leads them to some spooky conclusions, and the strain of it all tells on Hubbs, who at one point agonizes aloud about the ants: "What do they want? What are their goals?"

The movie often scrambles beyond such hysterics, thanks to the skill of Director Saul Bass, a graphics designer and visual consultant here making his feature-film debut. Bass knows a good deal about how to isolate a single image, how to place it and build on it for maximum effectiveness. There are sequences in Phase IV that seem to have been lifted intact from a surrealist's fever dream: giant anthills looming like pylons against a gloomy sky; a dead man's hand, unclenched, revealing ants crawling out of holes they have chewed in the palm.

The movie works toward a vision of a chillingly absurd apocalypse, then pulls back a little, not in implication but in illustration. Originally, Phase IV ended with a montage of hallucinatory images suggesting man's destiny after the ants have had their way. But the sequence was deleted by Bass because he thought it too abstract. It may be just as well: the movie is not substantial enough to support the kind of philosophical freight such a montage would imply. Phase IV works best as a weird thriller and as a showcase for Bass's talents, which transform a story that could have been entirely silly into a bit of necromancy that lingers like an omen.

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