- Directed by Geoff Murphy
- Written by John Flock and Peter Doyle
- Starring
- Christopher Lambert
- Aiden Rea
- David Roberson
- Liz May Brice
- Beth Toussaint
- Produced by John Flock
First, let me say that I love the original Fortress. Christopher Lambert is one of my guilty pleasures, and the other actors thrown in — Jeffrey Combs, Kurtwood Smith, and Loryn Locklin (aka “the perky mini-van lady”) — just sweeten the pot. Granted, it’s got a couple of plot contrivances that leave your suspension of disbelief gasping for breath, but it’s just cheesy enough to give a funloving glow to the action. Stuart Gordon’s had habitual trouble when directing sci-fi movies as opposed to horror (can you say Robot Jox?), but he almost manages to infuse Fortress with the same enthusiasm that powers his horror outings.
It was with some trepidation that I saw that Gordon was not associated with this sequel; instead, the director is Geoff Murphy (The Quiet Earth, Young Guns 2, Under Siege 2, and Freejack, among others). This is a filmmaker who can make interesting films (The Quiet Earth) and unsuccessful films (the others quoted), but one thing seems constant: The story just doesn’t move very well.
No exception to the rule here.
We open somewhere rural with tall trees in autumn (the implication is that this is somewhere in the northern conterminous states, although the closing credits show that all locations shooting was done in Luxembourg [!]), most of a decade after the events of the first film, where John Brennick (Lambert) is living far from civilization with his wife Karen (now, alas, no longer played by Locklin), and his son Danny, who was the forbidden second child that got them into all that trouble in the first movie. This raises one of the biggest (though certainly not the last) of this story’s “hunh?” questions: Why the hell didn’t the Brennicks stay in Mexico, where they were at the end of the original, and where the U.S. Government and the Men-Tel Corporation couldn’t get them for “multiple breeding”? I mean, sure, autumn is beautiful in temperate zones, but being able to live with electricity and without a shotgun under your pillow is a blessing too.
So three people show up at the Brennick cabin: two members of the “Resistance” movement, (male and female, and naturally Brennick had a relationship with the female, Elena, while he was in the Air Corps), plus a former Men-Tel exec who’s become a sympathizer. Brennick says he doesn’t want any part of ferrying the exec out of the country, or of using his knowledge to help sabotage the new Power Generator which Men-Tel is building to replace the dwindling oil and coal. The obvious question is asked: “How long do you think it’ll be before they find you here?” Given the premise of the movie, I’d say, oh, roughly three minutes.
Bingo. Bad guy choppers show up. Brennick hurries the wife & kid into the escape tunnels beneath the cabin and then leads the baddies on a chase through the woods, ending in an exploded chopper and an overturned jeep. Alas, the jeep is Brennick’s, and he’s taken into custody.
He wakes up next strapped into a chair, wearing nothing but his BVD’s. A computer goes through Trial-O-Matic, convicting him of sedition and treason against the U.S. Government and the Men-Tel Corporation, then sentencing him to death — a sentence which is stayed as long as Men-Tel has use for him. He gets an implant inserted into him (shades of, well, the first Fortress) which naturally uses “behavior modification” (read “ball-crushing pain”) to control the prisoners.
Then he’s ushered into the prison facility, where he meets Elena, also captured, and his other bunkies — a black guy who’s an electronics expert (and don’t think that ain’t gonna come in handy) and a big Russian guy, played by Little John from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (ditto — the fact that he’s big and Russian, I mean). Alas, aside from Elena, neither of them have nearly the personality of Brennick’s bunkmates in the first movie, so I’ll not describe them further than necessary. We also see the former exec, whose implantation went wrong, leaving him a halfwit with a pet cockroach (ditto again — and yes, I do mean the pet cockroach).
In our first prison brawl, we also meet the Bad Guard, a sadistic Mr. Sato (Yuji Okumoto, the punk kid from Karate Kid 2), and naturally, the Good Guard. And Brennick is quickly ushered in to a private audience with Teller (Patrick Malahide, who isn’t nearly as much fun as Kurtwood Smith), who basically gives him the “your ass is mine” speech — and reveals that his escaped wife and son are under satellite surveillance, and soon will be in Men-Tel custody.
And it’s then that the load of prisoners find out that their “prison” is actually an orbital station which also happens to be the Power Station which Elena and friends were trying to destroy in the first place. And here we run into another “hunh?” moment: That Teller’s passion to have Brennick, the only escapee ever from a Men-Tel prison, under his thumb will let him override all common sense and place him as a worker in the very facility that he would most want to destroy. Even the current CEO of Men-Tel (Pam Grier, honestly) thinks Teller’s being an idiot.
So now that the stage is set, what do we get for the rest of the running time? At best, a pale imitation of the original Fortress. Pale, I say, because many of the story points are terribly anemic. Brennick’s bunkies don’t have nearly the personal animosities that the originals did, and correspondences between the two movies continually elicit a response of, “Oh yeah! They did something like that in the first one — only much cooler.”
The space station itself is wildly improbable. Obviously equipped with budget-saving artificial gravity which immediately stops operating once you’re out the airlock, it’s been designed by someone with no idea of the strictures of maintaining a self-contained environment. Corridors are wide, with plenty of headroom; some industrial-type rooms are several stories tall, with staircases up the sides and lots of wasted airspace in between. And in their miscellaneous and meaningless tasks, the prisoners sure use a lot of combustion-based tools, which would deplete the precious oxygen supply even further. (At one point, there’s even a flamethrower.)
One other blooper which gave me the giggles: Brennick at one point meets the rough-n-tumble shuttle pilot who uses the station as a stopover while ferrying water from the moon to Earth. Aside from the fact that there were no obvious signs of drought on Earth (at least not in Luxembourg), the producers obviously didn’t hear soon enough that the much-publicized discovery of water on the moon turned out, rather embarrassingly, to be the vented urine from the space suits of previous U.S. astronauts. That’s right, the only water on the moon is frozen astro-pee!
But the biggest flaw, by far, is the maltreatment (or rather, non-treatment) of Karen Brennick. In the original, she was an active participant in the plot, a co-prisoner with John, the catalyst of much of the story’s action, and as responsible for their escape as her husband (though he was the one firing the guns). Here, she’s written out as soon as possible. Teller’s surveillance shows that she and her son slipped over the border into Canada, officially out of his reach (and, given that the Canadian border is apparently within hiking distance of the Brennick homestead, again raises the question of the sanity of setting up shop in a country where you’re wanted for a capitol crime, when you’re practically in spitting distance of home base). Even the “black ops” mission to recover her never really produces anything. When Brennick is eventually reunited with his family (whoops, hope I didn’t give away too much there), they’s still in the wooded hill country — apparently they’ve been wandering there for the nebulous time period that Brennick’s been incarcerated, given nothing better to do by Mr. Murphy. (But hey, she’s not nearly as easy on the eyes as the first Mrs. Brennick, so I’m kinda glad she didn’t take up more screen time.)
In all, most of the disappointment in Fortress 2 came from direct comparison with Fortress the First. On its own, it’s a passable movie, with an adequate budget both for sets and CGI space effects (and even some spacewalking scenes). Too bad it had to be a sequel to a superior movie, instead of something wholly its own.
A Notable Quotable:
“Girl, you better recognize my skills! I could build a radio station out of a milk carton and two condom wrappers!”
- Marcus the electro-whiz
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 11
- breasts: 5
- explosions: 24
- dream sequences: 2
- ominous thunderstorms: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
- Willie Garson (Nussbaum the brain-damaged exec) showed up on a Voyager episode
- Beth Toussaint (the ersatz Karen Brennick) was Tasha Yar’s sister Ishara on the TNG episode “Legacy”
