So, in case you haven’t heard, there’s this movie called Phase IV. It’s a 1970s apocalyptic sci-fi thriller about killer super-intelligent ants, and it was directed by Saul Bass of all people. And instead of special effects, the killer ants are played by real ants, filmed in close-up by National Geographic photographer Ken Middleham.
Either that is enough to make you drop everything and go see it (or go see it again) immediately, or you’re one of those people whose tastes make no sense to me.
But the thing is, as deliriously entertaining as Phase IV is, it’s a singular creation that could only have existed when it did, and couldn’t be (re)made today. And therein lies this week’s story…
There are two main reasons why you couldn’t make something like Phase IV today. Reason #1 is the film’s curious approach to special effects. As I mentioned above, the effects are basically actual nature photography, but this deserves some more explanation.
For the benefit of those who haven’t seen the film, this is not about giant ants—it’s about ordinary sized ants who do things that real ants would theoretically be capable of if they tried—like chewing through electrical cables or building supersized anthills in strict geometric shapes. It’s just that real ants don’t behave as methodically and intelligently as the ones in the film do.
Which is not to say that ants aren’t intelligent. Individual ants are dummies, yes. But collectively, ant colonies behave in astonishingly intelligent ways that some scientists have likened to human intelligence (I’m serious—for example, Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach spends several chapters drawing the parallels). In order to posit a new breed of super-intelligent ants, all the film really needs to do is to exaggerate reality a bit. This is a hugely different kind of challenge to the audience’s suspension of disbelief than that asked by, say, Night of the Lepus.
And it is commensurate and coincident with that creative decision to have the onscreen ants behave like real ants—and to emphasize that fact by having them actually be real ants. And since we all know that you can’t train ants, that there aren’t any ant actors, the fact that we are watching real ants goes a long way to legitimizing the film’s mildly loony premise.
So instead of special effects we get some gloriously nutty nature photography, like an episode of Planet Earth directed by Salvador Dali.
In today’s movie environment, the natural instinct of filmmakers and studios would be to opt for CGI ants. I don’t mean this as an anti-CGI rant—I have to say that CGI effects are capable of some really amazing things these days. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is simply astonishing, for example. And I believe that the digital effects artists who create those computer models are artists every bit as much as the practical effects guys of previous generations, they just use different kinds of tools.
So my objection to CGI ants isn’t that CGI is inherently bad, or that it is inherently unrealistic. Quite the opposite. The CGI ants would be too convincing. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes works because you stop thinking about Caesar and Kobo as effects and accept them as characters, so you can just invest in the drama. But by comparison, Middleham’s insect photography is clearly separate from the rest of the film. Only once do the ants and the human cast appear in the same frame together, and that’s clearly a (wobbly) special effect. The rest of the time, each side is depicted reacting to the actions of the other.
The ants disable the lab’s AC and build reflectors around the base to raise the temperature—the humans roast and swelter. The humans spray insecticide on the ants—the ants genetically engineer a new caste of insecticide-immune soldiers (this sounds ridiculous when written out in words; it is in practice my favorite scene of the film and utterly chilling).
But this is what I’m trying to get at: when I say the film only shows ants behaving realistically, I don’t mean it’s realistic to show ants engaging in genetic engineering. However, what we see are ants taking clumps of food down tunnels, ants eating, ants laying eggs. We interpret these scenes based on the narrative context, but what Middleham shows are things the ants actually could do, and did.
But because his scenes are also clearly staged, and photographed so carefully, they have a false ring to them. It’s nature photography, but it’s phony. And that phoniness is the key. Throughout the movie, the audience is asking itself, “How exactly did they get the ants to do that on cue? How did they stay in frame, so perfectly composed, so perfectly in focus?”
It’s the tension between those questions, which emphasize the unreality of the fiction, and the actual ant behavior, which emphasizes the reality of them. Taken together, they create the necessary plausibility for the scenario. If we weren’t constantly aware of these being real ants somehow compelled to act on cue, we’d probably reject the premise as ridiculous rather than terrifying.
Which brings me to the second reason a Phase IV remake wouldn’t work today. The apocalypse that unfolds here is one of Mother Nature getting revenge on Mankind. Science and technology are mowed down in the face of tiny little pests. It was a common theme in the 70s—from the aforementioned killer rabbits of Night of the Lepus to Godzilla’s Smog Monster to the seemingly infinite variants of giant rampaging insects on offer in various drive-ins.
It was a response to ecological fears. We knew we were doing wrong with all our pollution and radiation and deforestation. There would be a price to pay for our misdeeds—Planet Earth would eventually come to exact that price.
But flash forward 4 or 5 decades and the price we seem to be paying isn’t the Earth coming at us for revenge, but the Earth just dying around us. I remember being a kid in the 1970s terrified of all the stories of the oncoming plague of Killer Bees. Well, they never materialized—and now the problem isn’t that we’re facing too many angry insects, but that our insect population is dying. The problem today is that the bees are dying off. We need to rescue them, not attack them.
The apocalypse of Phase IV is weirdly hopeful—life persists. We may end up slaves to a new master race of ants, but at least we survive.
