Coming Soon
PHASE IV
1974
Director
Saul Bass
Starring
Michael Murphy
Nigel Davenport
Lynne Frederick
Runtime
89 minutes
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The one and only feature film directed by Saul Bass, the legendary designer whose title sequences offered strikingly modern thematic encapsulations of films by Preminger, Hitchcock, and others, PHASE IV is an ultra-ambitious feat of mind-bending, eye-popping imagist storytelling. The film’s astonishing ending was butchered on original release but now those essential final five minutes have been restored and returned to the movie!
Following a mysterious eclipse-like solar event, scientists begin to notice strange and unexplainable behavioral changes in ants. While initially written off as an unconcerning anomaly, it soon becomes apparent that the creatures have developed advanced intelligence along with the ability to work collectively. Scientists Ernest Hubbs and James Lesko have been transferred to a futuristic lab in a remote part of the Arizona desert in which to study these phenomena. However, when the ants begin to attack and kill both wildlife and humans, Hubbs and Lesko realize that the entire human race might now be at a deadly evolutionary disadvantage to the tiny insects
Bass holds back nothing in his swing-for-the-fences debut, displaying his dynamic visual sense through microphotography and just about any other technique you can think of in a stunner of a film that has garnered comparisons to 2001, generating the same sense of interstellar awe right here on planet Earth.
Following a mysterious eclipse-like solar event, scientists begin to notice strange and unexplainable behavioral changes in ants. While initially written off as an unconcerning anomaly, it soon becomes apparent that the creatures have developed advanced intelligence along with the ability to work collectively. Scientists Ernest Hubbs and James Lesko have been transferred to a futuristic lab in a remote part of the Arizona desert in which to study these phenomena. However, when the ants begin to attack and kill both wildlife and humans, Hubbs and Lesko realize that the entire human race might now be at a deadly evolutionary disadvantage to the tiny insects
Bass holds back nothing in his swing-for-the-fences debut, displaying his dynamic visual sense through microphotography and just about any other technique you can think of in a stunner of a film that has garnered comparisons to 2001, generating the same sense of interstellar awe right here on planet Earth.