Def-Con 4
(1985)
Director: Paul Donovan
Cast: Lenore Zann, Maury Chaykin, Kate Lynch
Although you
might not think it because I review a lot of movies that have given me
a lot of pleasure, in my personal life I am kind of a cynical guy. I do
try to think the best of a situation when I am with friends or family,
because they accept me despite my eccentric ways, and I see that
evidence in front of my eyes. But when I am alone, more often than not
there is a voice in the back of my head that tells me to be very
careful about whatever I am planning to do, from doing my duties at my
job to going out to shop for groceries. The reason for that is pretty
simple - like you, I have been disappointed or hurt by some bad
occurences in my life, and I have no desire to be in a situation that
will bring up any of those bad feelings again. So to be sure of this,
quite often in my spare time I imagine myself in various bad
situations, and subsequently do a lot of brainstorming as to what I
would do if I was in a certain bad situation in real life. I previously
brought up this quirk of mine a long time ago when I did a review of
the movie This Is Not A Test.
I discussed various situations of peril I have made plans for just in
case, from running into a cougar in the woods to waking up in a strange
place with an unfamiliar girl next to me. Also in that review, I
brought up the subject of nuclear war, and what I would do if a nuclear
strike was heading to my country. Well, at the time that I wrote the
review, I kind of dismissed the idea with a quick answer. I figured out
that the nuclear strike would include my city (which is the capital of
the province I live in), and since I live downtown, I would be
instantly annihilated by the nuclear blast. So I wouldn't suffer much,
if anything.
Since
writing about that, in the weeks and months that
have followed, I found myself thinking about the situation more and
more for some reason. To be more exact, I was thinking, "What if there
was a nuclear war, but for some reason my city wasn't among those that
were hit by a nuclear missile?" After thinking about the situation in
that way for some time, I soon came to the conclusion that what would
follow would make for a very tough situation. For one thing, there
would be no Internet, and the electricity would be out, so that would
mean my range of entertainment would be very limited. Seriously though,
it didn't take me long to realize the major problems that would come
from multiple cities around me being nuked. For one thing, the supply
of food coming into the city would immediately stop. Maybe I could loot
the supermarket that's just a block from my apartment, but other people
in my city would no doubt have the same idea. Even if I did manage to
stock up with food, what would I do when my food supply ran out?
Another problem that would likely come up would be that the comfort of
the existence of law and order would disappear. The federal government
would be gone, so there would be no more guidance from that source. And
the police in my city would no doubt be more concerned protecting and
caring for their own families than the average citizen, so the city
would, in short order, fall into chaos, and it would be every man for
himself. Much as I hate the thought, I would almost certainly have to
acquire a gun and keep it on me at all times as I would struggle to
survive.
The more I think about it, the problems of trying to
survive in a post-holocaust world would just keep mounting up. What if
you had a medical emergency? Where would you get a constant and clean
source of water? And what would you do when you had to go to the
bathroom? To be honest, after thinking of tough questions like those, I
think that those who would immediately
die in a nuclear holocaust would
be the lucky ones. I certainly would prefer to be vaporized than live
in such a radically changed world. But with my luck, I would be one of
the survivors. So since I have started to think about the possibility
of me being in that situation, I've been searching for movies about
surviving a post holocaust world, Def-Con 4 being
one of them. I was especially interested in it because it's a rare Canadian
post-holocaust movie. I felt that the Canadian angle could be more
informative for Canadians like me preparing for the worst. Though
there's circumstantial evidence that the
characters introduced to us at the beginning of the movie could be
American. They are Walker (John Walsch), Jordan (Lynch, Meatballs), and
Howe (Tim Choate, Ghost
Story),
three astronauts in a nuclear weapon-armed space station orbiting North
America. Not long after their introduction, nuclear war breaks out on
Earth, and the three barely manage to save their space station when a
nuclear missile is launched against it. With their home planet blasted
with hundreds of nukes, the three soon argue whether to return to their
planet or not. Eventually the decision is made for them when their
computers suddenly activate in a way not programmed by them, and the
space station descends through the atmosphere and lands on an isolated
part of the continent's eastern seaboard. While the three astronauts
may be away from most of the radiation, they soon find they are facing
some challenges just as tough. These include drifters with a taste for
human flesh, and a survivalist named Vinnie (Chaykin, The
Kidnapping Of The
President)
who has a taste for the lone female among the astronauts. But the most
pressing of their problems is a teenager named Gideon Hayes, a former
Army brat who has taken advantage of the chaos of the holocaust to
become leader of a large band of armed followers. Gideon wants his
hands on the astronauts, because they can access important information
from the space station's
computer.
But what Gideon and his followers do not know is that there is one
nuclear bomb still attached
to the space station that's due to go off in a few days...
Perhaps because of the Canadian origin of the filmmakers
who made Def-Con 4
is why there are a number of off-beat touches in the finished film.
True, the movie in quite a few aspects wants to be familiar (read:
American) to the mass audience, including references to the United
States military, such as when it's mentioned that the father of the
character of Gideon belonged in the American army. But there are some
elements that have been handled in a way that many viewers might
consider to be Canadian. Most obvious are sights like a social
insurance number card, Canadian cigarette boxes, and a Canadian beer
bottle, though blatant Canadian touches like those in the movie are
rare.
There are some more subtle touches, like the fact that at one point one
of the astronauts says he is a member of NORAD - which Canada
participates in. So it's possible that this astronaut (or any one of
his fellow astronauts) could be Canadian. It's true that whether or not
the astronauts are Canadian is never revealed. But the astronaut
character of Howe has been written in a way that he does not come
across as the typical American action hero you usually get in a movie
like this. He is not someone who is cool and confident. Not long after
the nuclear war has broken out, he gets a farewell message from his
dying wife, which shakes him up badly - enough to possibly explain his
later behavior when he lands on earth. As he battles the various foes
he encounters on earth, he is clearly shown to be physically weak
enough to not present himself as such a great obstacle to others who
wish to control him. Indeed, at several points he is seen more or less
whining and pleading with the people who challenge him. And most of the
movie revolves around this weakling character. Though I wouldn't call
this behavior of this character "Canadian", I do think that the
Canadian origin of the filmmakers contributed to making a protagonist
who is different than others in the B movie world.
Interestingly, while the character of Howe might at
first strike viewers as a kind of a wimp, by the end of the movie we
root for this weakling. Part of the reason is that the screenplay
provides foes for him that make him look good in comparison, but
another reason is that eventually he does start fighting back in
earnest. Though even before then he's sympathetic, thanks to a skilled
performance by actor Tim Choate. His character may be weak, but he's
weak in a way we can identify with. I could picture myself in his
situations behaving in the same way. The other performances in Def-Con 4 are
pretty well done for a largely no-name cast. Kevin King (Iron Eagle)
deserves praise for not going over the top with his performance as the
ruthless teenage dictator. His relative calmness makes him believable
as well as creepy. However, his character has some of the problems
found in the screenplay. For one thing, it is never really explained
how this teenager got a hold of all his power, and managed to keep it.
It's also not explained very well just how this fascist society of his
works. All the movie does is having a character briefly mentioning,
"He's got his ways", and the issue is immediately forgotten about. By
not going deeply into things like this, the movie really lost the
opportunity to give its audience extra interesting details. Another
problem with the screenplay is that around the middle of the movie, the
story stops in its tracks and stays more or less in place for a
considerable long time. It's a bit surprising, because up to this point
the movie had been moving at a comfortably zippy pace, revealing
multiple plot turns and new locations at a fairly brisk clip. The movie
eventually does start speeding up again, but it's a considerable wait.
There are also some problems that may not have been
evident when the filmmakers wrote the script, but popped up when it
came to the production design. For example, it's stated several times
that the crashed space station contains four months of food. However,
when seeing the crashed space station, it is barely big enough to
simply house the three astronauts, and couldn't possibly have that much
food aboard. There are also problems with the look of the movie not
related to the screenplay. The biggest problem is that the movie looks
dark - too dark. When the astronauts reach Earth, most of the
subsequent scenes are filmed outside during the night, with precious
little lighting used by the filmmakers to illuminate things. This
results in a few confusing action sequences where it is hard to figure
out just what's going on. However, when you know that the movie was
made on a poverty-row budget of just a million dollars or so, one can
see that the filmmakers did well with so little money to work with. The
opening sequences in space have some impressive visuals as well as set
design. Later sequences also have some pretty convincing construction
of Gideon's compound as well as Vinnie's home. The filmmakers also took
advantage of the Nova Scotia wilderness (beaches, forests) to create
some haunting visuals equal to those found in post-nuke movies taking
place in the desert. So while Def-Con 4
may not be very strong in the exploitation department with its
disappointing action sequences (as well as there being virtually
nothing in the nudity and sex department) it does have enough offbeat
touches and impressive low budget production design to entertain
post-apocalypse movie fans in ways they probably haven't been
entertained by a post-apocalypse movie before.
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See also: Steel Frontier,
Survivor, Warlords
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