Virus – 100 Days of Sci-Fi

Virus is a movie about a virus coming from aliens that infects a research vessel in the middle of the ocean. When a tugboat crew get caught up in a hurricane, they can’t seem to find a way out because the crazy captain towing cargo pushes it too far and almost loses everything.  Just at the last minute before the captain blows his own brains out, they run across the infected ship from the alien virus that is now drifting inky in the ocean completely powered down.

With the cast of this movie, I was expecting a lot more from Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, Joanna Pacula, Marshall Bell, Sherman Augustus, Cliff Curtis and Julio Oscar Mechoso. Like I said this crazy captain had no loyalty of the people he was working with, no morals, and basically was a doomed failure in the first place. As the crew runs into the ship, they decide they’re better off taking the $30 million in commission from the Russian government for finding the abandoned ship floating in the middle of the ocean.

Richie, played by Sherman Augustus, is the one character in the movie that I did like quite a bit. He had gone rogue from the beginning and set up a booby-trap to eject himself and blow the ship to kingdom come. Unfortunately he didn’t get to use it as he gets killed saving Jamie Lee Curtis, playing Kit Foster, and William Baldwin, playing Steve Baker. As I mentioned Donald Sutherland, playing Capt. Robert Everton, is a complete lunatic who’s bet everything on a single cargo transport with a crew that is less than stellar.

The ship comes alive with the alien virus infecting all the computers and taking on a “life” of its own. When the new crew shows up, the ship has been powered down, and they eventually find one crew member that is panicked and overwhelmed with fear. This itself seemed to be a common problem with the movie; at one point, one character would be crazy and out of his/her mind with fear, then the next  moment they would trade places doing stupid things.

Several times throughout the movie I was left wondering why they were doing things they were doing. This included while they were running around the ship trying to get to the top, and then they would turn around and try to go back down to the bottom, while all along they were carrying military grade thermites. They could have sunk the ship relatively easy if used correctly.  Anyhow I rate this movie about a 5.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.