Fortress 2: Re-Entry

Dir: Geoff Murphy

1999

***

No offense to Luxenberg but it isn’t exactly known for it’s film industry, but here it is, possibly the only American-Luxembourgish science fiction action film to have ever graced the bargain bin of Blockbuster Video. Fortress 2: Re-Entry did not make it into the cinemas. The first time I saw Fortress in 1994 with my best mate is still one of my favorite cinema experiences of all time. We loved it and it remains a firm favorite of ours, one that we still quote all these years later. Fortress 2 is something I think we both wanted but only if it was treated the same way as the first. This was, unfortunately, far from the case. I love a good b-movie, and Fortress 2 is a good b-movie, but the original film is a cult masterpiece, the second is a far cry from its greatness. I would argue that situating the second film in a space prison was suitably b-movieish and a great idea but very little of the charm of the first film is present. All the great characters from the first film were killed off but none of them have been replaced by anyone as good – apart from the legendary Pam Grier who is a saving grace (and goddess) to cult film obsessives and all-round nerds such as myself. Christopher Lambert is the only person to return from the first film, and the mighty Stuart Gordon is replaced by Geoff Murphy – a good director who is better than all the sequels he has been given throughout his career. I suspect he was hired based on his 1992 film Freejack. Fortress writers Steven Feinberg and Try Neighbors wrote the story but they clearly peaked with the original. The film takes place a whole ten years after the events of the first film, with a 2027 John Brennick lurking somewhere in North America, still on the run from Men-Tel and living in the rural mountains. His son Danny, now ten years old, runs to him and tells him to come home immediately. When they arrive, there are three people waiting for them. They ask Brennick to help them destroy Men-Tel's new power station, saying that the company is on the verge of collapse and "without their power, they have no power". Brennick refuses, wanting to protect his family, so the trio leave on a boat. As Brennick waves goodbye, two Men-Tel helicopters appear and he scrambles his family's escape plan. He sends Danny and Karen (played by Beth Toussaint after Loryn Locklin declined the offer to return) through an underground passage, while he leads the soldiers on a wild goose chase. The battle ends with one helicopter destroyed, but Brennick's Jeep is overturned. He is then knocked out and captured. He wakes up in a room with a disembodied voice telling him that he is in prison again and has been sentenced to death. He has been implanted with a behavior modification device which causes headaches of various intensity when prisoners enter prohibited areas. He also finds one of the men who visited him, a former Men-Tel vice president, who is now brain-damaged because of an improperly planted device. Another of John's visitors, a former soldier, is also in the jail and friends with one of the guards. Brennick starts making enemies almost immediately. A video of Director Teller "welcomes" the new prisoners. We then see a demonstration, like the one seen in the first film, where he shows them a female prisoner receiving her death sentence: being blown out into space through an airlock. This is the film’s big twist. The video shows the prisoners that their new prison is actually a space station orbiting the Earth which is used to generate power via a solar array. How the hell do they get off a space station? Brennick tries to escape in a water-delivery shuttle but is caught and sent to "The Hole" - an exposed area of the ship where he is bombarded with solar radiation while the station faces the sun and extreme cold when its orbit takes it behind the Earth. I’m pretty sure it’s the sort of thing no one could survive but in the late 90s Christopher Lambert was still pretty tough. When Men-Tel's president arrives he tries to kill Brennick by jettisoning him without a spacesuit. Brennick manages to hold his breath and propel himself towards another airlock and back into the prison, somehow without freezing to death, this again may be due to Lambert being a tough guy but probably more to do with Steven Feinberg and Try Neighbors not knowing much about space. Due to the sudden decompression, the computerized warden, Zed, begins to malfunction and cannot perform its duties. Brennick uses a prison gun to destroy the computer and Teller is subsequently electrocuted. Brennick and all his friends board the Shuttle – because re-entry is easy - and head back to Earth, where John reunites with his family. The low budget shows far more than it did in the first film but then I think its safe to say the budget was much lower this time round. Budget isn’t everything, there is sufficient wit and quirkiness and actually, the special effects aren’t too bad. It just suffers from being not quite as good as it’s excellent predecessor.