Review: Virus (1999)

Stars: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Sutherland

Budget: $75 million

Directed By: John Bruno

In a world where we are now facing a global pandemic, i mean wtf else can go wrong these days?
I really am waiting on everything to go mad max or the walking dead. Lets lighten the load with some movies that take that name, premise or just idea and run with it.
Welcome to Corona Virus contagion month.

Here's our first one a massive project from the late nineties directed by John Bruno who is no stranger to making big budget films, though just as a visual expert. He even worked with some of the cast before too, like Jamie Lee Curtis on True Lies.
But nothing significant in the directorial capacity before or pretty much after this.
Unfortunately a lot of said cast have came out and outright bashed the film saying it's possibly the worst film they've worked on.
Is this fair?
Is this true?
Let's take a look at Virus, some of it's flaws but also some of it's strengths, if there's any to find.

In space we see a weird lightning like thing streaking through the cosmos, it hits a Russian space station killing all the astronauts. It then gets transmitted down through the radio wave into a Russian ship called the Volkov (longer than that but that's what i'm calling it).
We then join the tugboat Sea Star, Donald Sutherland (Robert) is it's alcoholic captain, an ass hole through and through as we'll see more later. When bad weather hits he forces the crew to keep their salvage despite it possibly sinking them. It does get lost anyway, also the engine room gets damaged then starts taking on water.

When they get to middle of the storm (the eye) the water magically calms down then they spot a new vessel on their radar. When they board after no reply they realize the ship could be worth millions in salvage, with one caveat there has to be no one alive on board. Finding the majority of electronic on the ship have been destroyed or removed they all get a weird feeling. Especially when they capture glimpses of things out the corner of their eyes.

When they restore power to ship is when the shit really hits the fan, they all slowly piece together that something bad has happened with the electronics on the ship. Especially when they find some survivors that tell them it has gained sentience. They even eventually manage to contact the sentient life force. It unfortunately see's human as some kind of plague that needs to be destroyed. It then starts to make weird machine/human pieces robots to attack them.

Most of the crew admit they can't let this thing reach the mainland or it will spread and possibly destroy the human race. Robert however doesn't seem like the idea of leaving this much money behind, to the extent he makes a deal with the life force to help it kill the others.
Unfortunately like some of the other crew he gets changed into a machine human cyborg hybrid even after striking this deal. The crew gets whittled down to just Jamie lee's Kelly, Baldwin's Foster and one of the other survivors from the actual Volkov.

That's where i'll end this as we don't spoil films here at THN unless they are ungodly bad, so even though Virus does have it flaws, being another take on alien. It does have some very good practical effects even CGI for it's time. It does get tense and very dark at time especially when we see some of the horrible machine/human hybrids the entity makes from bits and pieces. I'd even say it influenced Ghost Ship (2002) that came afterwards with a very similar story. THN awards Virus a strong 2 out of 3 stars, it's worth one watch.