Director – Hubert de la Bouillerie, Screenplay – J. Reifel, Producers – Barnet Bain & John Eyres, Photography – Gregory Gardiner, Music – Eric Colvin, Visual Effects – Electric Filmworks, Inc. (Supervisor – Tony Venezia), Special Effects Supervisor – Jim Byrnes, Production Design – John Zachary. Production Company – Moonstone Entertainment.
Cast
Sandra Bernhard (J.T. Wayne), Cameron Dye (Lennon), Frank Zagarino (Vendler), Matt McCoy (Suarez), Laura San Giacomo (Goad), Lee Arenberg (Noel), Merle Kennedy (Mailai), Michelle Anne Johnson (Misha), Teddy Lane, Jr. (Rugby), Spencer Garrett (Charlie), Brandon Hooper (Mason)
Plot
The salvage captain J.T. Wayne is recruited at short order to fly a mission to intercept The Agamemnon, a ship that went missing several years earlier and is carrying a valuable shipment of solarium. Because personnel are in short supply, Wayne is forced to take on a crew headed by her former partner Vendler, whom she found untrustworthy, along with others including Lennon, the bartender from her local bar. They rendezvous with The Agamemnon but Vendler and his team prove treacherous and wipe out most of the other crew. Moreover, they discover that the programmer Goad has left an impossible set of access code hurdles in the Agamemnon’s computer and has set the ship and its payload of explosives on a collision course with the Earth.
The Apocalypse was one of the films produced by John Eyres, a British director who had a brief period during the 1990s putting out action films, including Project: Shadowchaser (1992) and sequels, Monolith (1994) and Octopus (2000), among others. The film was a directorial outing from Hubert de la Bouillerie, who has worked as an editor with credits on high-profile films such as The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Tango & Cash (1989), Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) and Mo’ Money (1992), among others. This was one of only two films that de la Bouillerie directed, along with the tv movie The Right to Remain Silent (1996).
The title The Apocalypse suggests all manner of End of the World scenarios – meteors on a collision with the Earth, nuclear war, the Biblical End of the World. When it comes to the film, the great disappointment is that this far more mundanely telescopes down to being a ship with a consignment of explosive materials that has been set on a collision course with the Earth and the battle for those aboard to access the program that will stop it. There are not even any scenes set on Earth, let alone depiction of the titular apocalypse occurring.
Your hopes for the film sink within the opening few minutes, which have Laura San Giacomo of all people as a hacker madly quoting Hamlet (1601), emphasis on the madly, while randomly jabbing buttons on a console. She looks the least convincing computer hacker ever and the scenes leave you with the sense of “WTF am I watching?” (San Giacomo’s husband Cameron Dye incidentally plays the male lead of the bartender turned crew member).
Sandra Bernhard as Captain J.T. Wayne
The disappointment of The Apocalypse is that as soon as it gets everybody on board The Agamemnon, it turns into a good deal of technical doubletalk being spouted by people in front of computer screens interspersed with occasional shootouts. As dramatic tension, this is several lacking. There’s Frank Zagarino, the killer android from Eyres’ Project Shadowchaser films, playing essentially the same role – that of a hijacker who takes over a facility, although in this case he is a regular human rather than an android. Both The Apocalypse and Shadowchaser films draw on the basics of Die Hard (1988).
The film is also lumbered by a low-budget, This leads to some very variable effects. Certainly, the model scenes for the ships are quite good. However, the computer displays are all low res 1990s graphics with the same 2-3 visuals repeated over and over.
The film has quite an interesting cast of names including Matt McCoy, who seemed on the verge of becoming a leading man in the 1990s. The biggest surprise is seeing Sandra Bernhard, better known for her work as a stand-up comic, slotting into playing the grizzled space captain and doing not badly in the part, even if most of her performance is given at the console of the ship talking into a headset.
