Fortress: The Underground-Prison Sci-Fi Actioner

Every prison film has to answer one question in its first ten minutes: why can nobody simply walk out? The great ones answer it with geography — an island, a desert, a wall thick enough to be a character. Fortress (1992) answers it with surgery. Each inmate swallows a device that sits in the gut and can be triggered from a console: a warning at low power, agony at medium, and at the top of the dial the thing detonates and the prisoner comes apart. The guards do not need to watch you. They need to watch a number.

That is a genuinely vicious idea, and it belongs to Stuart Gordon, who by 1992 had spent seven years demonstrating that he was more interested in the body than almost anyone working in genre film.

Gordon takes the corporate shilling

Gordon came out of the Organic Theater Company in Chicago and arrived in cinema with Re-Animator (1985), which remains one of the most confident debuts in horror. He followed it with From Beyond (1986), a film about a machine that lets you perceive things your body was designed to be spared, and then Dolls, and then Robot Jox (1990), where he discovered what happens when a theatre director inherits a special-effects budget and a production company in financial trouble.

Fortress is what came next: a bigger picture, shot in Australia at the Gold Coast studios, with a recognisable lead and an actual action structure. It is the most conventional film of Gordon’s first decade, and the interesting thing about it is how much of him survives the conventionality. Every element that distinguishes Fortress from the dozen straight-to-video dystopias it shares a shelf with is an element about flesh — what can be put inside it, what can be taken out of it, what a corporation is permitted to do to it once you are property.

The world, in one law

The premise is delivered fast and never revisited, which is the correct choice. It is 2017. Population control is absolute: one child per couple, and a second pregnancy is a crime. John Brennick (Christopher Lambert) and his wife Karen (Loryn Locklin) are caught trying to cross a border with an illegal second pregnancy, and he is sentenced to the Fortress — a facility owned and operated by the Men-Tel Corporation, thirty-three levels below the desert floor.

The economy of that setup is worth admiring. One sentence of law generates the crime, the sentence, the marriage under threat and the corporate villain, and the film never has to hold a seminar about what kind of future this is. You know exactly what kind of future it is: the kind that has worked out the unit cost of a person.

Why the vertical works

The design is the film’s best craft decision. A prison that runs downwards inverts every piece of escape-movie grammar you have absorbed. There is no perimeter to reach, no fence line, no yard with a sight of the horizon. Freedom is straight up through solid rock, and the film keeps the shaft in frame — a lit column dropping away into red — so that you are constantly reminded of the distance. Gordon shoots the corridors tight and the shaft wide, and the two rhythms give an otherwise routine action film a real spatial logic.

The other good touch is the surveillance. The Fortress does not have many guards because it does not need many; it has cameras, a floor plan and a database, and the panopticon is run by a single man at a desk. Kurtwood Smith plays Director Poe with a placid, managerial cheer that is far more frightening than shouting would be. Smith had already given the eighties one of its great screen sadists in RoboCop, and here he plays a variation: the administrator who has simply never encountered a reason to be cruel, because the system does the cruelty on his behalf and he only has to sign for it.

Jeffrey Combs turns up as D-Day, the resident hacker, and does the thing Combs always does for Gordon — arrives with a specialism, a nervous energy and line readings that suggest a whole life offscreen. Lincoln Kilpatrick’s Abraham supplies the film’s decency. Lambert, meanwhile, is Lambert: physically credible, verbally minimal, and best in scenes where he is being hurt.

The prison watches you sleep

The idea that outranks even the intestinator gets about four minutes of screen time, and it is the reason the film has a cult. The Fortress monitors its inmates’ dreams. Sleep is scanned, the imagery is displayed on a console upstairs, and a prisoner whose dreams stray into forbidden territory is punished for them — while unconscious, for something he did not choose to think.

Gordon stages this almost casually, and the casualness is the point. Nobody in the film treats it as an outrage; it is simply a feature of the facility, listed alongside the meal times. The inmates have adapted by trying to control what they dream about, which is the most desolate detail in the picture: men lying in the dark, disciplining their own unconscious minds, because the alternative is being woken by pain.

This is the sequence that marks Fortress as the work of the man who made From Beyond. Both films are about a technology that reaches a part of a person which had previously been unreachable. The device in From Beyond lets you perceive what you were built to be spared. The device here lets somebody else perceive what you never agreed to show them. A more expensive film would have made this the whole plot. Gordon put it in the middle of an action picture and moved on, and it is still the thing people describe when they describe this film thirty years later.

A video-shop life

Fortress opened in Australia in 1992 and reached the United States the following year to little theatrical fuss. Its actual audience found it on a shelf, in a box, on a Friday night, which is the distribution channel that built half the reputations in this genre. That history explains its shape. The film is constructed for an audience that might join it twenty minutes late and would still be able to follow it, and constructed to deliver something memorable every reel — a device, a reveal, a mutilation — because a video-shop picture that goes quiet for ten minutes loses the room.

Judged against the films it actually competed with on that shelf, it is close to exemplary: better designed than almost any of them, better cast than it needed to be, and carrying two ideas that most big-budget science fiction of the decade never got near.

The case against

The screenplay is a machine with visible gears. Every ally Brennick acquires exists to provide exactly one skill at exactly the moment the plot requires it, and the film’s mid-section is a series of introductions that feel like a quartermaster handing out equipment. The romance is a photograph and a memory. The dialogue outside Poe’s office is functional at its best.

And the film flinches at the end. Gordon spends an hour establishing that this world’s horror is systemic — the law, the corporation, the accounting — and then resolves it with a fight. The law that generated the entire story is never the thing the film puts in the ring, and no amount of action at the scale of one building can reach it. The intestinator deserved a better film around it.

The real ancestor

Everyone reaches for Escape from New York, and the resemblance is real enough — the sentenced man, the implanted device, the clock. But the deeper ancestor is the pure prison-break tradition, and specifically the tradition’s insistence that the interest lies in method. A Man Escaped is the extreme case: Bresson makes an entire film out of a spoon and a plan, and it is unbearably tense because every step is comprehensible. Fortress has one sequence built that way — the exploitation of a gap in the system, worked out and executed — and it is the best fifteen minutes in the picture. The rest of the escape is achieved with weapons that appear from nowhere.

Forward, the descendants are everywhere, and the most surprising one is High Life, which takes the same core proposition — convicts as biological property, reproduction as the state’s business — and plays it as art cinema in deep space. Gordon got there first with a Christopher Lambert vehicle and a bomb in the stomach. He usually did.

Worth ninety minutes. It circulates in good transfers, it moves, and it contains Kurtwood Smith running an institution, which is its own genre.

Spoilers below

Poe is a cyborg, and the reveal is the film’s one moment of true Gordon. The managerial calm turns out to have hardware behind it: the man who administers a facility full of augmented prisoners has been augmented himself, more thoroughly and more expensively, and Men-Tel owns him as completely as it owns the inmates. Smith plays the disclosure without triumph, which is what makes it land. He is not a monster revealing himself. He is an asset explaining his specification.

Karen’s arrival inside the Fortress is where the plot machinery grinds loudest — she is captured, brought in, and installed as Poe’s assistant in a sequence that exists to put the couple in the same building. What it buys is the film’s nastiest scene: Poe’s interest in the Brennicks’ pregnancy is proprietary, and Gordon lets you understand that a corporation which owns the body owns what the body makes.

The escape itself uses the intestinator against the system that installed it. The devices come out, they go where they will do the most damage, and the film gets its best explosion out of its best idea — which is more discipline than this kind of picture usually manages. The final ascent up the shaft, with the lift mechanism doing what lift mechanisms do in films like this, is competent action cinema and not much more.

The last shot puts the family in the desert at dawn, free, and thirty-three levels of Men-Tel property intact behind them. Gordon returned to the idea in a 2000 sequel that swapped the rock for orbit. The original is the one with the stomach.