NEMESIS (1992)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

I'll give Albert Pyun's NEMESIS this much credit: though it's not that great even for a low-budget BLADERUNNER imitation, its extreme paranoia about cyborgs comes closer than does the Ridley Scott film to the way the source novel, Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, depicts the threat of its "replicants."

But though NEMESIS had the potential to be a good cheap sci-fi adventure, director Pyan and writer Rebecca Charles mostly blew their chance to give their opus any conceptual weight. Despite the shortcomings of the original film, a franchise, mostly of the "in-name-only" type, did develop three years later, but it didn't use the main character Alex Rain, and none of the nineties sequels included the lead actor Olivier Gruner (whose career as a martial-arts cinema-hero was almost certainly boosted by NEMESIS, only his second film). 

What Pyun and Chase get wrong is that their protagonist Alex is such a hardass that he doesn't really have any emotional investment in anything, unlike the prose and film versions of Rick Deckard. Alex is a cop in a futuristic L.A., and he's first seen approaching a woman named Rosaria, whom he tags as a cyborg. He deems her to be part of a rebel group, but after a failed attempt to explain her group's goals, Rosaria wounds him and escapes. The wound reveals that this cyborg-killing cop has artificial parts inside him, and though he claims to be "eighty percent human," his new wounds require yet more artificial transplants and training. Though Alex is nominally loyal to the force, he doesn't like either his superior Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson) or any of the other few LAPD officers we see. Later, purely on a mission of vengeance, Alex journeys to Mexico looking for Rosaria. He finds her but she doesn't recognize him until he kills her. Alex then meets two of his trainer-handlers, both female and one a cyborg. The audience is told that Alex used to be the lover of the human handler Jared, but few couples have seen less like lovers than these two.

Alex resigns from the LAPD, but after a few months as a hired gun, Farnsworth approaches his old subordinate with a new offer: to take out Jared, who has fled the US to Asia with important security information, on sale to foreign bidders. Farnsworth belatedly informs Alex that there's an explosive charge in his skull, so that Alex has no choice but to obey his old bosses.

During his peregrinations, Alex eventually finds out the truth Rosaria tried to impart: that Jared stole information on a massive plot by cyborgs to infiltrate themselves into human government, with the eventual goal of subverting human rule. Also, Jared herself  has been killed by the time Alex arrives in Asia. (Does he react at all? Don't be silly.) But Jared's cyborg agent Julian (Deborah Shelton, who gets a fine nude scene) gives Alex the straight dope by letting the former cop talk to Jared's memory core. I think we're supposed to believe that the resistance fighters are a combination of humans and altruistic cyborgs, but Pyun and Chase don't pursue details like this. Bad cyborgs then come after Alex-- I'm not sure why, since they shouldn't yet know about his change in sympathies. There's also some talk about neutralizing the bomb in Alex's head, though later I think someone claims this was just a bluff.

Anyway, for the rest of the film Alex, with intermittent help from other resistance fighters, fights off various bad cyborgs, including his former superior. The original ending of the film implied that Alex would go on fighting cyborg conspirators, but the streaming version I saw included an alternate ending that left Alex's fate ambivalent. And so ends the short career of cyborg-hunter Alex Rain, aside from part of his name being bestowed on the heroine of the next three sequels.