You wanta learn about ants? This is how you learn about ants! Eerie Ant colonies are just a byproduct of such ant-ness. Shout-out to
Rea’s Creature Features for the recommendations on this one, link in the description below. Saul Bass’s sole directionatorial efforts here. It’s kinda weird, cool and like a National Geographic film that has way more sinister implications.
After an event involving an eclipse or something, there’s a remote area in Arizona with some weird ant shit goin on. They go way beyond the the normal big hill-buildin kinda shit down there, and it presents a big problem for, well, everything else. Especially some scientists sent to check em out, with their a space-age biodome run by a Ford truck. Because you know what? Ants? They get everywhere. EVERYWHERE!!! Fkn ants.
This is admittedly a pretty cool look at, well, ants, and their subcultures. Is that even a thing? Yeah, it really is. The plot is actually pretty interesting in both a sci-fi and pure science kinda way. I’d say this is more of a fiction-science kind of movie, and the ant footage itself is very well done, not hokey as I thought it would be. Inspired by the H. G. Wells 1905 short story Empire of the Ants, which has its own film “adaptation” from 1977. A little cheese in some of the acting, but the visual story telling here is the key.
Director Saul Bass is an interesting one to make this. His history is more in the field of graphic design, with logos for a lot of companies you’ll recognize [Lawry’s, Kleenex, Alcoa, Dixie, Bell Telephone, Quaker, United Way, Warner Communications, United Airlines, Girl Scouts, Geffen Records, Minolta, AT&T, General Foods], but more well known for his unique film title sequences and posters for the likes of directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorcese, Billy Wilder; powerful in a somewhat simplistic introduction to the mood or theme of the film. His style has inspired a lot of imitators in the years since, recognizable when you see it like in the opening of the show Mad Men or the movies Catch Me If You Can and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so that makes this film that much more intriguing. Interesting new palette for him to work on. But apparently the audiences didn’t care for it much at the time though, so Bass just stuck to his graphicsins after that.
