Phase IV (1974)
★★★ — Phase IV (1974)
There's a shot in Phase IV that's stayed with me. A column of ants moving in perfect formation across scorched desert earth, deliberate and unhurried, like they've already won and they know it. No roaring, no chaos. Just quiet, geometric purpose. It's one of the most genuinely unsettling things I've seen in a 1970s sci-fi film, and it costs nothing except patience and a macro lens.
The premise is brilliantly simple: ants, seemingly overnight, develop a collective intelligence and begin systematically dismantling human civilisation. Not with aggression, exactly, but with something worse. Method. The insects construct towering crystalline spires across the Arizona desert, manipulate local ecosystems, and appear to coordinate with an eerie, almost mathematical precision. There are no bug-eyed monsters here, no city-flattening swarms from a creature feature. Just ants doing what ants do, except now they're doing it with intent.
What makes Phase IV a genuine curiosity is who directed it. Saul Bass spent decades as one of the great title-sequence designers in cinema history, the man responsible for some of the most iconic opening credits ever put to film. This was his only feature, and you can feel the visual intelligence all over it. The macro-photography of the ant sequences is still genuinely impressive, hypnotic even, and the sun-bleached desert cinematography carries a dread that feels authentic rather than manufactured. Pair that with a theremin-heavy ambient score that keeps things feeling properly otherworldly, and you've got a film that absolutely nails its atmosphere in stretches.
The trouble is the human half of the story. Two scientists hole up in a geodesic dome to study and combat the ant threat, and the drama between them never catches fire. The dialogue is stiff, the characters thin, and there are stretches of the film where the pacing goes from deliberate to genuinely sluggish. When the ants are on screen, Phase IV hums with tension. When it's back to the dome and the people inside it, the energy drops noticeably. It's a film that's more interested in its insects than its humans, which is either a bold creative choice or a structural weakness, depending on your generosity.
Some cuts include an alternate ending that's been much discussed over the years. I'll say this: it's ambitious, and it fits the film's strange, abstract logic, but it lands more as confusing than profound. There's a fine line between leaving an audience to interpret something and leaving them without enough to work with, and that ending wobbles right on it.
The film that kept coming to mind as I watched was Fantastic Planet, another piece of offbeat 1970s sci-fi that puts humans in the position of the small and the powerless. That film commits more fully to its vision and is the stronger work for it. Phase IV feels like it's reaching for something similar but pulls back at crucial moments, unwilling or unable to fully trust its own weirdness.
That's the frustration with Phase IV, really. It has a concept that should be chilling, a visual sensibility that's often genuinely striking, and the fingerprints of a real artistic intelligence behind the camera. But it never quite coheres into the film it's clearly straining to be. It's a B-movie with A-movie ambitions, and the gap between those two things is where the film lives and, too often, stalls.
Still, I'd recommend it. Not without reservations, but I'd recommend it. For anyone who's ever looked at an anthill and felt a flicker of unease, or anyone curious to see what a graphic design legend does when handed a feature film and a desert full of insects, there's enough here to justify the time. It's dated, uneven, and never as gripping as it should be. But it lingers. And films that linger deserve some credit for that.
Three stars.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1974 | Watched: 2026-03-17
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More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
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