WESS, Mark, and Carter suit up for imminent war against unknown forces.
interacting with Mark and the others in the same room, on the same geo- graphic plane, for the sake of clarity, rather than via a television screen. Furthermore, the name of the myste- rious planet that plays host to the film’s events—Aura—is mentioned only once, buried amid much other futuristic jargon in an early conversa- tion; as a result, a later single men- tion of “the Aurans” is easily mistaken for a reference to the dead alien race discovered by Mark and Sonya. Add- ing to one’s initial perplexity are the Argos and Galliot themselves, which were scripted as twin ships for eco- nomic reasons, allowing the produc- tion to use the same model and set interiors for both. However, Rinaldi’s failure to provide distinctive establish- ing shots for each craft makes it often impossible to tell geographically where anyone is, as the Argos crew venture perpetually back and forth from one ship to another.
Nowhere else in the Bava canon do we get quite so many intimations of shots missing. The greatest oversights occur during and following the climac- tic battle, as we are prepared for py- rotechnics which never take place. Prior to the final showdown, there is a painstaking introduction of grenade- shaped plutonium “detonators,” which are carried into battle but never thrown—and finally, there is no effects shot of the Galliot and its spectral crew being blown (as Wess says) “to smithereens.” Instead, we get a close- up of a gloved hand setting an explo- sive timer and—after a bewildering interlude in which the Galliot crew (last seen trapped inside their doomed ship) is suddenly hot on the heels of their saboteurs—several immense flashes of light are shown bombarding the hori- zon. It isn’t satisfying, and on a planet whose atmosphere has been demon- strated to be breathable, a fireball would not have been out of place.23 As for the much-revised “sting- in-the-tail” finale, Ib Melchior’s
WESS discovers that Sonya and Mark are possessed by Auran spirits bent on colonizing other planets in the surprise finale.