Neill Blomkamp launched his independent film company in 2017 and created numerous short films for free, which was a huge risk. The goal was to obtain audience input and support for these films in order to turn one or more of them into full-length features.
He’s a brilliant storyteller with a vivid and otherworldly imagination that has no bounds as a director. Blomkamp has demonstrated in films like District 9 and Elysium that he can generate brilliant and exciting work when granted artistic freedom.
However, this creativity occasionally clashes with production houses that don’t want to take chances. Because he was too different for the executives, he lost the director’s chair for pictures like Alien. Isn’t that ridiculous? Blomkamp started his own studio to address these concerns.
Oats Studios has a history of producing films based on supernatural and sci-fi phenomena. Firebase is one of them, a Vietnam War story about a man who is chosen to battle a monster known as The River God.
The Omega Event
A close-up scene of a US soldier garroted against a wooden pole, his corpse deteriorating and skin rotting, sets the tone for the rest of the film. Following that, we witness footage from 1969 in Vietnam’s An Giang Province. The first consists of a sequence of aerial pictures of a napalm airstrike over deep forests.
As though people in groups were starting gigantic bonfires, white smoke rises from within the trees. Following that, we see a group of troops on foot patrolling an area. They come find the burnt corpses of Viet Cong troops, but something about these dead fighters seems off.
The face of one of the corpses had no human jaw or teeth, and it seemed as if the facial bone below the nose transformed into fangs. The skin seemed thicker and denser than usual as if it were the bark of a tree and could be peeled off just as easily.
To add to their horrors, the unit witnesses the strangest of phenomenons. They noticed that scores of dead bodies were levitated and revolving in concentric circles. This inexplicable and gruesome event claimed fifteen thousand two hundred and twelve lives and two thousand and twenty-five vehicles.
The CIA dubbed it the Omega Event and started an investigation. More footage reveals Vietnamese women speaking about a particular man who went into the fields and started praying. The levitation took place after this as trucks, tanks, men, houses, and choppers lost control and rose up into the air.
The scenario appears like something out of a superhero movie, as if Magneto has gained the ability to control all items, not just metal. Many of the CIA’s files, including a couple on UFOs, were recently declassified. These examples lead us to assume that Blomkamp’s concept is still rooted in the realm of possibility.
The Soldier and The Spear
The image then changes from archive footage to what appears to be a US military combing operation to kill Viet Cong fighters. One tough-looking broad man holds a pointed wooden spear while everyone else has heavy artillery and ammunition.
This is the first time we comprehend the enemy may be bullet – proof; otherwise, what would be the point of holding such an unusual weapon? Sergeant Hines goes through a brief zoning out period during which he hears a sharp monotone, but then discovers an underground bunker and leaps into it like a badass.
It’s not long before a fellow American soldier comes out of the darkness, seemingly in a trance. Hines strikes his spear against the zombie-like soldier, it pierces into the lower rib, but nothing happens.
Hines pulls out the lance and goes one more time for the upper part of the chest. However, the zombie-soldier grabs the weapon from his left hand and breaks it. Hines pushes and throws away his enemy in a dark corner of the bunker before tossing a stun grenade at him.
And brothers and sisters, what comes out of the darkness is beyond the imagination of either of us. It was one of the Spidermen, not your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, but something entirely different. It was an eyeless humanoid creature with skin that was shedding and a bloody and meaty torso.
At roughly five minutes into the film, we hear the first true dialogue. By comparison, if it were a two-hour feature picture, the first conversation would have been roughly thirty minutes in. Before the beast presumably fell, Hines fired nine shots from his pistol.
The Tale of Two Cities-Quatro and Tarheel
Three choppers arrive at ground zero the next morning, and CIA operative Jacob Palmer arrives to accompany Sergeant Hines to an army facility. Sergeant Carr of the Studies and Observation Group joins Agent Palmer. Hines had quit his squad in order to search for the weird creatures and began collaborating with the CIA.
The men board a chopper, and Palmer tells Hines about Firebase Quatro, which is located near the Cambodian border just outside Tay Ninh. The CUA had built up a base there to track down the River God, who was the mastermind behind all of this. He tells Pine that the River God used to be a humble Vietnamese farmer, and that the survivors of his attack are being treated in the field hospital at the fort.
So, Hines is taken to a major named Brickerson, a survivor of the River God who can still talk. At Firebase Quatro, Brickerson explains his ordeal, noting his men faced a Viet Cong ambush, and the enemies would not die even by bullets.
So, Brickerson and his men retreated to another base called Firebase Tarheel, where they awaited reinforcements and requested a napalm airstrike. However, Firebase Tarheel had been destroyed by the enemy. The napalm strike burned the jungle down, and that’s when Brickerson saw this monster he couldn’t understand.
It was visible only because of the napalm that was sticking to it and was just standing in one place, without any pain or suffering: invisible and invincibleBrickerson warns that his men were scared and shocked by what they saw.
The Big Bad River God
Corporal Richard Bracken, the sole survivor of the events at Tarheel, meets Hines and Palmer. Bracken’s right side suffered third-degree burns, his skin had melted, and even his flesh had been burnt.
Palmer requested that he recount his experiences at Firebase Tarheel. When the Navy SEALS discovered something weird, Bracken and his men left the base in the morning. Bracken’s unit was tasked with gathering further information about it.
Back at Tarheel, he and his comrades were firing indiscriminately at Viet Cong rebels who had cornered the Americans. Bracken noticed a skeletal creature approaching him while his soldiers were being fired out of nowhere.
As it came closer, flesh chunks flew towards him and joined his bones to form a hulking muscular but skinless monster with numerous bony spikes protruding from its back. He was the River God himself, and he just kept staring at Bracken, who was in a state of trauma and shock. Was it really a God? Was it an alien? Was it the Devil himself? Bracken must have been wondering about these basic questions while thinking about his life.
However, in an odd turn of events, Bracken was staring right into The Thing’s eyes one minute and then found himself at the Charleston Airbase in South Carolina on the day of his deployment the next, implying that the River God had the potential to shift the space-time continuum.
By extension, he could physically manipulate time and space, similar to moving a pencil across a table. He just shifted Bracken from one spot to another if Bracken was the pencil and the table was time and space. Physically!
The South Carolina base was under attack, and a modified Russian aircraft came along and burned Bracken and other soldiers with huge flame throwers. Bracken was burning, but strangely, he got pulled into the water by his mate Freddy and others back in the Vietnamese jungles. It had happened again, he had traveled once again through space and time. Basically, Bracken was pulled out of South Carolina into Vietnam.
He observed the reanimated corpses of his battalion on the other side of the river. The River God was resurrecting the dead, most likely to form his own army. Remember the American soldier who looked like a zombie that Hines battled in the start?
The insides of these zombie troops evolved into insect-like cartilages, and instead of limbs, they possessed razor straight claws, similar to scorpions. Hines and Palmer allow Bracken to rest, and it is agreed that he, along with 318 other troops who died at Firebase Tarheel, will be enrolled as an MIA. Tarheel, on the other hand, never existed.
The Son of Life vs. The Demon of Nature
Hines was tasked with heading a party of men to track down the River God now that his whereabouts had been discovered. Before that, though, Hines and Palmer had a heart-to-heart. Hines talked about his sights and the noises he heard in his head for the first time.
Palmer was a CIA operative, so he had done his research on Hines. He had spoken with Hines’ unit members and examined his paperwork. They thought Hines was being aided, directed, and protected by a divine intervention, as if the cosmos didn’t want him to die.
Objects were put in his path to protect him from incoming assaults, be it bullets or shrapnel from grenades. As if life itself knew that he was coming and the universe was keeping him alive because it had a plan for Hines, a job to finish. Now, was finishing off the River God a part of this?
Moving onto River God, as discussed earlier, he was a regular villager who was not involved in the war and took no sides. However, the war came to his house and killed his loving wife and beautiful children. The incident left him with such grief that his mind could control the very matter around him.
His flesh ripped away, and all that was left was his skeleton. He was, nevertheless, more strong than he had ever been. He didn’t realise he was inflicting terrible terror on everyone around him until he realised it, at which point he sought aid at a North Vietnamese Army base. He possessed telepathy, telekinesis, and invisibility at this stage.
The River God had gone fully insane and had to be destroyed. The aim is to set fire to the entire jungle in order for napalm to stick to his body and make him noticeable. However, there remains one problem. The River God can change the very fabric of matter in his surroundings, and therefore, he can kill anyone by changing their interiors or even resurrect the fallen.
Hines is given a specially built prototype suit called the Relativity Capsule by the officers at Firebase Quatro. The magnetosphere created by the exoskeleton protects the wearer from electromagnetic radiation.
This would allow Hines’ world to be unaffected by the River God’s powers. However, simply preserving reality will not suffice. As a result, Hines is given an electromagnetic railgun that fires at one-twentieth the speed of light.
This is the weapon that will hopefully be used to defeat the River God. So, armed with a suit that will keep Hines’ reality from being distorted and a special weapon to track down his target, he heads for the chopper.
What was The River God?
As previously stated, the River God was once a mortal man with a wife and child, but the horrors of war robbed him of those things, and as a result, he underwent a profound physical and mental alteration.
His mental state improved to the point that he began to use significantly more of his cerebral capability. He had the ability to bend reality and become invisible. Blomkamp’s concept for the monster was that the River God was a cosmic oddity or error.
If the universe were a piece of software, the River God would be a bug, and Hines would be the self-correcting piece of code that the software used to fix the problem. The River God is able to see beyond the perceived existence, and he simply breaks through this to see what lies behind it.
You can think of it as a character who lives in virtual stimulation and sees through that cyber interface to come into the real world. Once there, the River God plays through the concepts of space, time, and even thermodynamics. However, he is not doing things out of his own free will but basically acting on his subconscious and instincts as a natural Predator.
Coming to Hines, he acts like an antibody against a virus. If we consider the body to be the universe, the River God becomes the virus that Hines is supposed to take down and kill. He doesn’t understand why he’s drawn towards the River God and only knows that he has to finish the monster.
Predator, The Thing, Tatari Gami and other influences on the River God
The River God, like the Predator, is an apex beast of nature. Predators seek in hot, humid environments like deep evergreen woods, and the River God doesn’t appear to leave the Vietnam jungles in the short film Firebase.
Yes, the motives for the murders are vastly different, but the two monsters’ methods and physical attributes, such as invisibility and near invincibility, are strikingly similar.
Secondly, by using its power to reanimate dead people, The River God makes monsters in the shame of men. Now, where else did we notice such accurate shape-shifting? Yes, you’ve probably guessed it right. John Carpenter’s The Thing is probably one of the greatest sci-fi horror films ever made, and its titular monster has the natural ability to metamorph into any living being.
Likewise, the River God uses his powers to bend the very fabric of matter inside a dead man and makes him alive again, well, almost alive. The undead people retain their skin, but on the inside, they become these hideous insect-like critters with cartilage instead of bones and teeth.
Tatarigami demons are mentioned in the 1997 anime Princess Mononoke(1:33). These are parasites that infiltrate their host’s tissues and damage their mental faculties. The TatariGami take over their host and transform them into animals who only know how to hate and wreck havoc in their environment.
The flesh becomes yellow and becomes infected, and the victim is eventually eaten by the creatures. Similarly, the River God was not acting on his own volition; he was engulfed by the purest kind of hatred, and the emotion had such complete power over him that he lost his mind, body, and soul.
The entire short film feels like an upgraded version of an X-Files episode with high-quality visual effects. The River God was created using a mix of practical effects and computer-generated imagery. The plot of the film follows a similar concept where Sully and Mulder would find out about a supernatural entity and go about hunting it down.
However, because it’s about the Vietnam War, it has an uncanny resemblance to films like Full Metal Jacket. Soldiers bear the brunt of combat in that film, but their situation deteriorates under the supervision of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. Similarly, Firebase has similar implications, with soldiers who don’t comprehend what they’re fighting and who are pushed to stage a mutiny due to a lack of knowledge from government leaders.
Improbable Future
Oats Studios had launched a crowd-funding drive to make Firebase a live-action feature picture. However, they were unable to raise sufficient funds to complete the project and chose to abandon it for the time being. In a nutshell, Firebase appears to be amazing. Apart from a few sound difficulties, the story, acting, effects, and direction of the film are all excellent. It would be fantastic if it were made into a full-length film.