By JOHN CARPENTER (1977)
John Carpenter has described this never-made script as “kind of HALLOWEEN in a nuclear power plant,” and that does indeed sum it up. Based loosely on the 1976 novel THE PROMETHEUS CRISIS by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson, MELTDOWN is one of several unmade screenplays written by Carpenter in the years leading up to HALLOWEEN that directly informed that iconic film, and perhaps the best of them.
As in HALLOWEEN, minimalism appears to have been Carpenter’s guiding principle. MELTDOWN’s narrative is simplicity incarnate, with a psychopathic worker in a nuclear power plant shutting it down and reprogramming its computers to do his bidding. We never learn much about this individual, identified throughout as “The Figure,” or his motives, which accords with Carpenter’s conception of Michael Meyers in HALLOWEEN (who was initially referred to only as “The Shape”) and his retrospective statement that “It always bugged me that you always had to go into so much detail about evil or killers in the movies…I remember seeing THE TOWERING INFERNO. It’s a fire—period, the end” (THE TOWERING INFERNO, for the record, was also based on a Scortia-Robinson novel).
The characters caught up in this nightmare scenario include two women and several men–all of whom exist, essentially, to get picked off. That picking off occurs once they enter the power plant (after approximately thirty pages of scene setting and “character development”), with the up-to-no-good Figure coming up with various creative ways to dispatch these unwitting victims. Viewers of Carpenter’s later films will recognize The Figure’s methodology in passages like the only in which he offs a woman by dunking her head in a vat of boiling water.
Also present is a hectoring moral angle, evident in frequent speeches about the moral implications of nuclear power and machinery. As one of the protagonists intones, “A machine doesn’t care. It has no conscience. It won’t save you.”
Anyway: The Figure eventually goes off the deep end and destroys the entire facility, thus allowing for some special effects pyrotechnics of the type in which Carpenter would come to specialize. This, however, fails to close out the script on a satisfying note, as none of the character arcs, minimal though they are, get much in the way of proper closure.
Yet the script delivers. It’s a fast and efficient read that delivers the expected action and gore, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. There may be a few too many exclamation point-laden descriptions (“He leaps away from the flame, back against the storage tank door!,” “The room shakes wildly!,” etc.) and overwrought technical references (there are numerous mentions of the “panaglide,” a pre-steadicam camera mount used extensively in HALLOWEEN), but overall this is a solid piece of horror-suspense from a guy who really knows how to do it.