Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Director: David Ayer
Writer: Ben Collins
Based on the video game
Cast: Colin Farrell, Kate Mara, Jane Levy, Terrence Howard, Alan Tudyk, Karen Fukuhara, Wilmer Valderama
Plot: In 2508,The USG Ishimura, during the process of mining the planet of Aegis VII, sends out a distress signal to the Concordance Extraction Corporation (CEC), the CEC dispatches the USG Kellion to investigate. As the Kellion attempts to dock with the Ishimura, a malfunction occurs with the automatic docking and the Kellion is badly damaged, however the crew lands safely and sets off to find the Ishimura's crew. It quickly becomes apparent that the Ishimura has been abandoned.
As they enter the flight lounge, Isaac Clarke (Colin Farrell), the crew's engineer, enters a separate room to assess the Ishimura's damage reports. As he does so, the flight lounge locks down in quarantine and grotesque humanoids break into the lounge and attack the crew. Corporals Johnston (Wilmer Valderama) and Chen (Karen Fukuhara) are killed, while the two survivors of the attack, Zach Hammond (Terrence Howard) and Kendra Daniels (Jane Levy), flee and tell Isaac to run. Isaac, defenseless, is forced to run for his life through a hallway before escaping his pursuers through an elevator. Isaac manages to get a weapon and make contact through a window with Hammond and Kendra once again. Hammond recognizes that many of the ship's systems are failing, including the ships anti-asteroid defense system. The loss of this threatens the integrity of the ship due to a nearby asteroid belt. Hammond sends Clarke around the ship to fix the core systems in order to keep them alive. Hammond also promises he will help Isaac to find his girlfriend Nicole Brennan (Kate Mara), a medical worker on the Ishimura, who sent Isaac a strange video, which was Isaac's sole motive for taking the mission: to visit her. After restoring USG Ishimura's tram system, Clarke returns to the flight lounge to repair the Kellion. Creatures attack the ship before he can even begin and it explodes, the wreckage plummeting to the bottom of the hangar bay.
During these treks, Clarke discovers various text and audio logs scattered throughout the ship and pieces together the events that transpired before his arrival. The ship's captain was actually an agent of the "Church of Unitology" — a large and influential religious cult — assigned to retrieve one of his religion's most deified relics, known as the "Red Marker", from Aegis VII. Aegis VII had been quarantined for undisclosed reasons by the Earth Government many years ago. CEC had disregarded the quarantine and performed a minerological analysis on the planet that revealed it to be extraordinarily rich in resources. While establishing a planetside colony to aid in the mineral extraction, CEC employees discovered the Red Marker, and Unitologists among the crew passed the clandestine information to the church.
The Church of Unitology and the ship's captain then quickly replaced or won over many of the ranking officers of the Ishimura. With the upper echelon of the ship in Unitologist hands and the records of the mining operation already made confidential due to the Aegis VII quarantine, the Unitologists had the perfect opportunity to seize the marker and use it to discover the secrets of human creation, evolution, and purpose they believed it contained.
Soon after the Marker was extracted and brought to the Ishimura, a large portion of the civilians — first on the planet-side colony, then on the ship — suffered from extreme hysteria and paranoia brought on by violent hallucinations. The medical teams in each location screened for diseases and distributed sedatives, but the agitation of the crew could not be contained for long and the outbreak of paranoia evolved into mass homicidal and suicidal impulses. These phenomena were believed to be linked to proximity to the Marker, but the colonists had no idea how or why it was occurring.
Despite this, the hysteria was kept under control, and the planet crack commenced a week later. Immediately after planet crack, the colony's power went out and unknown organisms began ravaging the colony, infecting the bodies of the dead and turning them into "Necromorphs" - abominations that kill and infect dead bodies in order to spread the infestation. When reports of this reached the Ishimura Captain Mathius cut off all traffic and communications between the ship and the colony to prevent the infection from reaching the Ishimura. Dr. Terrence Kyne (Alan Tudyk), the Chief Science Officer, urged Captain Matthias to halt the extraction and send out a distress signal. Because they are in a restricted system, the Captain refuses, and becomes more and more focused on delivering the Marker to the Church, even at the expense of his crew's safety. Dr. Kyne believes this decision is irrational, and that the Captain has buckled under the psychological pressure of his loyalties to the Church and CEC.
Under maritime law, Kyne relieves the captain of his duty, though Mathius refuses to comply, spouting angry fanatical comments of heresy. Dr. Kyne then tells the Captain to hold still and attempts to inject him with a sedative. Benjamin Mathius struggles violently and is killed by Dr. Kyne in the scuffle as the syringe misses the captain's neck and is instead rammed through his eye socket.
Dr. Kyne did not appear to want to kill the captain, and the death may have been a freak accident, but it may also have been a momentary loss of control as the presence of the Marker on the ship has been causing the same homicidal paranoia as was experienced on the colony. The infection then spreads to the Ishimura via a colony shuttle piloted by a survivor, who was unaware that a Necromorph had entered his shuttle prior to take off. The shuttle crashes into the docking bay, allowing the creatures to escape into the Ishimura ventilation system and begin killing and infecting the Ishimura's inhabitants. Shortly thereafter, all of the emergency shuttles and escape pods of the Ishimura are remotely launched -all of them empty.
Furthermore, the communications array becomes damaged either by the same saboteurs or by the creatures that are beginning to rampage through the ship. In an attempt that claims her life, a member of the Ishimura security team is able to launch a single general distress beacon, which is picked up by CEC who then dispatch the repair ship Kellion. Hours later, the distress signal is picked up by the EarthGov Military, which dispatches a special operations team to deal with the suspected outbreak and perform search and rescue. When the Kellion arrives, the Ishimura has almost completely fallen to the Necromorphs.
Though Hammond states that he is unaware of what the Marker's role in everything is, Daniels confides to Clarke that she believes Hammond is lying. Clarke would later encounter his girlfriend Nicole, though they are unable to meet directly. Nicole is seen to be behaving strangely.
With the critical systems repaired, the three are able to launch a beacon for rescue, attracting a nearby military ship, the USM Valor. However, the Valor, having picked up an escape pod launched by Hammond containing a Necromorph, becomes overrun with the creatures and crashes into the ship. Hammond then deduces — from the heavy military equipment he finds on board — that the Valor was actually assigned to destroy the Ishimura, suggesting that someone outside of Aegis VII knew of the alien threat.
The group thus decides that they must find a shuttle and escape while they can. Clarke and Hammond then retrieve the Valor's power core in order to repair an available shuttle, but Hammond is killed by a Necromorph in the process. The surviving Dr. Kyne later contacts Clarke and urges him to return the Marker to Aegis VII. He reveals in a video what the planetcrack caused: a large creature known as The Hive Mind, the creature that controls all of the Necromorphs, was allowed to escape the instant the planet was cracked, and began infecting the colony. He believes that the Marker actually acted as an inhibitor, rendering the Hive Mind dormant as long as the Marker remained on the planet; the Hive Mind's dormancy would also cause all other Necromorphs to enter a dormant state. He concludes that the only way to stop the creatures for good is to return The Marker to the planet.
After being assisted by Clarke in loading the Marker onto the shuttle, Kyne is murdered by Daniels, who reveals the truth behind everything: she is a government operative ordered to retrieve the Marker for her superiors. She further reveals that the Marker is a reverse-engineered copy of another Marker found on Earth, and was placed on Aegis VII by the government hundreds of years ago to have scientists study its effects. These scientists discovered the pattern covering the surface of the Marker is, in fact, the DNA code for Necromorph infection.
The newly created infection escaped and began to kill the doctors and transform them, and it wasn't long before the original colony fell, but the doctors were successful in editing the Marker into an inhibitor of the infection, and activating this new feature. With the doctors dead and the infection locked away, the government marked Aegis VII as off-limits and abandoned the planet. The planet cracking operation was in fact a mission by CEC and the government to retrieve the valuable marker, which led up to the present events. She then leaves on the shuttle without Clarke, but Nicole arrives and is able to help him recall it, prompting Daniels to flee via an escape pod.
Clarke takes the shuttle with the Marker to the colony, and replaces it there; this pacifies the Hive Mind briefly, but also disrupts the gravity tethers holding a large portion of the planet several miles off the surface, threatening to destroy the colony. As Clarke attempts to escape, Daniels appears and takes the Marker back to the shuttle, once again removing the "dead space"-field pacifying the Hive Mind, and shows Clarke (through a fully recovered distress transmission) that Nicole actually committed suicide before they arrived on the Ishimura, and Clarke's visions of her had been the Marker's way of attempting to bring itself back to the planet, revealing that it is sentient in some way. Before she can leave, Daniels is killed by the gigantic Hive Mind, but Clarke is able to defeat it. Leaving the Marker behind, Clarke flies off in the shuttle just before the rock crashes into the planet, ravaging the surface of Aegis VII.
As he sets course away from Aegis VII, Nicole's suicide video plays, but is stopped by Clarke, who then simply stares off into space. He is suddenly attacked by what appears to be an apparition of Nicole in Necromorph form. The screen is suddenly covered with strange runes and Nicole screaming, which then cuts to black and static.
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