Science fiction and action can make strange bedfellows, but when they come together in the correct proportions they can result in a classic. I am speaking, of course, of Avi Nesher's 1996 film Savage, starring French kickboxer Olivier Gruner. Like many proto-superhero movies of the 1990s, Savage is a rollercoaster of action and colorful CRT computer monitors.
A minuscule number of your universe's critics do not understand Savage. For example, reviewer grin writes, "If you need a plot, avoid like plague. It doesn't have any." Reviewer jaigurudavid writes, "Poorly acted, poorly written, poorly filmed, poorly costumed." And reviewer fmarkland32 writes, "You will not see a movie as demented or senseless then this mess." (For what it is worth, I appreciate fmarkland32's use of the word "senseless."
Read on for a true appreciation of the science fiction action classic Savage...
In a small farmhouse at the base of rocky peaks, farmer Olivier Gruner interrupts his wife singing “Amazing Grace” by sniffing her hair and telling her, “Mmm. You smell so good.” During their dinner with their young son and Saint Bernard, however, the lights go off and someone invades the home, shooting Mr. Gruner through the hand, killing his wife and son, and causing a fire that burns down the farmhouse.
The filmmakers cut to the Arapahoe County Psychiatric Hospital, where an orderly tells a new hire reassuringly, “This is nothing like Cuckoo’s Nest. You’ll be fine.” They check on Mr. Gruner, who is now near-catatonic, a patient who lies in bed and says nothing. Almost immediately, however, the television in the nurse’s station outside his room mysteriously cuts to a choir singing “Amazing Grace,” which triggers Mr. Gruner to get out of bed. Disturbed by lightning outside, he throws a chair through his window and escapes the psychiatric hospital.
Mr. Gruner shuffles away from the hospital and the city, reaching the desert on foot by morning (from the way he shuffles, his bare feet are clearly extremely sensitive). Accompanied by grandiose music, he makes his way across the barren desert, eventually reaching a cave where he finds spring water. The cave also conveniently features a flat floor and pictographs painted on the wall, all of them in excellent condition.
Surprisingly, the pictographs appear to tell a story similar to Mr. Gruner’s, as they show a group of men attacking a woman and child with spears, and then a man gathering leaves over their bodies. Of course, Mr. Gruner follows the story and gathers leaves. He wraps them around his bare feet, and the next morning he can walk better. He leaves the cave and, for several months, graduates from surviving on a diet of ants to hunting rabbits with a crude spear.
One night, Mr. Gruner awakes to find the cave floor covered with fog and green laser light. Akin to one of the pictographs, he encounters an alien being made of light.
The alien quickly transforms into Mr. Gruner’s wife, who tells him, “Find the man who did this to us before he does it to millions of others.” Then she transforms into a bespectacled man, presumably the man responsible for his family’s deaths. Then, shockingly, Mr. Gruner himself transforms into a caveman and then back into himself. He tears off his clothes so he can crawl naked through the cave and carve some markings on his oily, well-muscled chest.
After Mr. Gruner’s origin story has been developed, the filmmakers cut to two policemen riding in a police car. One of the officers wears a virtual reality helmet, inside which he is playing a game called “Rump Wrangler” in which his virtual hand grabs the body parts of virtual attractive women. Somewhat distracted, the police car bumps into Mr. Gruner, who is still naked and now walking the streets of the city. “We hit somebody who looked like frickin’ Tarzan,” says the officer who was driving.
Across town, a nude woman is making love to a nude man when a computer beeps, alerting her about Mr. Gruner’s situation being called in by police. The woman, Miss Belloc, pushes the man away and gets dressed to leave. “If you’re here when I get back,” she says coldly, “I’ll kill you.”
The officers bring Mr. Gruner to a police station. The female desk sergeant, Officer Carter (played by the daughter of Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon), calls tauntingly after the VR-playing officer as he leaves, “Hey, Halliday, the only reason you’re on the street and I’m not is because you wear a jock. Albeit in a minute way!”
Mr. Gruner is apparently unable to answer the desk sergeant’s questions. He sees a photo of a dog on her mug, has a flashback about his own dog dying, and inadvertently breaks the mug in his hands, cutting his skin. Officer Carter cleans him up.
Elsewhere, at the corporate headquarters of Titan (its logo stylized for unknown reasons with a pi instead of the letter T, so it looks like TTITAN), which manufactures the officer’s VR headset, Miss Belloc meets two other employee of the tech corporation whose names are, cleverly, Edgar Wallace (played by Sam McMurray) and Allan Poe. (Miss Belloc is Marie Belloc, named after the author of The Lodger). As they ride up the elevator, Edgar complains about his job and their tech CEO boss: “I have worked for some seriously warped individuals in my time but this nut job takes the cake.”
As he says this, the elevator stops, as it is under control of the CEO, who has cameras watching his employees. The CEO’s name, incidentally, is Reese Burroughs, perhaps an allusion to still another author named Edgar. Mr. Burroughs is the bespectacled man in Mr. Gruner’s vision in the cave.
Mr. Gruner is locked up in a holding cell with dangerous prisoners. Presumably based on orders from the CEO and Ms. Belloc, a group of orange-jumpsuited prisoners attack him, but he uses tremendous strength and dexterity to defeat them. He jumps up to the steel rafter near the ceiling (prison cells, of course, are famous for having 15-foot ceilings) and subdues all the prisoners, and then he escapes. When the guards enter and ask “What the hell happened here?”, a drug-addicted, redheaded prisoner replies wisely, “Gerbils ate each other.”
Mr. Gruner walks through the city; as he passes lights they explode of their own accord. The first stop he makes is to smash the window of a convenience store, where he steals hair clippers and some clothes. We do not see him cut his hair (or wig), but in the next shot his hair is extremely short a la Moe Howard. He passes the traditional storefront with TVs in the window and sees a news report about CEO Reese Burroughs’s VR product. Through the glass, we hear the newscaster say, “Consumers quickly fell in love with these enormously entertaining Titan games. However, teams of highly skilled engineers and scientists have failed to duplicate the technology.”
(Of course, by “enormously entertaining” games the newscaster is referring to Rump Wrangler. Additionally, it must be noted that highly skilled engineers and scientists generally do not report to the media that they are unable to duplicate presumably patented technology, like Rump Wrangler. Perhaps Rump Wrangler and its ilk are extra-terrestrial in origin?)
Intrigued by the news report, Mr. Gruner finds a VR booth (with convenient soundproofing) that plays Titan games at a nearby newsstand. The booth advertises the enormously entertaining game Illegal Entry.
Unfortunately for Mr. Gruner, a motorcycle gang has tracked him to the newsstand, presumably under Reese Burroughs’s orders. Mr. Gruner fights the gang athletically, then steals a pair of sunglasses and leaves. Seconds later, Edgar Wallace and Allan Poe arrive. They kill the newsstand operator, possibly to hide evidence that Mr. Gruner is now a superhero.
Mr. Gruner then finds what might be called a combination neon cocktail bar/internet cafe called Electronics Kitchen where a massive crowd sits around tables with PCs while light electronic music plays in the background. A video monitor gives him a message about his farm, implying that his family was killed to transfer the property title to Titan Corporation.
Coincidentally, Mr. Gruner meets Officer Carter from the police station, though she is now dressed in a hockey jersey for a night on the town.
Shockingly, a group of gangsters with automatic rifles starts shooting up the bar, apparently on the orders of Reese Burroughs. Mr. Gruner fights them off, but Allan Poe shoots him. This injures Mr. Gruner but he manages to kill Poe just when police officers arrive, further reinforcing his fugitive status.
Mr. Gruner takes refuge, somehow, on the rooftop of a skyscraper in the rain, where he uses leaves that he acquired somewhere to heal his gunshot wound. Then he looks over the side of the building and sees that the Titan Corporation building is next door.
Reviewing video footage of the Electronics Kitchen debacle, Burroughs realizes that Mr. Gruner has feelings for Officer Carter, so he is therefore vulnerable. Edgar Wallace and his goons immediately kidnap her from her apartment.
The next morning, Mr. Gruner jumps from his building to the Titan Corporation building.
Like any self-respecting hero, Mr. Gruner enters the air vents of the skyscraper to find Burroughs. In a humorous touch, he enters a corridor by dropping out of a ceiling vent next to a poster for Titan’s Illegal Entry VR game.
Meanwhile, Burroughs and Ms. Belloc are flirting as they walk through the corridors of the building. She explains, “I could hack my way through any code in high school. I’m a real student of cryptology. I used to break into NSA files, missile site codes. Fun Stuff.”
“Precocious,” Burroughs says.
Burroughs shows Ms. Belloc his secret computer room that houses a giant rock with markings, tubes, and domes that dates from the cro magnon era. “I was a member of the original expedition that found it,” Burroughs explains. “The only surviving member, as a matter of fact. The others met with a little accident on the way home.” About the markings, he explains they are simple cryptography: “The cryptographs translate to key numbers which translate to cyber text.”
Fortunately for all concerned, Burroughs continues to explain the backstory, which involves the destruction of Eden and Atlantis as well as the fact that Ancient Ones created a virtual universe as a paradise and imported human ancestors from Earth to train them as slave labor. Burroughs stole the ancient VR technology to create games like Rump Wrangler and Illegal Entry. Furthermore, the Ancient Ones are still alive, albeit virtually in their own universe, and they sent Mr. Gruner (whom Burroughs refers to as The Savage) to stop Burroughs from “deciphering the key to immortality.” Burroughs and Belloc use their immense technological skills to try to crack the immortality code, using some high-tech 13” monitors.
In a matter of minutes, they crack the code and the magic rock cracks open. At the same time, Mr. Gruner finds Burroughs’s office, where Burroughs is able to confront him. Burroughs turns on a TV that shows Officer Carter being threatened by Edgar Wallace with a knife. Of course, the villain’s plan works and Mr. Gruner runs away heroically, but not before he sees Officer Carter’s address on a computer monitor so he can rescue her directly.
Mr. Gruner smashes his way through Officer Carter’s apartment ceiling and begins punching them, forcing Edgar Wallace to push a button blowing up a bomb in the apartment. However, Mr. Gruner and Officer Carter survive. He leaves her on the street and cleverly returns to the Titan building, repeating his trick of sneaking in through the ventilation ducts and (for a third time) dropping from the ceiling. Oddly, however, the first person he encounters in the building is Officer Carter, who has apparently simply walked into the building. She follows Mr. Gruner to the secret lab, which is empty and unguarded.
Then the two good guys simply walk out the front door of the building, but they are surprised when Police Captain Rohmer and his men arrest them. The police attempt to kill Mr. Gruner on the false pretext that he has a gun, but he gets out, throwing several of them through a glass window and then jumping on top of a police car that Officer Carter commandeers. This leads to an exciting police car chase through the city. As she drives, Officer Carter laments that she is now a felon and her career is done. “I might as well get married. My life is over.”
He tells her he needs to go to Spirit Rock, which he saw on one of Titan’s computers and which was the site of his farmhouse, not to mention that magic cave where he obtained his superpowers. They abandon the police car and Officer Carter steals her friend’s car so they can make their escape, unaware that Burroughs and his goons are already there.
Inside the magic cave, Burroughs uses his computer to decode some pictographs and open a massive stone door. The magic rock and all of Burroughs’s equipment is already set up in the cave, conveniently. Burroughs steps inside a chamber made out of the open rock, where he can levitate. This causes some more stone machines in the cave to activate. “It’s a generator,” Burroughs explains. “The most powerful machine ever created, but it takes time to warm up. In about an hour, we’ll reach maximum dimensional thrust and then…we digitize!” Unfortunately for those outside the cave, the machine causes dangerous earthquakes.
Elsewhere, Mr. Gruner returns to the ashes that were once his farmhouse. He picks up one of his little boy’s toys as rain falls from the sky (it was clear seconds ago, but clearly the machine also causes weather changes). Edgar Wallace finds him in the house and attacks him. Mr. Gruner kills him by breaking his neck, and then he triumphantly yells “Hi-yah!” to the pouring rain.
After his wife’s ghost blesses them, Mr. Gruner and Officer Carter hurry to the cave. They kill a few goons and Officer Carter tells him sensitively, “I just thought if you were a cop we could be partners. I think we would get along.” Then the floor opens up and fire burns from below.
He jumps through the flames to get to Burroughs, who is now sealed inside a pod as Ms. Belloc is surrounded by the bright white images of the Ancient Ones who digitized themselves ages ago. She chooses to remain a physical human, so Burroughs somehow has her killed; she is engulfed in lightning and flames and then explodes.
Burroughs begins the process of digitization but Mr. Gruner uses a crowbar to smash the machine and Burroughs appears to die. The aliens offer Mr. Gruner a choice between peace and war, but the entire cave explodes before we see his choice.
Later, Officer Carter is being driven away in a police car. The computer monitor in the car says HE IS ALIVE, so she knows that Mr. Gruner has not been killed. She looks in the car mirror and sees him standing on the mountain where the cave used to be, a silhouette in the sunrise, possibly symbolizing something.
The End
Director Avi Nesher might be most famous for Timebomb (1991) with Michael Biehn or Doppelgänger (1993) with Drew Barrymore. It is this latter film that might be considered a precursor of the masterpiece that is Savage. Its story, as everyone knows, involves Drew Barrymore and her alter ego rooming with a Hollywood writer. At the end, the explanation of events opens up a whole new world of stories. I will not ruin the ending here, but suffice it to say it might or might not involve aliens. Savage, in a way, is an expansion of the ending of Doppelgänger, showing us what would happen if a race of ancient aliens digitized themselves into cyberspace and became a kind of holy grail of human evolution.
It almost goes without saying that Savage was supernaturally prescient for a 1996 film. How many of us in 2026 live in our own virtual worlds, playing games exactly like Rump Wrangler and Illegal Entry while letting the real world slip by? (Perhaps fewer now that, as I understand it, the corporation called Meta has discontinued its megaverse, or whatever it was called, but I believe my point still stands.) Perhaps in the near future, VR will be revealed as an alien invitation to evolve to a higher plane. Or perhaps not. In either case, Avi Nesher can claim to be a visionary and even a prophet based on his fascinating action film Savage, which looks more and more like real life every day.