Julian Rome  …  JAMES SPADER Dr. Kate Brecher  …  JANINE ESER Dr. Michael Straub  …  JOHN LYNCH Nyla Olson  …  LESLIE STEFANSON Dr. Alexi Gierach  …  NIKOLAI BINEV Grisham  …  CARL LEWIS Pilot  …  ANTHONY CRIVELLO Shelly Klein  …  AIMEE GRAHAM Dr. John Bachman  …  ROY DOTRICE Secretary Bayer  …  KEIR DULLEA Copeland  …  JOEL POLIS Abell  …  STU CHARNO Gordon Osler  …  BERT EMMETT Dacia Pertrov  …  SVETLA VASILEVA Co-Pilot  …  KALOYAN VODENICHAROV Navigator  …  RUFUS DORSEY Airman  …  GEORGE STANCHEV Sam  …  WOODY SCHULTZ First Man  …  RONALD KRAUSS Second Man  …  WILLIAM SKINNER Third Man  …  FRANKLIN VALLETTE Fourth Man  …  HRISTO ALEKSANDROV Falkland Man #1  …  ROSS CLARKSON Falkland Man #2  …  WILLIE BOTHA Kitt Peak Man #1  …  TYRON PINKAM Kitt Peak Man #2  …  ATANAS SREBREV Reporter  …  MARIANA STANISHEVA Kapitan Sokolov  …  DOBRIN DOSEV X.O. Volkov  …  ATANAS ATANASOV Navigator Petrenko  …  HRISTO SHOPOV Army General  …  HARRY ANNEACHKIN Alien  …  VELIMIR VELEV SCI FI Pictures Nu Image Sandstorm Films Screenplay by J.S. CARDONE Story by J.S. CARDONE and BOAZ DAVIDSON Directed by RON KRAUSS Executive Producers AVI LERNER, DANNY DIMBORT, TREVOR SHORT, J.S. CARDONE Producers CAROL KOTTENBROOK, SCOTT EINBINDER, BOAZ DAVIDSON, DANNY LERNER Associate Producers CRAIG ANTIOCO, DYLAN TARASON Director of Photography DARKO SUVAK, H.F.S. Editor AMANDA I. KIRPAUL Music TIM JONES Casting MARY JO SLATER Art Director VALENTINA MLADENOVA Production Designer Wm LADD SKINNER Costume Designer KATHERINE JANE BRYANT Visual Effects SCOTT COULTER, SIMEON ASENOV Worldwide FX Special Effects Supervisor WILLIE BOTHA Special Makeup Effects BRIAN WADE, PAUL ELLIOTT Make-Up & Effects Lab, Inc. AT THE ENDS OF THE EARTH,      IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD... It began with that celebrated UFO incident in the New Mexico desert nearly 50 years ago — an event that became an icon. Not that an ill-fated ham-radio operator and his protective dog wanted to be part of it.... Cut to the present day: Satellite imagery detects an anomalous mass six meters long by three meters wide, buried within the Antarctic ice shelf — and emitting radio signals. Crews at the Rundell Peak research station near the South Pole dig it out and bring it in. As scientists wait for the ice around the mass to melt, spectrographic analysis reveals something unexpected: The radio signals are non-random. University of California, Berkeley: Linguistics professor DR. JULIAN ROME (James Spader) is called in to the office of his boss, DR. JOHN BACHMAN (Roy Dotrice, TV's Beauty and the Beast). It's not, as Julian fears, about that long-ago trouble involving a young co-ed. It's about his days — also long past — as a decoding cryptologist with the government's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project (SETI). Bachman tells him about the exhumed object, and that the esteemed DR. ALEXI GIERACH (the marvelous Nikolai Binev) has invited Julian to the Antarctic to help them understand what the radio signals might be trying to communicate. Not that, when he gets there, most of the staff think it's communicating anything, or that Julian is anybody. DR. MICHAEL STRAUB (John Lynch, In the Name of the Father, The Secret of Roan Inish), a chief scientist on a genetically engineered crop project, chides the beaten-down Julian as an "alien hunter." And DR. KATE BRECHER (Janine Eser, the miniseries Merlin and Alice in Wonderland) is downright hostile, for understandable reasons — she was the co-ed from Rome's past. "There's four women here," she tells him tersely. "Try not to set any records." He wouldn't have had time to, whatever his inclination. As the encrypted message becomes clear and as nightmares become premonitions, the ice-station crew begins to realize the danger it faces, and the terror that is hidden in the code — all leading, in a complex and suspensful drama, to a global pandemic, a U.S.-Russian failsafe, human betrayal, rekindled romance and the end of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The supporting cast also includes Aimee Graham (Timecode, Brokedown Palace, Perdita Durango), the actress sister of Heather Graham; Carl Lewis (Speed Zone!, Atomic Twister), the Olympic track star and sometime-actor; and, as the Secretary of Defense, SF legend Keir Dullea — astronaut Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey. "That film is a great inspiration to me," says director Ron Krauss, "and I wanted part of that to ring through my film. Not just with Keir, but also through the film's tone of isolation." Helping create that tone was the film's real-life isolated location shooting, in Bulgaria. "I arrived in a blizzard in the heart of winter," Krauss recalls. "It was a pitch-black evening with very few lights on the road. It felt like I had just arrived in the perfect setting for our story." The ambitious script called for a five-level underground facility, a 25-foot ice block and corn fields hundreds of yards long — large sets by any standard. "Rundell Peak Station was built at Slavia Studio, and our corn field and submarine set were built at Boyana Studio, which was an old Russian movie studio," Krauss says. "There were several stages there with production going on from all over the world. Their stages were equipped and as functional as most of the stages I have seen at the studios here in the states." As for the Eastern European crew, Kruass had seen on a previous visit "that the craftsmen were highly skilled in set-building and model-making. They could be as good if not better than Hollywood if they were given the right direction." Among those providing direction were Wm Ladd Skinner, the production designer of U-571 and the art director of Dances with Wolves, 12 Monkeys, Pearl Harbor and K-19: The Widowmaker, and Brian Wade, whose special-effects makeup graced grace John Carpenter's The Thing, Enemy Mine, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and other films; Wade also designed the Vulcan and Klingon prosthetics on two Star Trek movies. But beyond even the impressive cast and the visual effects is the story: a complex, suspenseful drama exploring the human heart at the center of the quest for life beyond our own. SCI FI Pictures