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Ladies and gentlemen, the #2 movie of the 1997 worldwide box office. Contra's story is built around the EMC (Elite Marine Commando) squad known only by their codename: Contra. The team is comprised mainly of the stoic Bill Rizer (Schwarzenegger), the hot-headed Lance Bean (Stallone), the energetic and manic Ray Poward (Brown) and their newest member, Sheena Etranzi (Thurman) as they are tasked with taking down a growing terrorist faction, Red Falcon. Contra is sent to Galuga Island, just off of New Zealand, where Red Falcon is stationed.

The first act is mostly built around showing the camaraderie between the old guard of Contra and Sheena's struggles as the new blood, in between shootouts between Contra and Red Falcon troopers, ending in a big shoot-out against a massive, heavily armored tank, forcing the use of specialized Probotector Armor to punch through it (hell yeah, we're bringing in the Probotectors. We're pulling all the stops here, boys.) They force out the controller of the tank, Noiman Cascade and begin interrogating him as to the plans of Red Falcon and who their leader is. Noiman, played by Wayne Knight, wails how he doesn't know anything, that he was just getting paid to make their weapons and that he never even met the leader. They eventually get a name out of him, Colonel Bahamut, before he is suddenly shot dead.

Contra goes further into the dense tropical jungle in search of Noiman's assassin, bringing us to the second act as it becomes very Predator, with the target having set up several traps that the team narrowly avoid and almost being able to go invisible and attack unseen. They soon manage to wreck the assassin's cloaking device, revealing it to be Deadeye Joe (Wells), an ex-member of Contra and former partner to Rizer. The two fight, drawing on past sots from Commando for fun before Bill finally kills Deadeye Joe by destroying his cybernetics with an EMP grenade and then filling with him with lead. "He was a deadeye... now he's dead." - Bill Rizer.

The final act sees Contra infiltrate the Red Falcon base in search of Colonel Bahamut. As the team makes their way through, they soon find that Red Falcon is not all as it seems and are soon attacked by aliens. This becomes the big twist as what seemed like a macho action movie with some sci-fi tech thrown in, goes full sci-fi with the introduction of aliens. The team are soon captured and brought to a wheelchair-bound Colonel Bahamut (Connery) who is aided by Dr. Mandrake (Lee) as he explains that Red Falcon was simply going to be weakening strike against the major countries of Earth, leaving them defenseless against the oncoming invasion. After having made contact with the aliens, the colonel struck a deal with them. For access to their technology and a few test subjects, he would aid the aliens.

It's here we get the last fight as Dr. Mandrake injects the Colonel with a vial of strangely-colored liquid and Bahamut mutates into a humanoid monster who attacks the four, throwing them around easily.


The tide soon turns, though Ray sacrifices himself to allow the rest of the team to land the killing blow. During the fight with the mutant Bahamut, Dr. Mandrake managed to escape, taking with him several vials of alien DNA and weapons schematics. The final set piece of the movie is the escape from Galuga Island, where the three remaining Contra troopers have to rush to escape the base before the self-destruct sequence blows the whole thing sky high. They escape and report back to Commander Doyle (Ventura) to let him know that the Red Falcon base has been destroyed, Colonel Bahamut is dead, but that Dr. Mandrake has escaped and that Ray was KIA. Doyle tells the remaining members that they'll need time to gather intel on Mandrake's location but that the mission is far from over yet.

The movie was the fall/winter blockbuster to Zelda III's summer, devouring half of Alien: Resurrection's OTL box office and completely decimating The Postman (which now got below a million in the box office.) Along with that, there's that movie about this big boat. You know, the Titanic? How'd it do?

Well, it starred Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman, and it's still did pretty good, raking in $900 million at the box office, but that only got it the #3 spot worldwide for 1997, beat out by this and Zelda III. Five years after the first video game movie and the market was now dominated by them.

As for Contra, the movie was absolutely built on spectacle and star power. Just having Arnold and Sly sharing the silver screen together was enough to get people coming in droves. Add to that the action, helped by the R-rating allowing plenty of blood and swearing meant this was the movie for all the cool teens to see. The use of practical effects for many of the machines and the blend of practical and CG for the aliens was well regarded, though the plot itself was considered weak and some said that Connery's limited presence as Colonel Bahamut was a waste. However, it's still praised for being a great throwback to 80s testosterone-driven action films and a fun popcorn flick. Plus, Reb Brown got to get the biggest paycheck of his career and work alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. That's a win in my book.

Also, Scream 2 got set for October, and had a $25 million budget (an extra mil from OTL's numbers) and managed to make $261 million, taking from both American Werewolf in Paris (also utterly destroyed by competition) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (only made half its OTL take.)