Dead Space: Aftermath



Dead Space: Aftermath is a direct-to-video Sequel to Dead Space set in the Dead Space universe. The movie is told mostly in flashback by the remaining crew of the USG O'Bannon, explaining to the crew of the USG Abraxis what happened to the rest of the ship.

Following the events Dead Space, the crew of the O'Bannon are sent to Aegis VII to collect. A member of the survey team, Nickolas Kuttner, stumbles upon one such shard and is driven mad in short order. Seeing visions of his deceased daughter Vivian, he accidentally disables one the planetary stabilizers in a misguided attempt to save her. The resulting chain reaction destroys the planet and cripples the O'Bannon. The survey team barely makes it back.

Scientist Nolan Stross experiments on the recovered shard, and he too begins seeing visions. Alien symbols fill his vision, which he believes to be the key to the alien language. He exposes the shard to a corpse, thinking that it will revive the body. It does, but not like he expects. The corpse is turned into a Necromorph and quickly escapes. It slaughters the crew, turning them into more Necromorphs. Stross kills his wife and son, believing they were more Necromorphs, before being found by his mistress Isabel Cho.

Cho, Stross, Kuttner, and engineer Alejandro Borges make their way to the ship's engines. They throw the shard into the engine, destroying it and the Necromorphs. The survivors are picked up by the Abraxis, where the story begins.

Dead Space: Aftermath contains examples of:

 * Artificial Limbs: Alejandro Borges has a cybernetic arm.
 * Art Shift: The present story is told in CGI, while the flashbacks are done in a Anime design. In addition, each flashback has its own distinct style.
 * Attack Its Weak Point: No one ever figures out that the limbs on Necromorphs gotta go, but they have an uncanny knack for hitting them anyway.
 * The Bad Guy Wins: Isabel Cho is, and Nolan Stross is
 * Boom! Headshot!: Kuttner deals out a lot of these.
 * Poor, poor.
 * Buried Alive: Stross' fear.
 * Continuous Decompression: When the hull is breached, the air takes way longer to vent than it should. Notably, the games are actually a lot better about this.
 * Driven to Madness: Touching the Marker fragment causes this, though smarter people are able to cope slightly better than those with average intelligence.
 * Driven to Suicide:
 * From a Single Cell: A variant. The Marker can't actually regenerate, but every piece of it is as potent as the whole, no matter how small.
 * Gorn: This is Dead Space.
 * Heroic Willpower:
 * Kill It with Fire: Borges rigs up some flamethrowers and incendiary grenades to deal with the Necromorphs.
 * Lowered Monster Difficulty: The Necromorphs are a lot more fragile than they're supposed to be, even accounting for the protagonists' unusually lucky shots. Subverted with the bigger ones; when the Brute shows up, all they can manage is to stun it briefly.
 * Man On Fire: Kuttner's fear.
 * No Ontological Inertia: Without the Marker signal, the Necromorphs instantly liquify.
 * Retirony: Campbell,, mentions that he should have heeded his wife's advice to retire instead before taking on this mission.
 * Shoot the Hostage: The military does not mess around when it comes to subduing an unruly prisoner.
 * Smoking Hot Sex: Stross in Cho's flashback.
 * Taking You with Me. uses an incendiary grenade to take down a bunch of Necromorphs after manually sealing a door so the others can escape.
 * Through the Eyes of Madness: Stross and Kuttner both see visions of things that aren't there or aren't as they seem. Though Kuttner's hallucinations are pretty clearly a product of his mind, you'd be forgiven for mistaking some of Stross' hallucinations for reality.
 * The Un-Reveal: We never do learn what the interrogation chair showed Cho.
 * Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: The interrogation chair is able to create hallucinations of the subject's worst fear.
 * More specifically, Borges is afraid of spiders.
 * You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: is unceremoniously executed once they determine he has had no contact with the Marker, and thus is of no further use., on the other hand, gets the unfortunate honor of being useful after that fact is determined, since there were no other potential subjects to examine.
 * Zerg Rush: The 100+ crew goes down to a half-dozen within ten minutes or so, resulting in this trope when the corpses get back up.