Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Julian Glover: Colonel Breen
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Quotes
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Col. Breen : Mars is dead, nothing there but a few scraps of lichen.
Professor Bernard Quatermass : Five million years ago it may have been very different. Suppose at that time there were living beings on it with techniques that let them visit the Earth at a time when the most highly evolved creatures here, our own ancestors, were only a type of Pliocene ape.
Minister of Defense : Go on.
Professor Bernard Quatermass : They may have wanted to found another colony, when their own world was doomed, but couldn't endure our atmosphere, so they experimented.
Minister of Defense : Oh, and the insects were responsible?
Professor Bernard Quatermass : There is clearly some connection. My guess is that those were ape mutations being brought back for release on Earth.
Col. Breen : And you really believe this was possible? That apes were systematically taken from this planet to another and...
Professor Bernard Quatermass : Altered, by selective breeding, atomic surgery, methods we can't guess, and with new faculties instilled in them, high intelligence, perhaps something else.
Howell : In effect, a colonization.
Professor Bernard Quatermass : It would be a way of possessing the Earth. Only a colony by proxy, but better than leaving nothing at all behind.
Howell : Surely it had to be carried out on a hugh scale.
Professor Bernard Quatermass : Yes, if I'm right, if I'm right, we've come on a single instance, probably an accident, a landing that went wrong and they all died. The Thames valley was swamp then.
Minister of Defense : You realize what you are implying? That we owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects.
Professor Bernard Quatermass : I suppose I am.
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Professor Bernard Quatermass : These shapes, suggests some sort of... apparatus... instruments...
Col. Breen : Your imagination is running wild
Professor Bernard Quatermass : Isn't yours?
Col. Breen : What?
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Sladden : [Preparing his drill] I did steel armour plating within six inches thick. Swish - just like that. Oh, it was legal. A bloke got shut in a strong room. But I got him out. It was a secret job like this one.
Col. Breen : Then I'm glad you don't talk about it.