Dead Space: Downfall (2008 Film) Explained

Dead Space: Downfall is an animated film released straight to video on 28 October 2008, a couple of weeks after the first game. It's a prequel set in 2508 that shows what happened aboard the planet cracker USG Ishimura in the days before Isaac Clarke arrived: how Marker 3A came aboard, how the crew died, and who sent the distress signal. Its hero is the ship's security chief, Alissa Vincent. This page covers the whole film, so it has full spoilers. (Dead Space: Downfall)

Before the story begins#

Aegis VII was a restricted system. The CEC ran an illegal mining colony there anyway, and in 2508 it brought in its flagship planet cracker, the Ishimura, to break off a slab of the planet's crust. Nobody on the colony knew that a Marker was buried there, or that the Church of Unitology had its own people aboard the ship. The captain, Benjamin Mathius, was a believer, and Dr. Terrence Kyne was aboard as the Church's expert on the Marker. (Dead Space: Downfall; Dead Space)

The Marker comes aboard#

A survey team from the Aegis VII Colony, led by Jennifer Barrow, went to check out strange seismic readings and found the Marker, a tall black spire covered in glowing red script. The colony reported it, the Church was told, and the Ishimura came to collect it. Mathius had it brought aboard for Kyne to study. Vincent protested. Serious violence on the colony had spiked in the week since the artifact came out of the ground, and she didn't want it on her ship. Mathius told her he had his orders. (Dead Space: Downfall)

On the planet things were coming apart. One miner, Hans Leggio, was held restrained in the Ishimura's medical bay, raving that he'd had to kill and that "they need bodies", until Kyne sedated him. The planet crack went ahead. When a dig crew called the ship screaming that something was killing everyone, Vincent asked to take a team down. Mathius refused and ordered that no one was allowed on or off the colony. (Dead Space: Downfall)

The outbreak reaches the ship#

Down on the colony, the miner Colin Barrow found his wife Jennifer in their blood-smeared quarters, where she cut her own throat in front of him. He carried her body back to his shuttle, and an Infector slipped in after him. Ordered to turn back, he forced the shuttle into the Ishimura's Bay 17, and by then his wife had come back as a Necromorph and killed him. (Dead Space: Downfall)

Vincent's squad found the shuttle soaked in blood and empty, with a blood trail leading away. Infectors were already at work in the morgue. Leggio woke from his sedation, stumbled in on them and was killed, and when the squad found his body it came back as a Slasher and attacked them until they shot it apart. (Dead Space: Downfall)

Then the alarms went up across the ship. Called to a mess hall under attack, the squad found that bullets barely slowed the creatures, and one of them, Pendleton, was killed. They were saved by Samuel Irons, an engineer and devout Unitologist, who cut the Necromorphs apart with a plasma saw and showed them that dismembering was what worked. (Dead Space: Downfall)

The captain and Kyne#

On the bridge, Kyne told Mathius the Marker was a trap and could not go to Earth. Mathius, raving about heresy and mutiny, had to be held down by his officers while Kyne tried to sedate him. He broke free and went for Kyne's throat, and as the officers pulled him back the needle went into his eye and killed him. It was an accident, but the bridge crew saw Kyne kill the captain. Soon after, every emergency shuttle launched empty. (Dead Space: Downfall)

Vincent's group headed for the Bridge through Hydroponics. On the way one of her officers, Hansen, came apart under the strain. He murdered his teammate Shen with his plasma saw and turned on Vincent before Ramirez shot him. (Dead Space: Downfall)

The survivors reached the bridge just as the ship's engines and thrusters cut out. Kyne was in the computer core shutting down the guidance systems, so the weight of the slab would drag the Ishimura down into Aegis VII. If the Marker couldn't be stopped, it could at least be buried with the ship. (Dead Space: Downfall)

On the way to stop him, Vincent's group heard crew trapped in the personnel barracks. Irons drew the Slashers off while Vincent and Ramirez led the survivors out through a cooling duct, among them a frightened woman who appears to be Nicole Brennan. Irons was killed, and an Infector turned his body. At the locked door to the computer core, Ramirez rewired it open, told Vincent the creatures were in his head and he wanted to hurt her, then shoved her through and sealed the door behind her. He died holding them off. (Dead Space: Downfall)

Vincent beat Kyne in a fist fight. He told her the Marker must never reach Earth and that this was an infection built to take over the human race. While she worked at the controls, he slipped away with her weapon. She got the stabilisers back online but couldn't get the access code for the guidance system, and the bridge didn't answer her call. (Dead Space: Downfall)

The ending explained#

Alone now, Vincent made her way to the cargo bay where the Marker was kept, and a horde of Slashers came after her. She slipped and fell near the Marker, and the attack never came. The creatures couldn't get close to it. She passed out in its shadow, and when she woke she saw an apparition of Ramirez telling her to finish the job and save the ship. (Dead Space: Downfall)

She recorded a video warning that the artifact was responsible for everything and that it and the Ishimura both had to be destroyed, and uploaded it to the emergency beacon on a crashed shuttle in the bay. Then she started the venting sequence and ran for the shuttle. As the bay doors opened, the decompression blew the Necromorphs out into space. Vincent clung to the shuttle long enough to launch the beacon, then lost her grip and was pulled into the vacuum. (Dead Space: Downfall)

Her body drifts off into the dark. Some time later a small ship approaches the Ishimura: the USG Kellion, answering her beacon. Inside, Slashers gather around the console as the Kellion's hails come in. (Dead Space: Downfall)

What it means: Vincent did everything right and it still worked out the way the Marker wanted. The creatures wouldn't touch it, the vision of Ramirez pushed her on, and the signal she sent with her last breath brought fresh people to the ship. That's the film's sting. Her warning to destroy the Marker went out with the beacon, but so did the Marker's invitation. It's the first clear sign in the series that the Markers use people to get what they want, which the first game builds on with Isaac and his visions of Nicole. (Dead Space: Downfall; Dead Space)

How it fits with the game#

Downfall runs straight into Dead Space. Much of what Isaac pieces together from logs on the ship, from Mathius's death to Kyne's sabotage, happens on screen here first. (Dead Space: Downfall; Dead Space)

Plenty happens off screen, too. The film never shows Dr. Challus Mercer and his experiments on the Medical Deck, the creature that grows into the Hydroponics Deck, or Nicole's final message to Isaac. The game fills all of those in through the logs Isaac finds, so the two work best as a pair: the film for how the ship fell, the game for what was left behind. (Dead Space)

Vincent herself never appears in the game, but her work does. Kyne is still alive and hiding when Isaac arrives, the ship is still in trouble, and the beacon she died launching is the reason the Kellion is there at all. (Dead Space; Dead Space: Downfall)

A few details don't line up. The game's video of Mathius's death shows a calmer captain, still restrained when the needle goes in, so it looks more deliberate. The 2023 remake brings his behaviour and his death closer to the film's version. (Dead Space; Dead Space (2023))

The same weeks are also told from other angles. The 2008 comic follows the colony as madness takes hold, and Dead Space: Extraction follows a group of survivors who escape the colony to the infested Ishimura. Vincent's security team turns up there briefly too, arresting survivors in the ship's infected zone. (Dead Space (comic); Dead Space: Extraction)

Where it fits#

Watch it before or after the game. It's the first part of the 2508 story, followed by Dead Space story explained: plot summary and ending for what Isaac finds on the ship. The overview Dead Space story explained covers the whole series, and the Dead Space timeline shows where the Aegis VII incident sits among three centuries of Marker history. (Dead Space: Downfall; Dead Space)