Your deal.
Oh, I see.
Let's see what you got.
Let's go.
Me?
Before I change my mind.
Hey. Who gets your chips?
Whoever's gonna re-patch the hole.
That'll be me.
Great.
Say, this is nice.
Mm, best you don't get used to it.
You better turn that down.
You'll wake Sunday.
Not until we finish our dance.
- Mm-hm. - You remember last time?
"Murderation.
You turn that racket down,
or I will buy your family home and raze it."
"My name ain't..."
"Merriell Sunday."
Feed it today?
Threw its food in the box.
You think I stuck around to check?
That's it for me, fellas.
Sorry.
It's just me.
Did I wake you?
No.
Thanks.
This just in: Merriell Sunday Jr.,
son of missing oil tycoon Merriell Sunday Sr.,
holds an emergency press conference.
Uh...
Howdy. Uh...
Two weeks ago, Father and his herd
missed their exit deadline.
Then, um, across the wire, a distress signal.
We're officially declaring them missing.
But we ain't... we ain't just gonna let the face
and founder of Sunday Oil disappear like that.
Don't worry.
I have handpicked some of the toughest,
smartest sons of bitches God ever strung a gut through.
Junior wasn't kidding.
Leander Coates, the team's watchdog.
He fought the Great War against the Kaiser in '17
and then went back for more in '44.
Dr. Margaret Lamb.
She's a real whiz with animals.
And her twin sis, one of the missing,
will sure be glad she came along.
Booker Marchmont, radio communications man.
He flew on the Enola Gay in '45,
dropping the bomb on the Japanese.
Impressed yet?
Certified demolition expert "Dynamite" Daniel Hewitt.
It's hard out there,
and sometimes the only way through
is with a fistful of powder.
The men who made the first maps.
These were titans who sailed the seven seas
and explored the globe,
cutting their way through jungles with machetes,
burning through cobweb-filled caves with torches
with almost certainly insufferable egos.
Cartography and exploration are not synonymous.
You've never heard of most mapmakers.
They do their exploring at night, in the dark
with a candle.
Their torch, a pen.
Their ship, a book.
Florence Kelley
created a new method for visualizing data
when... when she mapped out the Chicago slums, and...
she did it without trekking to some far-off distant land.
My point is this...
You don't have to leave home to be a pioneer.
Yes?
Is it true that your dad got trapped in a pyramid?
Ma'am.
Would you sign this?
Your father is my hero.
Miss Bannister has a meeting now.
Thank you.
Thanks. I, uh...
I'm your next meeting.
Sorry for the ambush. My name's Belle Parker.
I represent for Mr. Merriell Sunday Jr.
Do you know why I'm here?
I could take a guess.
It's about your father.
Theme of the day.
I'm afraid it's serious, Miss Bannister.
I'm sure it is.
Did he step on a trapdoor and fall into a snake pit?
Are you aware of his expedition to the Alaskan territory?
Being roasted on a spit by a group of local natives?
He and the Sunday team are missing.
Hollis has been missing since I was 15.
He's not missing.
He's... right where he intends to be.
The boat left, and they missed it.
And the last word the boat got was an SOS.
What am I supposed to do about it?
Mr. Merriell Sunday Jr. is putting together a rescue team.
Save his daddy and yours, too.
And he wants you to lead his search.
You're good at something,
but you never got to do anything with it.
Don't you think it's time?
If something happened up there,
and Hollis really is in trouble,
how do you think you're all gonna fare?
Better with you.
Hey, wait.
It's the last thing Hollis gave me.
You're gonna need it.
I went ahead and hired
the best navigator left in the South.
She's gonna make things easier for us.
Wait, "she"? Did you just say "she"?
Who is it?
Let me present our navigator,
Miss Ellie Bannister.
No more questions,
or I'll have Coates exit you through the door by your head.
We are done here.
Let's take a flashlight, though.
Erebus. This is Ellie. I need a ping on our location.
Do you copy?
...an anchor... Can you read me? Over.
Erebus. Come in.
Storm's going over the boat.
Say... say again. When will you return?
Sorry, Miss Bannister.
This cloudburst has got us jammed
the last few days.
Damn ground's harder than Uncle Tommy.
Consarn it.
You're gonna need more than a shovel.
That top layer is permafrost. Rock solid until mid-summer.
It's like trying to punch through an anvil.
- Hey. Hey. - Try to--
You figure out where we're heading?
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Get up.
Get up, get up, y'all. Gather around. Come on.
Go on. Tell us.
We made contact with the Erebus.
But the storm... The signal wasn't--
-I ain't hearing a solution. -I don't know.
With the storm, I can't...
We have to just stay put
until the storm passes through.
Then we can keep moving.
Oh, heck.
Stay put? In... in what?
A can of soup?
We've been chasing our tails
following after girly here for three days!
It's the storm.
-Nobody knows where we are. -We're fixing to die out here
-if we stay any longer. -That's enough.
Sir. I'm awful sorry, but, uh...
More than likely, your pop is dead.
And even if we knew where they were,
we can't find them with "Slow Walk" here
- leading the way. - I'll shut him up.
Try it, old boy.
The boat couldn't stay anchored in the chop.
They had no choice but to leave us.
Anything the ice gets, the ice keeps.
Maybe we catch it before they get real far out.
I... I swim creeks faster than that boat.
Ice? It ain't even fast. It's just floating there.
- I think if we can just-- - No more thinking.
Anymore!
Shit. This here's all bad.
Just one great goddamn big rhubarb bastard.
We can't even blow it up.
Why can't we?
A bivouac. Hollis used to do--
Only God Almighty's got a higher command than me out here,
and He's quieter than Ellie.
Can't pick the ground.
Right?
So I say we blow it open!
Wide open. All the way down to hell.
Yeah.
Ma'am.
All right.
Mama said ladies come first.
Debris!
They say you're supposed to get a clean kill shot
on an animal, but...
tsk...
I always find you just hit 'em anywhere.
And you get 'em limping.
And they can't run so good, and then...
Just... bam.
When I was little,
my dad used to take me to the VFW.
Some of the guys had faces.
Masks.
Your father was in the war?
Mm-hm.
Paderborn.
I had a daughter that was a field nurse in the war.
She said if I had to be there, she ought to be there, too.
Would have been about your age.
Such a loss.
And the fossils destroyed.
More bombs, more bones destroyed.
Animals and rocks
we'll never have a chance to learn about.
Hey.
Didn't mean to...
dig my heel into your toe so hard.
The storm didn't make me lose the way.
Look at this.
It's going every direction.
- Huh. - Been causing me trouble
ever since we got here.
I can't wrap my head around it.
Hey, look.
You can't always get it right.
Hey.
Boots get shit on 'em sometimes.
What's an animal expert doing out here
on a rescue mission, Lamb Chop?
I mean, shoot, they already got Dynamite Dan.
I blowed up just about everything
could be blowed up.
My sister is the chef for the expedition team.
I'll keep an eye out for her.
Why'd you bring me here?
How you mean?
I'm not the person you've been selling
to the papers.
Fifteen years since I've been near a damn mountain.
It's like something out of one of them
grand American novels.
But better.
You and me.
Parents and children.
Why was Hollis here?
I can damn sure tell you he doesn't care about oil.
I mean, Father probably promised him
a building full of money, too.
He'd care less about that.
Father would eat the dirt.
Said he could taste the minerals
if oil was in the ground.
I don't taste nothing.
Yeah.
We're adjacent to the magnetic north.
Chaotic spinning could be from the magnetites.
Magnetic poles can be blamed for all sorts of things.
Monsters, myths, signs from the gods.
Monsters?
Shoot! Now I know monsters.
Jersey Devil, Old Ned, Devil's Triangle--
We need monsters.
Keep us from going places we don't belong.
You hear that?
That's enough.
No, seriously. Like, listen.
You see?
Grizzly, maybe.
A big one.
There are no grizzlies this isolated.
Polar bear, potentially.
Next man who brings up monsters will sleep outside.
That's enough.
Good night.
Bobcat and mountain lions.
Muskrats.
One time, I put a quarter stick in a vole burrow.
Sunday.
Baby vole burrow.
Guts everywhere. My eyelids.
Jeepers, I done a lot in this life.
I blowed up...
about everything could be blowed up.
I wonder if animals believe in God.
Sheesh, I gotta piss.
Hey.
Take this so you can find your way back.
It's a system we used in the mountains.
Baby, can't nobody put a collar on Dynamite Dan.
Baby vole burrow guts up in my eyelids.
Gotta find that baby vole.
Baby vole.
Forgive me.
It's Inuit with a French accent.
Inuktitut.
Near Nunavut, that's the--
Northwest Territories.
Oh, yeah. You've been around the map, huh?
Yeah, around... around the map..
I don't get out much.
Oh.
I... I was supposed to be a famous explorer
like my folks.
There was a polio outbreak when I was 15.
I was bedridden.
Barely survived.
Left with this.
What...
What happened to your mom?
Your friends.
Try and get some rest.
Dan?
Who's that?
Who is that?
Oh, shitfire.
Dan!
Shit!
What am I doing?
Jesus Christ. What are you doing?
Slow Walk.
I just seen what's-her-name's sister.
She sure is pretty.
Oh, my God.
Ellie!
Ellie?
Ellie, where are you?
Ellie!
I'm here.
Ellie!
Ellie, are you...
Wait, wait, wait. Hey! Where's Dan?
Half-eaten in a pile about a kilometer from here.
He was attacked.
Why didn't you wake me up?
You could have got yourself killed.
I'm not out here to babysit a bunch of blowhard cowboys.
Dan's dead?
Attacked by what?
Something big enough to halve a man.
Ellie, did you see the animal?
I'm gonna find the body.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We ain't going off the plan right now 'cause Dan ran off.
He could have been going after the boat.
Maybe he just wandered drunk into a hole. Come on.
-Mr. Sunday, if there's-- -The Sundays are not
funding a rescue mission for Dan. That's it.
Dan can't be rescued.
The Sundays are gonna save money on his pay.
But don't you ever insult the dead in front of us.
I may not have served in the war, all right?
But out here, what I say goes.
It's not the front lines.
We'll retrieve his body, whatever's left of it.
But we don't leave the fallen behind.
Are you out of your mind?
That... that souse is not more important than my father.
We need to keep moving. Come on!
Find that outpost.
Our fathers.
Okay.
Our fathers.
After we find our fathers,
we'll pick up Dan's body on the way back.
We'll give him a proper burial back home.
That's the word.
Let me look at you.
We can't stay here.
Stay together, y'all!
Do bears hunt people?
Most likely scared of people.
Or just curious.
Bears are diurnal.
Hunting at night must have meant it was starving
or trying to feed cubs.
If it was a bear.
If?
What did you find with Dan?
Butterflied from the back of his head to his rear,
and his organs flowing out behind him
like they were looking for some kind of handout.
I should have examined the body.
Daniel Hewitt's body, Doctor.
Just because we work for him
doesn't mean we have to act like him.
We honor the fallen.
Daniel Hewitt's body.
I hope you don't have any more opportunities for examinations.
Keep it moving.
We should be right there.
The outpost... a couple of kilometers ahead.
What do you mean, "should be"?
Uh-uh, no.
My... my gut's telling me we need to go that way,
where there's less trees.
That's where they'd put an outpost.
With all due respect, you go off more than just gut.
Hey.
Where's the kid?
Parker.
Oh, shit.
Parker!
God damn it! She couldn't be too far.
Fan out. We'll sweep the woods.
We go spreading out, we're more likely
to lose somebody else. You keep going.
I'll track you once I find her.
Nobody should move alone after Dan.
I spent many nights alone sweeping for mines.
I'm faster that way, trust me.
Besides, it's what my daughter would expect me to do.
Coates won't be alone.
I'm going with him.
The hell you will.
She might be injured.
I'm not afraid of the dark.
Try to keep up.
Go, go! Quick, quick!
This way. I'm telling you.
Right up in here.
We're close.
Parker!
Kid, where are you?
Parker!
Kid! Kid, keep making noise!
Oh, hell.
Where in the hell?
We're going the wrong way.
How would you know?
You ain't got a working compass.
The moon is there.
Which means northwest is that direction.
The moon?
The moon? Are you out of your damn--
Say "Yes, ma'am."
Lead the way.
Help!
Christ!
I have to see it.
Are you out of your--
Help!
Over here!
Easy.
I'm here now.
Daddy...
Should be straight ahead.
Keep pushing.
That's it.
We found it! We found it!
Father?
Are you in here?
Sunday Oil.
This... this is it.
Father was here.
Damn.
Where did he go to?
Where's he gone?
Dr. Lamb?
Dr. Lamb! Booker, get a fire started.
Where's Parker and Coates?
Coates left.
Coates is still out hunting.
Raced... back.
Coates.
Are you hurt?
Coates?
What happened to Parker, Coates?
It killed her.
Did you see it?
I saw the shape of it.
It walked like a man on two legs
and has matted fur and fangs,
and the hands were four times the size of mine,
and it just, it... it...
tore her apart.
It threw her like a doll.
And you didn't do nothing?
You were there to protect her.
You took the job,
and the job is for finishing.
And you just...
What kind of man doesn't do his job?
Especially protecting somebody like Parker?
Huh?
What?
What, you wanna be tough now? Huh?
When it don't matter? Huh?
Easy.
He's civilian. Stand down.
You killed her bringing her out here.
I am gonna hunt it before it hunts us.
And I am gonna kill it for Parker.
No.
No, you are not.
You're gonna stay right here and protect us!
Coates.
What? This is mutiny, y'all!
Mut... One of y'all say something, please!
Coates.
You are going to stay here, or so help me God--
Gigantopithecus.
Ape.
Great ape.
Prehistoric animal that went extinct.
Or so we thought.
That was in Parker's leg.
Twenty thousand years
of primal evolution migrating across
the Bering land bridge during the Pleistocene era.
A 20,000-year-old monster?
A 20,000-year-old Gigantopithecus? No.
But its ancestor might be stalking us.
It might be the most significant find
of the millennium.
Do you think there are more?
I don't know.
Coates.
We need to stick together.
If it is...
this ape,
it's gonna take all of us to kill it.
Kill it?
Are you out of your mind?
We can't kill it.
We gotta... we gotta call in reinforcements, y'all.
The National Guard.
Texas Rangers, somebody! Booker!
Get... get the boat on the horn!
Right now, come on! That's an order.
Too late for orders now, son.
Everybody away from the window.
Erebus! Erebus!
Erebus! Can you hear me? Erebus!
No.
No, no! Stay with me!
No!
No.
- I have to-- - No, Ellie.
He's gone.
Come on.
Oh, God.
That thing will be back.
Come on.
It seems the expedition team was asleep in their bunks.
Never made it out of bed.
My sister is...
but if your fathers were here,
you might be able to find some traces.
My antenna is broken.
We're gonna have to find something else
to bounce the signal off of.
Ellie?
One for the storybooks.
What's that?
Sunday Jr. brought me here for the story.
He never even considered me outside of the pulp magazines.
He knew I wasn't fit.
All the dead.
Dan, Parker, Coates, they...
they'd still be alive if he chose someone
with the right stuff.
Worst of all is that I believed him.
I should have said no, but I... I...
I wanted
to make things right.
Ellie, if you weren't here,
we'd be out lost in the Arctic,
following the whims of Little Sunday.
The last time I was lost, it killed my mother.
We were ascending the south wall of Mount McKinley
when the storm hit.
My leg seized, so my father carried me on his back, and...
we lost my mom in the fog.
He went back for her, but he couldn't find her.
Couldn't look me in the eye after that.
I can...
hardly look myself in the eye.
Maps became my way to see the world.
I should have kept it at that.
Miss Bannister,
when we dropped the bomb,
we were excited.
It's gonna end the war.
We didn't know how powerful it would be.
They didn't tell us.
It's so bright,
you close your eyes
and you can see the bones in your fingers.
I can still see 'em.
Dust in the streets.
Why do you keep that?
As a reminder,
anytime I get too complacent or proud.
That's me in the middle.
What happened on that mountain wasn't your fault.
It's the mountain's fault.
You never get comfortable with it.
I agree with Junior about one thing.
Your story will be one for the history books.
Whenever you find the courage to write it.
Parker said they got an SOS from the outpost.
They built a radio tower.
We find it and we contact the ship.
Yes, ma'am.
Pop that into your shoulder.
Aim it at his chest. Pull the trigger.
Reload. Pull the trigger.
This is going around you.
Oh, if you see the thing, run!
Don't try and fight it.
Only fight as the last resort.
Is that a challenge for Slow Walk?
I don't think you're as slow as people say.
I'm entrusting you with my radio.
Please don't lose her.
I got her in boot camp, and she's all I've got left.
Does she have a name?
You bet.
You hear the signal, shine the flashlight up.
We'll be fine.
It's all fine.
Okay.
Hey.
Are you gonna tell me her name?
I don't kiss and tell.
Hey, Booker!
Booker, we got a signal!
Hey!
Ellie, it's coming! Ellie, run!
Run!
Ellie, run! Ellie!
Run!
It's coming! It's here!
Ellie!
Ellie! Ellie, run!
Run! Ellie!
It's coming! Ellie!
Ellie! Run!
Booker!
Dad? Hollis?
Dad. Dad, is that you?
Where is it?
Where...
is it?
Where is it?
You must be Sunday.
Your son's been looking for you.
Morphine tartrate.
He's out in the damn cold.
Wrists chained, left there to die like a...
like a trophy animal in that cage.
Ellie, I need to get Father home.
First thing in the morning I'm taking him to the boat.
With or without you.
Please don't make it be without you.
Their expedition.
It's got something to do with the cage your daddy was in.
And... and the creature that's been killing us.
I knew Hollis wouldn't come here for oil.
Now, Ellie, there's... there's a very, very sick--
Look at these.
You don't bring a cage all this way out here
unless you're planning to trap something.
What did Hollis have to do with all of this?
I'm not leaving here without it.
The girl is correct.
Hollis lives.
It was he that chained me to that frozen bastille.
Get in here.
Both of you.
Junior.
There's no oil.
Never was.
Hollis never gave a damn about any of that.
Plans to dig a well were for the shareholders.
I came to hunt.
Hunt what?
A living fossil.
A monster that's...
been around since 'fore the birth of Christ.
Oh, years ago, I did plan to dig a few wells,
sent a ground team to survey.
Last wire told word of something...
biblical.
Twenty feet tall.
Five thousand pounds.
Eat a man whole.
I stopped caring about the crew and oil.
I wanted to know about this beast.
And I went to Hollis.
There's anyone who'd know about such things,
it was him.
He told me a story.
Alexander the Great and how he hunted an ape
that killed hordes of troops.
Your daddy told me
that ape, that beast, could be one and the same.
So...
you made him join up?
Made him?
I begged him.
He's the only living man worthy of my expedition.
He is better than them who created all the first maps.
When we got down here,
that ape killed all of our hunters.
It was left up to Hollis and me to capture it.
To drag it back here.
Instead...
we find something different.
Cries from deep in that shaft.
A babe.
Birth of the beast.
Hollis saw the...
beauty.
The humanity.
The humanity only a father could see.
Except he stole that babe 'fore I could use it.
Left me in that cage to catch a freeze.
Got all the...
rest of the team killed
when the mama come back.
Offspring.
That means there's a mate.
That's right.
I never seen hide nor hair of it.
Why go through so much for this animal?
I have my reasons.
Your daddy had his.
We can't fight it.
We just can't.
We won't.
That's good.
No time for reverie, boy.
You know, my whole life...
you told me I needed to have sand...
any sort of spine or backbone.
And now this.
I'm saying it ain't right.
I'm putting it down.
My foot.
We need to go home.
I will bury you with your grandfather.
Go on.
More than the other one.
Keep pouring.
- Knock the beast out clean.
That's good.
Go ahead. Pull!
That's it. Harder! Put some back into it.
Hey, come here. Give me that.
You never met your granddaddy.
Made sure of that.
He died a sniveling husk of himself.
Time did away with his entire legacy.
Wasn't worth a straw coin in the end.
Couldn't even bury him in the family plot.
A man who doesn't go to the ends of the earth
for what he want--
Shh.
All right.
She's here.
That's it. Get out there.
Light it up.
All right.
She's here.
No!
Oh, my God.
Yeah, that's your kennel.
Go on.
Oh, my God!
She's out.
She's out, she's out.
Now, I want you to go over there.
I want you to get a rope. And I want you to tie it up.
Hands, feet, neck.
I'm gonna get more tranquilizer.
-Go. -Okay. You--
-Go! -All right, all right!
Ellie?
Where'd they go?
Ellie?
Well, well, well.
You do that to my boy?
Yeah.
And you're still with us.
Please don't.
Now you sound like the stock men.
The shareholder ain't never right.
Merriell!
You bring my babe?
I came back to steel my heart
and do what the cold couldn't.
I'll make you a trade.
The beast child...
for yours.
My son... is dead.
And your daughter is--
Bannister.
You... you killed them all.
Yeah.
The cook, the men.
All of your little girl's friend... friends.
Taking its child
sent it into a killing frenzy.
Two animals for a score of men.
Well...
was it worth it?
Dad?
Daddy?
Dad?
Ellie.
Where...
What happened?
You shouldn't have come here.
Somebody had to bring you home.
What, and that somebody was you, was it?
Yeah. Who else was it gonna be?
I tried to say no,
but... I don't know. I thought maybe I'd...
find...
God. What the hell am I doing?
You left me when I was just a kid, and nothing's changed.
Ellie, we found the child.
And...
it made these little cries.
And they sounded human.
And it reminded me of you when you were little.
And...
and Sunday, he just...
he just wanted a trophy. That's all he wanted.
He was gonna kill the mother, too.
I couldn't bring myself to let that happen.
So I stole it.
And I've been sitting here thinking ever si...
ever since, thinking about you.
Thinking about all the things that I would say to you.
But I wasn't never supposed to see you again.
And then here you are, right...
right back on the summit, aren't you?
Here you go.
Yes.
Is that good?
All right. No fingers.
There we are.
Attaboy.
Okay.
She found her baby.
Here we go.
No. What are you doing? You can't...
You can't bring that with us. She'll follow us.
We're not coming with you.
I'm going to run,
and the mother's gonna follow me.
-No. No, you're not-- -Listen to me.
You don't need me.
You're not lost.
You're a Bannister.
Now plant your flag.