Alex (Proteus)
Alex was a British undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency. Along with his girlfriend and fellow agent Rachel, he was assigned to infiltrate a group of small-time smugglers led by Paul who were buying heroin from a group of Triads. Alex's mission was to find out who Paul was selling the heroin to. He ingratiated himself to the group and earned passage for himself and Rachel aboard their yacht as well as a cut of the money by saving Paul from the Triads when the deal almost went wrong.
Halfway through the voyage, the ship sank thanks to a mistake made by the operation's financier, Mark, who along with his girlfriend Christine, Alex and Linda (both still undercover) voted with Paul and Linda to cut out of the deal. As they drifted in their lift raft, the group found the floating corpse of a man named Duncan Jarman, although none of them could figure out where he'd come from or how he'd died. Immediately after this, they stumbled across an oil rig. Alex climbed up and used a crane to lift the others out of the water. Having had some experience with oil rigs, Alex took charge as the group explored the structure.
It was unanimously decided that Jarman had been aboard the rig and either fallen off and drowned, or been killed and then thrown off. They found out that the rig was owned by a company called Brinkstone, and that it was a front for some sort of research laboratory. They found empty clothes and discarded weapons, which Alex and Rachel collected and distributed to the others, and taught them how to use.
As the group bedded down for the night in the scientists' cabins, each couple to a room, and Alex and Rachel discussed their next move, something dragged away Paul. The others went searching for him, but found only a scientist named Dr. Shelley, who claimed that what took Paul was a creature called Charlie. As to Paul's whereabouts, Shelley wouldn't say, and he violently threw Alex aside when the DEA agent attempted to forcibly demand answers from him, then vanished. A subsequent encounter with another scientist, Dr. Carol Soames, went more or less the same. The group eventually ran into security guard Buckley, who transformed into the beast named Charlie and severely injured Rachel before being driven away.
With Rachel severely hurt, Alex left her in the rig's infirmary along with Linda and Christine, and left Mark to guard them. He found some videotapes of Dr. Shelley, who revealed that he and the other scientists living on the rig had performed an experiment called the Proteus Project, which created the ultimate organism, an amorphous great white shark who they nicknamed Charlie. Charlie escaped and killed everyone, absorbing their minds into itself. Alex returned to the infirmary to find Linda missing, and Rachel and Mark having been taken over by Charlie. Charlie, in Rachel's form, attempted to seduce him, but the grief-stricken Alex escaped.
He encountered Linda, and after revealing himself as a DEA agent, the two joined forces to try and kill Charlie. Brinkstone CEO Leonard Brinkstone arrived with a group of armed guards to try and discover why communication with the rig had ceased, and Brinkstone didn't believe Alex and Linda's claims until Charlie appeared in the form of Dr. Shelley and attacked the group. Alex and Linda escaped, but Brinkstone and his men were slaughtered. Before he died, Brinkstone activated a bomb which would destroy the rig.
Heading outside, Alex told Linda to run for the helicopter Brinkstone and his men had come in, while he confronted Charlie, now in the form of Rachel again. Charlie transformed into its true form, a hideous, gigantic shark monster, and after a prolonged battle, Alex destroyed the beast with flames. He then got aboard the helicopter with Linda and they were flown safely away before the entire rig was destroyed by Brinkstone's bomb. On the ride home, Alex decided not to arrest Linda. Neither suspected that the helicopter's pilot had been infected with Charlie's genes prior to the main creature's death, and was well on his way to becoming a monster. Once safely back at base, Alex found that his DEA superior refused to believe his story, because he'd made no arrests, recovered no drugs, had discovered the identity of Paul's buyers, and had no evidence to back up his claims against Brinkstone. His fate is unknown.
