Brilliant but racist surgeon Ray Milland is dying of chest cancer and the way to survive is a complete body transplant. After completing a successful experiment with a gorilla, Milland entrusts a team of his colleagues with finding a suitable donor body and carrying out the procedure to save his life. Finding a donor proves very difficult, however, as the ideal donor must be dying (since they will not survive the procedure) but must also have a healthy body and be able to live long enough for Milland’s transplanted head to establish control of the body.
As time runs out and Milland slips into a coma, the doctors go to their last-ditch source: death row inmates. Convicted murderer Rosey Grier volunteers just before they flip the switch on the electric chair, hoping that the extra thirty days of life will be long enough for his girlfriend to collect evidence that will exonerate him. But when Milland discovers that his head has been transplanted to a black man’s body, wacky hijinks ensue.
Is it any good?
This is a movie where Ray Milland’s elderly head is transplanted onto the body of a professional football player. This is also a movie where the resulting two-headed monstrosity flees on a dirt bike and leads a dozen police cars on a bash ’em, crash ’em chase across a hilly field for twenty minutes. So no, it’s not really “good” in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s not exactly bad either. I don’t have a whole lot to say about THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, but it’s crazy enough to be worth maybe a few paragraphs at least.
I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but I think I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen more sci-fi movies yet that are about race. The only obvious one that doesn’t dance around the issue at all is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959). A lot of folks read a criticism of race relations into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), but it’s not clear how much of that was intended. Otherwise, there are a lot of movies that arguably allegories for the racial situation in the U.S. -- probably the closest being CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972).
THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, on the other hand, is unambiguously about race. Yet despite the fact that it introduces a racist character precisely so that it can bind him physically to a black man, I’m not real sure that it has anything to say about the situation except, “Boy wouldn’t that something!” In some ways, I guess that’s enough. What do you really expect a movie like this to say anyway? In THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, it was clear that Harry Belafonte connected passionately with the story and themes, and that he really wanted to get people to sympathize with a mixed-race couple despite their prejudices.
But THE THING WITH TWO HEADS is more like an authority-tweaking wish fulfillment movie -- more along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). Rosey Grier starts out as a victim of the system. Not only is he wrongfully scheduled for execution (or so he claims), but when he volunteers for an experimental transplant operation he finds out that he’s being used to prolong the life of an old white racist. So it’s kind of exciting to see him break out of the clinic and go on the lam -- ultimately convincing a young black doctor to join him in thumbing his nose at the man.
A lot of movies from the 1970s seem to be about thumbing noses at the man, and it’s something I can never exactly relate to. There’s a certain sensibility that runs through whole genres that takes it for granted that disobeying laws, evading the police and destroying government property is unquestionably heroic. The middle of THE THING WITH TWO HEADS falls squarely into this sensibility as Rosey Grier leads the cops on an excessively destructive chase that would have made Burt Reynolds or Kris Kristofferson (or at least Tom Wopat and John Schneider) proud. I didn’t count how many cop cars we actually see destroyed on camera, but a news report in the movie says fourteen and that sounds about right. (Some of them are clearly the same wrecks from different angles though.)
There’s not a whole lot else to talk about -- this movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect anybody else to either. It is far superior to another similar movie I watched called THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971). I had high hopes for that one, since it starred Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, but it’s nonsensical, inept and offensive. THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, despite being incredibly silly, is none of those things. It’s not really something I’d recommend, but I will think of it fondly for the next week or so until it fades entirely from my memory.
And now here are a bunch of screenshots of police cars crashing, since that is primarily what the movie is about:
After a spate of mysterious rocket disappearances, a scientist petitions for the cessation of all space travel until the problem is solved. Reluctantly, the council in charge of such things agrees, and those serving on distant space outposts are consequently temporarily stranded. Two such men in particular find themselves chafing under the travel ban -- one because he is yearning to head back to Earth and the other because his son is among those who are reported missing.
After sulking for a bit, the two decide to violate the travel ban and visit their nearest neighbor at the next outpost. They can’t get too close since he has contracted a deadly space disease (possibly from strange shadow-like creatures indigenous to the asteroid he’s stationed on), but he gives them a capsule that he says someone will be along to claim later. Meanwhile, the scientist on Earth quizzes one of her colleagues who appears to know more about the disappearances than he’s letting on. But the mystery isn’t solved until the scientist travels into space herself, and the various pieces of the puzzle all start to come together.
Is it any good?
EOLOMEA was produced by the same East German studio that put out THE SILENT STAR (1960), but besides that connection I didn’t know anything about it before I watched it. I was watching it online (which is why there are no screenshots), and I figured I’d get through the boring beginning bits and come back to the rest of it later. But it seems that the East Germans learned a lot about movie pacing since 1960. There are no boring beginning bits with this movie -- things started off interesting with the disappearance of several rockets and never let up for the next eighty minutes.
One of the neatest things about EOLOMEA is the complex system of space exploration that it seems to take for granted. I don’t know how far in the future the movie is supposed to be set, but there are apparently several space flights each day -- many of them between space stations on other planets or asteroids. In fact, at least one of the characters in the movie has never even been on Earth, so this bustling space traffic has been in place for at least a generation.
Most of the view the audience has into this brave new world is on the dull and poorly trafficked fringes, however. The two men stationed out there are pilot and navigator for what is essentially the rocket version of a delivery truck. Unlike in THE SILENT STAR, the characters here actually have interesting back stories and real emotions. The pilot, for instance, was one of the first people to help colonize space. But at some point he was involved in a deadly accident and everyone on his rocket died except himself and some children. His wife died in the accident, but his son survived. That was decades ago, though, and he hasn’t seen his son since then. When the travel ban is put in place, the pilot is waiting for his son to visit.
The main characters all mostly have stories as well realized as that one -- and they are all interconnected in ways that feel organic. It’s easy to imagine that people involved in the space program would have varying relationships with each other, depending on what jobs they had. So when we learn that one character knows another, it doesn’t seem out of place. And that definitely helps the story, since all the various strands eventually come together. The movie is primarily a mystery (but with very strong sci-fi overtones, of course) and it’s always clear that the disappearance of the rockets is not exactly what it seems.
But even before the different strands get tied together, there’s plenty to be interested in. The sick fellow at the other outpost, for instance, doesn’t seem important in his own right at first. I figured he would end up just being an excuse to get the other two off their asteroid and into an unapproved flight, but even so I wanted to know more about him. Because of his sickness, he only communicates with the others through his spacesuit. And his theories and descriptions of the aliens he believes he contracted the sickness from are the kind of charming diversions that add color to sci-fi stories. The film makers could easily have given him a mundane sickness, but instead they deliver a tantalizing half-explanation of an alien disease.
There’s another similar scene with a robot later in the movie. The robot has information that the characters believe they need to save lives, but the robot has been ordered not to tell. This creates tension in its programming since the robot is also not supposed to cause harm to humans. People have been mining this exact same sci-fi situation since Isaac Asimov first laid out his three laws of robotics, so there’s no points for originality. In fact, the robot’s dilemma here is far less interesting than HAL-9000's in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). But it’s presented pretty convincingly (in every detail except the appearance of the robot) and is refreshingly more of a momentary inconvenience than a major plot point.
THE SILENT STAR had a lot of this little business in the margins too, and I liked a lot of the ideas floating around in that movie. But EOLOMEA has far more interesting characters, a tighter story, and some improvements in the special effects. All in all, this is a neat little sci-fi mystery with a pretty satisfying ending. There’s also a surprising lack of any kind of obvious political agenda. No specific countries are mentioned at all (though some characters do have ethnic names) and neither are any real historical events except Yuri Gagarin’s space flights. Not only are there no diatribes against warmongering capitalists (another weakness of THE SILENT STAR), but the characters aren’t even all necessarily happy and productive members of society. The two guys in the outpost are bored with their jobs, disobey orders, and get drunk while ostensibly on duty. Meanwhile, the ending of the movie suggests that sometimes the best way to serve mankind is to take initiative and act outside the established chain of command. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that this was produced by a Soviet bloc country, I never would have guessed it.
What else happened this year?
-- Bruce Dern saves the last surviving forest from short-sighted politicians and public apathy in SILENT RUNNING. The movie also features three awesome robots, a folk soundtrack by Joan Baez, and some of Dern’s best crazy-man acting. -- Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky adapts Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel SOLYARIS, but focuses more on the human relationships than the sci-fi bits. I like this version better than Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation, but neither movie is anywhere near as good as the book. -- In other literary adaptations, there’s also a version of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE starring absolutely nobody you have heard of (the most famous name is Valerie Perrine) but which is still pretty good nonetheless. I never read the book though, so I don’t know how it compares to the Vonnegut/imagination version. -- Christopher Walken almost single-handedly turns THE MIND SNATCHERS into a pretty interesting character study of a sociopath fighting to save his identity from a new form of electroshock therapy. -- Meanwhile, Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin try to have a baby in a world where getting pregnant is a capital crime in ZPG: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH. -- Roddy MacDowell leads a monkey uprising in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, moving the series a big step closer to a world where talking apes rule over humans.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1972...
I’m a big fan of SILENT RUNNING so I think I have to tell you to watch that one.
In an alternate version of early 1970s America, the government has taken to sentencing “political criminals” (i.e., hippies, dissidents, draft dodgers, and the like) to serving brief but brutal stints in newly designated punishment parks throughout the country. The park featured in this movie is a desert wasteland in southern California. Any prisoner sentenced there has three days to make it fifty miles across the desert with no food or water to a checkpoint. If they succeed, they can go free. But if they are “apprehended” by law enforcement officers (who use the parks as a training ground) then they are taken to prison to serve out whatever their original sentence would have been.
Except for waiting two hours to give the prisoners a head start, the law enforcement officers have no restrictions on how they can hunt down the fugitives. They use vehicles, radios, and weapons with live ammunition to aid in their pursuit. Though they claim they won’t use violence unless the prisoners resist when they are apprehended, none of the prisoners believe them. And when a group of prisoners fights back and succeeds in killing a deputy, the game turns even more deadly.
Is it any good?
This is another documentary-style sci-fi movie from British director Peter Watkins -- the third that I’ve watched for this blog. The first one I watched, THE WAR GAME (1965), ranks among the most riveting movies I have ever seen in my life. But the second one, THE GLADIATORS (1970), was dull and disappointing. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from PUNISHMENT PARK. Based on what I knew about the movie, it sounded like it was more along the lines of THE GLADIATORS, so I was almost steeling myself to be bored. The DVD I had also included an introduction from Peter Watkins which consisted largely of the director reading from several densely typewritten pages about how PUNISHMENT PARK has been unfairly ignored by everybody for twenty minutes. The omens, then, were not so good.
Luckily, the bad omens never panned out. One of the biggest differences between the other two Peter Watkins movies I had watched is that THE WAR GAME depicts events that could have very plausibly taken place (a nuclear war), whereas the subject of THE GLADIATORS are much more allegorical and detached (an isolated institute where countries fight out wars using small numbers of troops). At first, I figured PUNISHMENT PARK would fall on the allegorical and detached side of the line, but there’s a few interesting things about the movie that give it much more of a punch than expected.
To start with, the premise behind PUNISHMENT PARK is mostly well within the realm of believability. The dissidents are tried by a civilian tribunal that operates outside the traditional American justice system. The defendants are presumed guilty and although they have a chance to state their case, the arguments are more about philosophy and politics than they are about evidence. I’m not going to try and rate how close the United States has come to systems like these in its history (though this country has certainly had its dark spots), but drumhead trials with foregone conclusions are nothing new or even especially unusual in the history of the world.
The arguments that do come up during the trials are also absolutely real ones on both sides of the debate. The tribunal members show a surprising indulgence in letting the accused speak and in responding to them with their own arguments. (Though there is an awful of indignant shouting on both sides, and as soon as things seem to be going badly for the tribunal they have the defendants hauled out.) But supposedly these trials were all unscripted -- Peter Watkins let the actors come up with their own arguments and just let them play out. Some of the establishment types were even supposedly conservatives who genuinely opposed the hippie movement. But the effect is that the movie serves as an interesting document of countercultural and mainstream opinions of the early 1970s, and the inability of the two sides to find common ground in their interactions.
The actual hunt through the desert should probably be the movie’s Achilles heel, and honestly it isn’t very plausible. Whether you believe that it’s possible that the United States might start holding summary trials of its own citizens and sentencing them to prison without due process, the idea that there would also exist a systemic punishment plan that involved hunting prisoners across deserts is pretty absurd. But despite the absurdity, the situation acts as a pretty powerful allegory for the dilemma of the countercultural movement. On the one hand, they find themselves trapped in a game with arbitrary rules that are clearly stacked against them. But if they refuse to play the game, then they will simply be apprehended and sent to prison -- or possibly worse.
Most of the hippies decide to play the game, since they see it as their best chance for survival (and some believe that they can even possibly “win”). They go along with the insane rules set up by the government, even though it’s obvious that the whole thing is designed to force them to fail. The others who refuse to play the game (and who wait in ambush for the cops instead of running) mock the rest of the hippies as hypocrites -- by even consenting to play the game, they are giving legitimacy to a corrupt system.
Just to be clear, anybody who is looking for an unbiased view of 1970s politics won’t find it here. Watkins is clearly on the side of the counterculture -- though the hippies don’t always come across as heroes and martyrs. Some of them come across as weak or snotty or naive or dangerous. They are also the first to use violence, and at one point even threaten the life of an innocent hostage. None of them deserve the kind of punishment they’re getting, however. And although Watkins lets the establishment make its arguments in a reasonable way much of the time, the fact still remains that the cops shoot down a lot of unresisting unarmed kids.
If I believed the movie was saying that this is an accurate portrait of America, ca. 1970, then I would probably be pretty offended. Pieces and parts of it are certainly accurate in isolated instances, but in general the picture doesn’t reflect what America is about. But I think the movie is in fact has two other far less objectionable messages. First, it can be seen as saying that this was how a certain segment of the population felt America was treating them at the time. And second, it could be saying that the government could easily usurp such powers on a wide scale if the people permit it. Either of those things I think are true -- some people DO believe that America is a fascist state, and the government really COULD quickly become frightening if the people let it. I also think they are important things to understand and be aware of. So even though I should probably be offended that some British panty-waist is making inflammatory movies about my country, I guess I will just say that he makes a couple of good points.
The movie does start to drag a bit as it goes along. After all, there are only so many times that you can listen to the same arguments over and over again. But at least there are characters to care about (mostly only among the hippies, but a little among the establishment) and ideas to think about. Things do get a little hysterical at times, and it's difficult to understand why the cops are so brutal when they know that a film crew is following them around. But if nothing else, the movie is a very interesting experiment in improvisation and an instructive document about attitudes that seemingly only survive in small paranoid pockets today.
Anyway, the final score puts Peter Watkins at 2 for 3. THE WAR GAME is still far and away his best, but PUNISHMENT PARK is well worth watching if you like unusual narratives and don't mind listening to a lot of angry hippies.
Robert Duvall plays THX 1138, a citizen of a sterile indoor city of the future. He has a dangerous job in the factory that produces the robotic policemen who patrol the city, a “mate” whom he is forbidden from having sex with, a holographic television, and a cocktail of drugs to keep him sedated and contented. But he has recently found himself losing his focus and experiencing strange emotions -- and ultimately it’s revealed that his mate has been making substitutions in his drug regimen to flush the sedatives from his system.
The un-sedated Duvall wastes no time in discovering sex, but he is observed by the all-seeing authorities who begin to monitor him closely. Meanwhile, a twitchy surveillance technician (played by Donald Pleasance) starts illegally modifying system software to get himself assigned as Duvall's roommate. The robotic police soon arrest them both and take them to a featureless white prison with no walls. Duvall and Pleasance soon escape with the help of a holographic television star. Once back in the city, more chases ensue until Duvall manages to make it to the world outside.
Is it any good?
THX 1138 is famously George Lucas’s first feature, adapted from a short student film he produced in 1967. The version I watched is a re-edited one with some new scenes and special effects that Lucas added for the DVD release in 2004. (As far as I know, no other version is available on DVD.) Besides being Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138 is also one of only six that he has directed -- the others being AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), STAR WARS (1977), and the three recent STAR WARS prequels. That being the case, it’s surprising to me how little attention this movie seems to get -- there are millions of fans of STAR WARS who apparently have no interest at all in THX 1138.
I can’t say that I had a whole lot of interest myself until I started watching it. Despite knowing that it existed for many years, I never bothered to seek it out. That’s partly because (like most people) I have mixed feelings about STAR WARS and its sequels. But it’s more likely because I had just never heard very much about THX 1138 before -- nobody seemed to be talking about it, so I didn’t feel any urgency to go out and see it.
I’m not even going to try and compare THX 1138 to any of George Lucas’s other movies. I’ve never seen AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and STAR WARS and its sequels have such cultural ubiquity that it’s almost absurd to even think of them simply as movies. I will say that it was kind of amazing to see a George Lucas movie for which I had absolutely no expectations. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know who Darth Vader was or what storm troopers looked like, but I knew practically nothing about THX 1138 before I sat down to watch it.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The story and setting are pretty familiar, after all. The oppressive society in THX 1138 is a variation on the one found in George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD. It’s not exactly the same as either, but there are dystopian elements that are very familiar -- the constant surveillance, the compulsory consumerism, the faceless enforcement figures, the manipulation of sexuality, the elimination of emotion and love, the state-mandated pharmaceuticals, and so on. Some of these elements crop up in earlier movies as well. Besides the 1956 version of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, similar extreme visions of oppressive societies show up in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966). And the paranoid obsession with constant surveillance and control is a big part of movies like THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE (1960), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1961), SECONDS (1966), and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970).
This is not to say that THX 1138 is derivative or unoriginal. I think it’s more a case of the movie being “of its time”. Orwell and Huxley wrote their novels in response to the totalitarian surveillance societies that coalesced during the rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe. But those regimes hunted down dissidents the old-fashioned way -- by accusations gathered through infiltration, entrapment, coercion, or fabrication. These kinds of things show up in the dystopian sci-fi flicks of the 1960s as well -- for instance, Robert Duvall informs on Donald Pleasance’s deviancy in THX 1138, which leads directly to his arrest. But these movies also resonate differently since ubiquitous video cameras and tape recorders were (and are) no longer the science-fiction trappings that they were for Orwell and Huxley. These themes became even more urgent after the abuses of the Nixon administration were exposed in the Watergate scandal, and they’ve never really gone away since then.
As far as the story goes, it’s a variation on the standard dystopian theme. There are a few neat twists though -- I really liked how Duvall’s mate needed to alter his drug mix before she could turn him into a co-conspirator. And since the story is told entirely from Duvall’s point of view, he starts to feel disoriented and confused long before he (or the audience) knows what’s happening to him or why. Another nice bit is that Duvall actually needs his drugs to safely do his job -- without the sedatives, he runs the risk of dropping radioactive and explosive materials during some delicate assembly operations. It’s not clear whether his need is physical or psychological, but either way it adds a much more serious element of danger to his decision to stay off the pills.
Donald Pleasance’s character is also a bit of an enigma. Like Duvall’s mate, his job is to watch a bank of monitors and coordinate security responses to deviant behavior. Apparently he takes a shine to Duvall while observing him during his hours on the job, but it’s not exactly clear what form his interest takes. The “mate” relationship in the world of THX 1138 is completely asexual, so it could simply be that the fussy Pleasance wants a roommate who will annoy him less than his current one. But watching the monitors means that Pleasance isn’t ignorant of sex -- and probably isn’t even ignorant of Duvall’s own sexual activity. So it seems at least reasonable that there might be some element of desire to his motives. Pleasance also seems more in touch with his emotions, though it’s not clear whether he’s off his drugs or not.
The futuristic world is very white, very sterile, and very inhuman. The vision of the future has a lot in common with the one in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) -- but with one important exception. I said that I got the feeling from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the movie took place the night before opening day in space -- that is, that the pristine spaceships and whatnot were being prepared for an onslaught of people who hadn’t arrived yet. In THX 1138, everything is still clean and pristine, but there’s also a sense that a lot of things are broken just below the surface. There are a lot of little throwaway scenes that show various bits of technology failing -- an elevator refusing to work, a robotic policeman running into a shut door over and over, and so on. The future isn’t dirty yet in this movie (we have to wait for STAR WARS for that), but it certainly has a lot of bugs. This isn’t the night before opening day -- it’s just another day in the peak season where the Hall of Presidents is closed for repairs.
The world is very minimalist as well. The starkest example of this is the prison where Duvall and Pleasance are incarcerated in the middle of the movie. It’s literally nothing more than a white space with a couple of couches. There are no walls -- instead, the whiteness stretches infinitely in all directions, making it impossible to see the way out and very easy to get lost. But Duvall’s apartment and the shows on the holographic television are minimalist as well. For a society that supposedly values mindless consumerism, there are really very few things to buy or desire. Instead, people simply take home useless geometric shapes (“dendrites”, according to the film commentary) which they then destroy and buy again the next day. But the consumerist angle is the least convincing and least interesting part of the movie -- whatever point they were trying to make gets wiped out by the production design and the lack of real attention to it in the script.
The robotic policemen, however, are one of the coolest and most interesting parts of the movie. The combination of police uniforms with expressionless silver faces is very creepy and compelling. There are some other scattered images here and there that are not so well integrated into the story -- a lot of the beginning of the movie is devoted to very brief unconnected vignettes (some involving the main characters, others not) of life in the city. They each last maybe five seconds or so, but they give a real sense of what the world is like. It also gives the movie a higher density of information so that it’s not always obvious exactly what’s happening or if it relates to the story. After skimming through the movie a second time to get some screenshots, I’m pretty confident that it all makes sense and that there is a clear story to it. But the little bits of unconnected business make it more interesting to rewatch since there’s a good chance that some little bit slipped by unnoticed the first time.
I do think the movie starts to go downhill a bit after Duvall and Pleasance are sent to prison. It becomes a much more self-consciously artsy movie in the middle section, before abruptly switching to a long (but pretty ho-hum) chase sequence at the end by foot and car. But the movie is always interesting to look at, and small parts of the future world are pretty thoroughly realized. (Vast sections remain unexplored, obviously.) The plot and characters are extremely simple, and nobody does very much acting in the movie, but most of that fits pretty well with the dystopian, emotionless setting. As I said before, I am not even going to attempt to compare this to STAR WARS, but I can say that right now I would far rather watch THX 1138 again than any of the six movies that George Lucas is most famous for.
What else happened this year?
-- Peter Watkins delivers yet another sci-fi documentary with PUNISHMENT PARK, this one about a government detention center where political dissidents (i.e., hippies and draft dodgers) are hunted down in a law enforcement training program. -- Michael Crichton's break-out novel THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN was adapted into a very effective "how done it" about a lethal alien disease. -- Take Roddy MacDowell and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira from THE PLANET OF THE APES; add in Ricardo Montalban, Sal Mineo, Eric Braeden, a funky score, and a time travel plot that brings talking chimps back in time to the 1970s; mix well and serve as ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES. -- Charlton Heston, meanwhile, imports his cynical, world-weary persona practically wholesale into THE OMEGA MAN -- the second adaptation of Richard Matheson's novella I AM LEGEND. -- Stanley Kubrick directed A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, about which I assume everybody has already formed their own opinion. (I don't like it much.)
If you only watch one movie from 1971...
THX 1138 is the one that I would recommend, but PUNISHMENT PARK is pretty interesting and unusual as well. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and THE OMEGA MAN are both more typical (but still solid) choices too.
The U.S. government brings online a defense supercomputer called Colossus. Designed to be the ultimate deterrent in the Cold War, Colossus has the ability to automatically monitor electronic communications and to act unilaterally by firing ICBMs as soon as it detects a serious threat. But no sooner is the existence of the computer announced via press conference, then Colossus detects the presence of another similar system in the U.S.S.R. called Guardian.
Colossus and Guardian soon demand to be linked together -- threatening both the American and Soviet governments with nuclear attack if the request isn’t obeyed. The two computers create a secret language (indecipherable by humans) they use to communicate, and are soon blackmailing the superpowers into giving them more and more control. Colossus’s creator, Dr Forbin, is put under continual surveillance by the computers, so the rest of his team must work on solutions for stopping the computers with minimal input from him. Meanwhile, the computers order the construction of a mysterious manufacturing facility that will take up the entire island of Crete, and the scientists decide they must stop them one way or another.
Is it any good?
Digital computing didn’t even exist until the 1940s, but in less than two decades sci-fi writers were already asking whether these electronic brains could be capable of independent thought and action. COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT is not the first movie to feature a computer that develops its own agenda -- there’s also the Alpha 60 in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and HAL-9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). The Doomsday Device in DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) is also a similar kind of computer, but it seems to function essentially as intended instead of going rogue. In any event, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT does have a few interesting wrinkles I don’t remember having seen before in other man vs. machine pictures.
The most interesting, to my mind, is that there are actually two computers -- the American Colossus and the Soviet Guardian. They are both built from similar plans (which were apparently leaked to the Soviets by spies), so it makes sense that they would have an affinity for each other. Once connected, the first thing they do is to exchange mathematical data like the multiplication tables until they work their way up to forms of higher mathematics that no human has comprehended yet. The purpose is apparently to establish a common form of communication that can’t be tracked or understood by humans.
This is another interesting thing about the movie -- the computers for the most part are simply computers. They are tied in to wide-reaching data streams (including all electronic communications in the world), but they don’t have any magical abilities to affect systems that are outside of their direct control. The only control they really have is over their output screens and the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Every demand that they make, no matter how large or small, is accompanied by the implicit threat of nuclear attack since the computers have no other way to influence humans to what they want. At one point late in the movie, when Forbin is under constant surveillance by Colossus, the computer tells him to stop drinking and to go to bed. Chafing under such paternalistic oversight, he asks in frustration if Colossus will destroy a city full of millions of people if he refuses to go to bed.
The answer to that question, by the way, is “no”. Another one of the interesting elements of the movie is that the computers believe they can make human existence better by taking control of the world, so they aren’t interested in wanton destruction for its own sake. The idea that giving up free will can result in a happier, more peaceful society is a pretty common sci-fi theme. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) is built around this very idea, for instance, and so are a lot of other stories in the genre going back at least to the 1940s. Modern western fiction usually takes it as a given that the freedom to be miserable is better than a society where happiness is enforced. But there was a real historical debate around the time when republicanism and free market systems started spreading across the world that argued that the elimination of the noblesse oblige (the moral duty of the nobility to care for their serfs) would result in a drop in the quality of life for the poor. It seems like a silly argument now, but that’s only because humans make imperfect stewards. So could a selfless computer really manage the world better than we can on our own?
On the other hand, Colossus is not exactly a selfless computer. It is very interested in preserving what power it does have -- attempts to interrupt Colossus’s ability to function or to launch ICBMs are met with deadly force (including the detonation of nuclear weapons). Like HAL-9000, it claims to be following its programming to the logical conclusion -- but it’s also clear that Colossus has the ability to rewrite its own program as well. In fact, Colossus is designed to be entirely self-sufficient. Once its facility was sealed off, it is expected to generate its own power, perform its own repairs, defend itself from attack, and so on. This is why the humans can’t just walk in and unplug the servers. (It’s also one of the least believable aspects of the movie -- surely there must be some interface with the outside world that can be disrupted.)
Skynet from TERMINATOR and WOPR from WARGAMES seem like pretty direct descendants of Colossus. They’re all designed more or less to do the same thing and they all start acting on their own sooner or later. The idea that Colossus can’t be swayed by emotion is pitched as an advantage during its introduction to the world. But that only underscores the absurdity of the theory of mutually assured destruction -- if the U.S. were really the victim of a crippling nuclear strike, would we have anything to gain by doing the same to the Soviets?
(If I can take a brief aside here, I’ll make not of a real document which every British Prime Minister must draft upon taking office. The document contains orders detailing what is to be done if the chain of command is destroyed by a devastating attack on Britain, and is stored in a locked vault in a submarine somewhere in the world. No one knows what the document says -- either it orders a full retaliation, or it orders surrender. The idea is that Britain’s enemies can never be sure what the orders will be -- but also that it allows human judgment to prevail over potentially self-destructive policies.)
Practically all of the “action” in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT takes place either in Colossus’s monitoring station in California or in the situation rooms of the White House and Pentagon. The plot plays out almost like a chess game, with each side maneuvering into positions that will stop the other from acting. The computers, for instance, order that any as-yet untapped communications lines be tied into their system, and that key figures be placed under surveillance so they can be sure they aren’t plotting against them. For their part, the humans are reduced to finding places to discuss the situation that can’t be monitored, and to trying to manually disarm the nuclear warheads without tipping off the computers.
Once Forbin goes under 24-hour surveillance, a sort of relationship starts to develop between him and Colossus. The computer schedules every moment of his day and becomes his constant companion through a series of terminals and television cameras. Colossus seems to have some interest in Forbin, but it’s hard to tell if it simply wants his know-how for improvements, or if it feels something more affectionate for its creator. Likewise, it’s not easy to tell how Forbin feels about Colossus. He’s clearly intellectually interested in the new developments in the computer and early on he fights to get Colossus what it wants -- believing that he can shut it down if it gets out of hand. By the end of the movie, Forbin is considerably less enamored of Colossus and is actively working to shut it down. Until the end, Forbin believes that the computer is still something that he can control and overcome. Colossus, on the other hand, maintains that it has progressed well beyond the knowledge of its creator. One of them is correct, but it’s impossible to tell which until the very end of the movie.
