|
"The manifestation of the human millennium" is a crossroads of epochs (cf. Metropolis), the modernity of the Cold War alongside something rather more ancient: "I think Frankenstein ought to be required reading for all scientists." You get out of the supercomputer what you put into it, the creator (Eric Braeden) reaches for unemotional intelligence and gets a dictatorial mecha-brain. Steel and circuitry and a shield of radiation comprise the project, for the White House unveiling Joseph Sargent avails himself of Seven Days in May monitors and a Kennedy facsimile (Gordon Pinsent) at the podium. The bash is promptly interrupted as the new security system hooks up with its Russian counterpart in a language of their own, leaving out the befuddled governments. One inventor is assassinated and the other gets entombed inside the proverbial pyramid, surrounded by cameras and messages cranked across the Panavision screen. "Well. The first electronic Peeping Tom." From within a Colorado mountain the cutting-edge conqueror, not Kubrick's paranoid Cyclops but a megalomaniac Janus, criticizing the amount of vermouth in a martini when not ordering executions. (Strock's Gog is an abstruse antecedent, Cammell's Demon Seed the logical continuation.) Sargent has the tightness and speed to lay out the of cautionary grid of the tale, and the keen eye to locate its satirical center: Braeden's humanoid egghead is made to face his hubris even as he's warmed by the ordeal, forced into awkward first-date rituals with the colleague who's posing as his lover (Susan Clark). "Don't personalize it. The next step is deification." The machine as overlord sets the terms with televised mushroom clouds, the defiant hero's face at the close is another algorithm to be devoured. With William Schallert, Leonid Rostoff, Georg Stanford Brown, Alex Rodine, Dolph Sweet, Marion Ross, and James Hong.
--- Fernando F. Croce |