Saturday, 20 October 2007
Demons in the Hard Drive: Ten Dodgy Computers
posted @1:05 p.m. by Richard Kelly
Ten Bad Dates now has its own Facebook group page, and I thought I'd share with you the inaugural hi-tech list I wrote for it - but there are other lists there, trust me, and growing every day...
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Richard Pryor’s super-computer in Superman III (US 1983, dir. Richard Lester)
The third Supe movie is widely disdained by Supe fans as just another of Richard Pryor’s ruinous misjudgements in the 1980s. It upset me for another reason, though, and that was the scene where the master-computer engineered by Pryor for baddie Robert Vaughn goes haywire, pulls Vaughn’s hard-faced spinster sister (Annie Ross) into its innards, and aggressively retools her as a lethal robot. Even watching this at the age of 12, I think I understood it was a kind of rape scene.9. ‘Mother’ in Alien (US 1979, dir. Ridley Scott)
Mother is just calmly obeying orders – those of The Company – when she/it engineers events so as to trade the lives of the entire crew of the spaceship Nostromo for that of a loathesome scaly xenomorph. But oh, the subsequent suffering of John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Sigourney Weaver et al!8. ‘Edgar’ in Electric Dreams (US/GB 1984, dir. Steve Barron)
Unique among independent-minded PCs in the movies, ‘Edgar’ attains sentience when his shy cerebral owner Lenny von Dohlen spills champagne into his circuit boards. I’ve done that too, but the effect wasn’t the same. Certainly, said machine didn’t then attempt to steal my girlfriend, as Edgar tries with Lenny’s neighbor, fair-haired cellist Virginia Madsen.7. Delos Control in Westworld (US 1973, dir. Michael Crichton)
This film absolutely fixed in my mind the impression of what a big important computer system would be like – you know, a roomful of rows and rows of data banks, little coloured lights blinking on and off, whirring sounds when Something’s Wrong. Everyone remembers Yul Brynner’s brilliantly implacable robot gunslinger from this movie. But the reason people start dying in Westworld – admittedly, not without just cause on occasion – is all because of that overheated little control room.6. Master Control Program in Tron (US 1982, dir. Steven Lisberger)
I’ll be honest – I don’t remember anything about this movie from a sole viewing back in 1982, apart from the sense that MCP’s voice was by David Warner, and its human creator was played by David Warner, and it also had a computerised henchman with the face of – David Warner. And David Warner, at least post-1960s, has been a cinematic guarantor of Evil.5. WOPR/’Joshua’ in War Games (US 1983, dir. John Badham)
This movie, coupled with Sting’s ballad ‘Russians’, were probably the two reasons why my generation came to appreciate the horror of Global Thermonuclear War and the folly of Mutually Assured Destruction. ‘Greetings, Professor Falken.’ ‘Hello, Joshua.’ ‘Strange game… The only winning move is not to play.’ Then Reagan and Gorbachev went to Reykjavik, and the rest was history, folks. Good movie, that War Games. And thank you too, Sting.4. Skynet in the Terminator movies (US 1984, 1991, 2003)
But lest we got too cosy in the 1980s, James Cameron came up with a self-aware corporate computer system that would annihilate the human race simply as a perceived threat to its own personal wellbeing. Great movies, monster hits, hard to quarrel with. We don’t really see Skynet so much as hear of its legend, but its offshoots and representatives – those bone-crushing Terminators – certainly don’t endear one to it.3. The base-camp computer in The Thing (US 1982, dir. John Carpenter)
It’s really not a bad machine, this one, just the bearer of awful news. Dr. Blair (Wilfred Brimley) wants to know how bad things have got now an appalling shape-shifting alien has surfaced amid the crew of his Antarctic research facility. The computer offers him a 75% probability that one or more of his colleagues are now infected. Moreover, if ‘The Thing’ manages to escape the Arctic Circle, the entire world population will be infected within 27,000 hours of first contact. Brimley stares at the screen glumly. We’re not feeling too chipper ourselves. Then he taps his teeth with his pencil. But we have already gathered that one single cell of Thing can take over a whole person. And that was the pencil Blair was using to poke around the innards of a dead Thing! Oh Wilfred, oh no…2. HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (US 1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
‘I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you…’ You little liar, the audience cries. HAL, another of those spacecraft machines that values the directives of The Man higher than the men onboard, is surely the all-time #1 computer in movies. But not in this list.1. Proteus IV in Demon Seed (US 1977, dir. Donald Cammell)
A heretical choice, maybe, but that’s what lists are for, and the late Donald Cammell (Performance) never got the credit he was due before his suicide in 1996. Proteus is the brainchild of Dr Harris (Fritz Weaver), a clearly complicated man in a marriage to Julie Christie. The machine is meant to serve Harris’s own corporate paymasters, but Proteus quickly and tersely arrives at his own eco-opinions views (‘The destruction of a thousand billion sea creatures to satisfy man's appetite for metal is insane.’) So it takes over the running of Harris’s computerized house and decides to launch its very own master race through the forcible impregnation of Christie. Thematically this is all a bed of nails, but there is brilliance in the movie, from the Proteus imagery created by artist Jordan Belson to the computer’s insidious voice, provided by – yes, back to where we started – Robert Vaughn…
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