SCIENCE FICTION MOVIES THAT ARE 'DIFFERENT' PART 1 SECOND SEGMENT

 As I mentioned in the last post, rather than focusing on outer space, many plots of sci-fi films delve into the ways that technology, particularly robotics, impacts people’s lives. When I began to research the history of robotics, I was surprised to discover that societies had robot-type devices as early as 3000 B.C. The Egyptians, for example, built figurines that could perform simple tasks, talk, and gesture. Other societies had mechanical birds that could fly and dolls that could move like humans. Oddly enough, however, the word robot, which means slave in Czechoslovakian, didn’t come into existence until 1921 when Czech writer Karl Capek penned his play Rossum’s Universal Robots (or Rossumovi Univerzalni Roboti). It was a story about machines working on an assembly line that rebel against their “slave driving” creators.

The word robotics became part of the English language even later, when Isaac Asimov coined the term for his short stories in the early 1940s. It took another ten or so years for George Devol, an inventor from Louisville, Kentucky, to actually develop a robotic arm. Then, in 1957, Joseph Engleberger partnered with Devol to start a business they called Unimate, which began building automated machines for the assembly lines in automobile factories. When the Japanese saw their machines, they quickly adopted then enhanced them.

Considering the length of time that people have toyed with artificial automation, I found myself wondering what comprises a robot. According to Stanford University, robots are devices that humans can program to perform tasks. Implicitly, this means that such machines must possess at least elementary knowledge of what they were built to do. Although not specifically stated, it is conceivable that they might also have the ability to learn, a concept known as artificial intelligence, or A.I.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/robotics/history.html

As for stories, societies had myths about objects coming to life long before they had tales about aliens. The Ancient Greeks, for instance, had the mythological Galatea, an ivory statue that the goddess Venus brought to life when Pygmalion, the statue’s sculptor, fell in love with her; the Jews had a story about the Golem, a clay statue that a sculptor could animate to protect his or her community; and thanks to author Carlo Callodi, the Italians had the tale of a wooden puppet that became a real boy (Pinocchio). Still, stories about robots in the modern sense didn’t appear in American literature until the Twentieth Century when writers like Isaac Asimov (I, Robot, a collection of stories that contain the three laws of robotics), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), and Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) started to publish. The movie industry has turned all three of these authors' stories into movies, although they renamed the latter Blade Runner.

Surprisingly, there were more films about robots in the early Twentieth Century than there were stories. Georges Méliès made the first, The Clown and the Automaton, which shows a clown that is fascinated by a wind-up man. Not long after, mechanical beings appeared in a variety of videos. Most were serials by European filmmakers, but there was a fifteen-part American series named The Master Mystery. It starred magician Harry Houdini acting beside an unnamed actor dressed as a robot. 

The first feature length movie featuring A.I. was the German film Metropolis. It aired in 1927 and was about an automaton that attempts to take over a city. Except for the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, the first full-length American film featuring a robot was The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Though the main character was a humanoid alien named Klaatu, he had a giant robot companion that he called Gort. Klaatu’s purpose in visiting Earth was to warn humans against misusing nuclear weapons. If they disobeyed, he threatened, Gort and others like him would come back and destroy them. It’s considered good for its time, but it was similar to other early science fiction in that it was low-budget and shot in black and white.

Forbidden Planet, which came out in 1956 represented a big step forward in science fiction. It was in color and presented a robot named Robby (a man dressed in a costume) who actually performed alongside the other characters. Robby was a hit among science fiction fans and became the prototype for automatons in TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Lost in Space throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Then in the 1970s, screenwriters added another layer to robots by giving them a human appearance and friends. Good examples of this are C3P0 and R2D2 in Star Wars. As was true for movies about aliens, casts of science fiction films started to include A-List actors like Bruce Dern (Silent Running), Yul Brynner (Westworld), and Charlton Heston (Soylent Green). In the better ones, sets were extravagant, special effects were awesome, and cinematography was riveting (2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Some of those movies continue to entertain audiences in the Twenty First Century, often blending alien encounters, robotics, and other technological advancements (Zachary Tomlinson, 11/3/2018 in Interesting Engineering link, below). In my continuation of Part 1 of this two-part series, I discuss the film Runaway, which has some eerily predictive robotics.

https://www.filmsite.org/robotsinfilm1.html

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/artificial-entertainment-a-century-of-ai-in-film

 

Runaway-1984

The producer, writer, and director of Runaway was Dr. Michael Crichton, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and prolific author of fiction, non-fiction, screen plays, and essays. His best-known film was probably Jurassic Park, taken from a novel by the same name, but he had others. They include The Andromeda Strain (which often crossed my mind when the pandemic started), Coma, The Great Train Robbery, Sphere, and Westworld. For this movie, Crichton sought Tom Selleck to play protagonist police Sergeant Jack Ramsey. Though he worked primarily in television, Selleck was a seasoned actor who was well-known due to his work as Private Detective Lance White on The Rockford Files, and Thomas Magnum on Magnum P.I. The most important aspect of this character is that although he is an exceptional police officer, he has vertigo which interferes with his job performance. In fact, since a perp escaped by running into a tall building, then went on to murder a family of six, Ramsey has been relegated to the robotic division where he deals with dysfunctional technology.

Crichton didn’t specify the year this story takes place, but it’s in an era where people have come to depend on and trust scientific inventions. Even though the other officers don’t hold Jack’s duties in high esteem, he takes the job seriously because robots keep society running, and it could be disastrous if they break down. As the movie opens, he’s having a typical day. A robot that is working in a cornfield is destroying the crops it is supposed to cultivate. When robots go rogue, the police label them “runaways,” and Jack is the only person who knows how to manage them quickly and efficiently.

After resolving the case, Jack returns to the police station where he meets Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes) who is excited to be his new partner. Jack doesn’t understand her elation because the job is pretty routine, but unbeknownst to him, that is about to change. As he and Karen are getting acquainted, a police officer calls Jack to come help at the home of the Johnson family. The robot has gotten a gun, shot the mother and one of the children, and is holding Mr. Johnson (Chris Mulkey) and the couple’s baby hostage. Even though he hasn’t dealt with anything like this before, Jack handles the situation with aplomb. He sends a “floater camera,” (which is a clone that Crichton imagined decades before they existed), into the residence to locate the robot, a disappointingly benign looking box with arm like appendages that are holding a knife and a gun. Jack sneaks into the house and disables the machine with a laser, then opens it up and finds an altered chip. Before he can study it, however, the robot self-destructs. Jack looks for Mr. Johnson to ask him about this anomaly, but the man has disappeared, leaving his baby behind. Once he’s wrapped things up there, Jack, a widower and single parent, goes home to his son Bobby (Joey Cramer) and the nanny/housekeeper robot, Lois (voice Marilyn Schreffler), that takes care of them. Even though it was an unusually rough day, he feels surprisingly good because he handled a tricky situation well.

It soon becomes evident that rather than being unique, however, the event at the Johnson’s house is just the first of a string of incidents involving technology run amok. In one instance, a stacker robot at a construction site goes haywire, and at another, robotic spiders crawl around and kill people by injecting them with acid. The genius that invented these creations is Dr. Charles Luther (Gene Simmons, yep, the guy from Kiss) who also makes ammunition, including bombs, missals, and smart bullets. After investigating further, Jack determines that Mr. Johnson is a scientist and has contracted with Dr. Luther to make templates of the smart bullets’ chips, so they can be mass-produced and sold on the black market. No one, however, seems to know where Mr. Johnson, Dr. Luther, or the templates are.

Jack takes Karen along when he goes to interview Mr. Johnson’s secretary, Jackie Rogers (Ally Kirsty). However, when they get to the office, they learn that another robot is holding her hostage. As a rule, people can control these machines with voice commands, but when Jack orders it to stand down, it ignores him. As a last resort, he throws a cover over the machine and smashes it to bits. Once she can leave, Jackie runs out of the room, dropping her purse along the way. Jack retrieves it and finds that it’s filled with the templates he is looking for. Realizing that the secretary must be involved in whatever is going on, he takes her to the police station and asks where the doctor is. At first, she pretends not to know, but eventually, she admits that he’s in a meeting at the Ritz Hotel with his buyers. Jack, Karen, and a backup unit rush to the hotel to interrogate the man. Unfortunately, he sees them coming and opens fire, then escapes to the roof where a helicopter is waiting. Jack is unscathed, but Dr. Luther manages to hit Karen with a missal that lodges unexploded in her arm. As the doctor flies away, Jack risks his life to deactivate the bullet before it kills both of them.

In an odd turn of events, the police chief (G. W. Bailey) consults a psychic about Dr. Luther. The only thing she can tell him is that Ramsey and the depraved doctor are cosmically linked. As if he can hear the conversation, Luther calls and demands that Jack bring both the secretary and the templates to him. When they get to the meeting place, however, Luther shoots and kills her. Jack gets away, leading the doctor to hack into the city’s computer system to acquire his personnel file. Unaware of the danger he's in, Jack takes Karen to his house for dinner, only to find Lois severely damaged, and Bobby gone. While he is asking the robot what happened, Luther calls and offers to trade Bobby for the templates. Jack agrees, but not wanting to endanger Karen further, he keeps the location of the meeting secret. However, Karen discovers that Lois records all information in her memory bank. She plays it back, then hurries after him.

The location of the meeting is a construction site with a high-rise building that arches hundreds of feet into the pitch-black sky. Dr. Luther is holding Bobby hostage at the top, and the only way Jack can get to them is by taking an elevator that has open sides and an unsecured gate. That is as far as I’ll go. This movie may have flaws (like naming the main character and the secretary Jack and Jackie), but the ending is too scrumptiously nerve-wracking to ruin.

 

Summary

Like Starman, Runaway encountered problems during production, but it didn’t have to do with too many writers spoiling the pot or directors walking out. Instead, The producer was also The writer and The director, meaning he made all the decisions. He had seasoned actor Tom Selleck to play the lead, but the budget was only eight million dollars (Starman’s was twenty-four million) so many of the actors were not well known. Cynthia Rhodes, a gymnast, and professional dancer had only appeared in a few movies and music videos, and wouldn’t portray Penny in Dirty Dancing, her most famous role, until 1987. Gene Simmons had appeared on a couple of TV shows, but this was his first movie. Trusting the singer’s instincts, Crichton let him decide how to portray Dr. Luther. Rather than seeing him as evil, Simmons interpreted the scientist as a greedy man that will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Kirsty Ally was also a novice at the time and audiences would not readily recognize her until she appeared as Rebecca Howe in Cheers and Mollie in Look Who’s Talkin.’

https://www.thelist.com/818208/the-truth-about-the-actress-who-plays-penny-in-dirty-dancing/

 

One thing Crichton did particularly well, however, was portray a world where humans control the machines. This differed from movies such as the 1984 blockbuster hit The Terminator, where robots destroy humanity and take over the planet. To the contrary, Crichton’s machines neither have a sense of self nor possess an agenda. Therefore, it isn’t science that poses a threat in Runaway, but the dark heart of an avaricious man and his henchmen.

 

 

Conclusion

Although critics and audiences give Starman higher ratings than Runaway, I found the latter film very intriguing. Crichton wanted to convey a warning that we need to worry, not about technology, but about it falling into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, rather than being a romantic and at times funny road trip movie, in ways Starman’s plot is akin to a horror film. The difference between it and other Carpenter movies is that the threat is not a ghoul like Michael Myers in Halloween, or a monster from outer space like in The Thing. It’s an alien with the persona of a handsome charismatic man that will do anything to catch his ride home. What makes him especially scary, though, is that he manages to win over his victim, the audience, and even the members of the Academy. In my opinion, Jeff Bridges deserved the Oscar for his portrayal of Starman because he gave such a convincing performance.

I also really impressed with the special effects in Runaway. The technology in Starman primarily consists of a blue light floating across a lake, an alien turning himself into a human, and silver balls that bring a dead deer and woman back to life. Even the spaceship that comes to get Starman is nothing spectacular. The one in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was much more impressive. The special effects in Runaway, on the other hand, were really innovative for their time. My favorite was the foot long spider that injected Luther's enemies with acid. However, there are also dog robots that sniff out explosives, and bullets that can track their targets around corners and behind objects. Even the boxlike robots, which don’t look very impressive compared to the androids in movies like Star Wars and Blade Runner, actually resemble the machines that Unimate and the Japanese built. Crichton also introduced technology that seemed unimaginable in the 1980s, but that we take for granted today. Examples are tablets, voice recognition software, smart bombs, and drones. Thus, I would say although audiences like Starman better, even with its flaws, Runaway is more believable.

https://robots.ieee.org/robots/unimate/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6lrMQCymgA

 

Next time, I will revisit Amazon Women on the Moon and The Fifth Element, which are both fun sci-fi flicks. I’ll see you in a couple of months, and in the meantime, exercise your own fabulous imaginations.

Sheehan out.