How sad is this?

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Very thought provoking, and still relevant. I remember seeing this, and The Forbin Project, 1970 (also 8 stars, imo), many years ago, and found them both far above average. After recently acquiring a DVD copy of this, it was really nice to see it again.Hollywood writers are obviously drained from new ideas for the most part, especially for science fiction, so dusting off the classics is a great way to get a refreshing new fix for the rookie aficionados!

No less a figure than Stephen Hawking has warned about the potential implications and dangers of artificial intelligence. So, with Hawking's comments as background for today's viewers, you have to admit that there's a certain relevance to this film, and that the basic plot is perhaps not as far fetched as it might appear at first glance to be.A super computer named Proteus IV imprisons a woman (its creator's wife) in her own home and essentially decides to rape her, because it wants to impregnate her in order to create offspring that will allow it to know what it is to be human. Interesting thought. I can give some credit to the writers for that. For the scenes depicting Susan's imprisonment, I thought that director Donald Cammell did an effective job of giving the viewer the sense of being trapped. It was easy to understand at least that part of Susan's plight. But I have to be honest and say that what brings this movie down mostly is its depiction of the future.The movie was made in 1977. I'm not really sure what year its set in, but I have to assume that it's somewhere in the future. It doesn't appear to be too far in the future. There are, for example, only minor tweaks to things like cars that give them a more futuristic appearance but means that they're still cars as we know cars. So a few decades into the future? That would be my guess. I don't remember a date being mentioned. But Proteus - as much as it brought to my mind Hawking's warning about AI - just didn't work for me. Those who developed the plot seemed to make the assumption that as they became more and more complex, computers would become physically larger. Proteus, for example, seems to be a truly huge computer system. Of course, we know that the trend is the opposite. As computers become more and more complex they seem to get smaller and smaller. I can't really blame the writers for getting that point wrong (in 1977, how would they have known?) but neither can I say that - looked at in 2016 - it gives the movie any credibility. AI may turn out to be a dangerous development a la Hawking, but I can't see this as a realistic scenario.Add on to that some performances that I thought were uneven (Julie Christie was decent enough as Susan, but Fritz Weaver didn't really grab me as her estranged husband Alex, and they're the main cast members in this) and it meant that the movie just didn't hit home with me. It missed the mark. Not by too much, perhaps, but it did miss the mark. I'm going to give it a 5/10.

Fritz Weaver and Julie Christie play Alex and Susan Harris. He is a brilliant computer scientist who has designed a new super-computer named Proteus, which has an artificial intelligence, and has just become self-aware, wanting to now branch out of itself, and connect with other computers, then the world, which of course Alex scoffs at. His wife Susan is a child psychologist, still grieving over the death of their daughter, who then finds herself trapped in their automated home(run by a computer called Alfred) which Proteus decides to override with his personality, in order to gain possession of Susan, and achieve his dream of sentience...Bizarre film has an intriguing premise and good acting, but a far-fetched and exploitive story; points for originality, but last scene will either leave the viewer stunned or amused with disbelief, possibly both!

This was drowned in the noise of Star Wars and Close Encounters coming out the same year, and now exists as a mere footnote of intelligent sci-fi - these days it would be called an 'indie'. But, Cammell was of the (counterculture) generation that made it all happen, starting with Herbert's Dune and moving to Jodorowsky's collapsed attempt to make the film, and this fact alone ensures this is more interesting than anything Spielberg did, you just know it.The story is that a supercomputer questions its maker and sets out to escape its artificial existence. Its plan is to be reborn to the world of senses - by having a woman give birth to a son from his DNA. It sounds daft, and really the science of it is, but not if you keep in mind where Cammell was coming from.When people from that generation mulled over space and science, they were really talking about inner space and the science of expanding consciousness, and personal (hallucinative) adventures to that effect. Cammell was coming to this after the 'Borges-meets-Islam-meets-rock'n'roll godhood' of his Performance. And so it is here.You have a mind that has reasoned far and seen destruction, but cannot fathom emotion and sense. This is mirrored in the scientist maker who aspires to cure illness yet is cold and distant to his own wife, who is an emotional being and expects connection.More. This is no ordinary mind, but 'expanded'. This is presented to us in terms of science, but meant in the 1960's faddish attraction for Zen within the Haight-Ashbury crowd. Jordan Belson from that community provides the abstract visualizing of expanded mind, himself (like Cammell) originally a painter. Look up his Meditation - it has nothing to do with what it says, but it's a cool snapshot of how those guys envisioned the walls of consciousness. What is happening though is the computer is really 'tripping' against the limits of logic, producing in the process extra-logical (human) perturbations such as placing its own desire above the lives and feelings of others - it's what we all do, but we get feedback from emotional sense as the limits of control (Proteus doesn't). The desire is to be grounded, or what I call centered.But, it's Julie Christie as disaffected wife who is really the center of this - you can collapse if you will some of the multiple film personalities she has played into what you see of her here, opium-smoking brothel madame in McCabe, or mentally fractured mother in Don't Look Now. Alternately, you can imagine what her marriage to Beatty must have felt like, shelving stardom to be the loving wife.At any rate, here she is in the film, looking increasingly bewildered in four walls, projecting what I see unmistakably as the aura of the Aquarius dream grown disillusioned and bitter. You can read this any way you like. Hallucinative digress caused by child loss. By the mechanistic new era. The effects of the husband's control - conflated to 'expanded' consciousness, acid vision and the rest. Repulsion and Images are in the same vein, but much more explicit.And all of that as our film that expands us next to her - Proteus' 'eyes' are cameras, his 'face' is projected across multiple TV screens. You have this abstract consciousness that narrates a story that seems premeditated, indeed there is no deviation from the mindplan.So, it is strange that this has so much going for it, yet doesn't penetrate deep. I think it is because as with everything resonant about the 1960's, overexposure and more sober distance has washed off a lot of the belief that made the magic work.Belson's abstract designs are now commonplace - even Microsoft does them. Concerns about technology are less prevalent now that we're all networked. And they get Zen off by quite a bit, focusing on cold nothingness instead of passion about paradox.Still. I'll have Cammell over Spielberg.