Formative Film 9: 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'

An autobiography in movies by BRAD WEISMANN

  

Colossus: The Forbin Project

Dir: Joseph Sargent

Prod: Stanley Chase

Scr: James Bridges

Phot: Gene Polito

Arvada Plaza Theater

9374 W. 58^th Ave.

Arvada, Colorado

April 8, 1970

 “Things are going so well we don’t know what to do with ourselves!” – Dr. Johnson (Martin E. Brooks), in Colossus

“A robot has killed a contractor at one of Volkswagen's production plants in Germany, the automaker said Wednesday. . . . initial conclusions indicate that human error was to blame, rather than a problem with the robot . . .” Associated Press, July 1, 2015

Trouble in paradise.

Suspicions about the rise of the machines, artificial intelligence that outstrips humanity and takes over or obliterates us, are nothing new. They are the mainspring of popular franchises such as Terminator and The Matrix, but long before Skynet and Ultron, the paranoia extends back back back in our little mammal minds. Back culturally at least to Mary Shelley and the Frankenstein nightmare of rogue creation, and to Samuel Butler, who wrote in his 1863 essay “Darwin among the Machines”:

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

The word sabotage has one origin theory that claims it comes from the wooden shoes or sabots that French and Dutch workers threw into the newly-invented 18^th century automated looms that were taking away their jobs. In 1779, an English weaver named Ned Ludd became a legendary figure, and an eponym, when he angrily destroyed two knitting engines. From 1811 through 1814, England’s Luddite movement destroyed factories and machinery. At one point, more English soldiers were fighting disgruntled workers at home than were overseas stalking Napoleon. The derogatory phrase still designates anti-technology activists.

The 20^th Century is rife with similar speculation, from Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. to Harry Piel’s little-seen 1934 German film The Master of the World, through reams of pulp sci-fi fiction, radio, and TV worldwide. Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, formulated in 1942, and Harlan Ellison’s 1963 classic short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” each spawned (Ellison would say ripped off, of course, and he’s right) successive generations of nightmares about the takeover of our cybernetic children.

Sci-fi novelist D.F. Jones is a great storyteller, and the first volume of his entertaining Colossus trilogy is adapted faithfully here by the talented James Bridges, who would go on to write the screenplays for films such as The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, and Urban Cowboy.

The story poses a huge challenge for a director. It’s mostly talk – well-written, thought-provoking talk, but still talk. You are basically shooting bunches of people in various rooms, watching a 1970-level supercomputer chatter, snarl, and ping its way through its reels of magnetic tape like an irascible pinball machine.

Director Joe Sargent was a workhorse in film and TV, best known for the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and he solves the problem by shooting almost as one would an old-school live TV drama – bouncing from medium shots to tight close-ups, using a few pans and push-throughs to maintain a sense of movement in these very static setups. The closer framing and rhythmic editing gives the film a pulse and propels the viewer along with it.

Composer Michel Colombier amassed more than 100 screen credits, but is surprisingly little-known. His score for Colossus is remarkable – composed of alternating passages of percussion and slashing, pulsing, plucked strings, a profane intersection of Ravel and Steve Reich. It punctuates the action perfectly, points the narrative forward, and keeps the tension high.

The conceit is well-constructed. Sometime in the near future (OK excepting for the legacy computer hardware), Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden) invents a supercomputer, Colossus, that will defend the United States from attack by, what else? The Soviet Union! Or course there is more than a hint of the twin Cold War films of 1964, Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove here. The president is a Kennedy lookalike played by Gordon Pinsent, who is enormously pleased until, oh, about five minutes after being turned on, Colossus makes like an cranky dad who yells “PULL OVER!” and takes over the wheel of civilization from foolish mankind. Using the threat of nuclear annihilation, Colossus hooks up with its Soviet computer counterpart and takes control of the world quite efficiently.

Of course, we were smart enough to ensconce the damn thing inside a mountain in Colorado, making it completely invulnerable, a modern-day dragon. Yes, that placement is supposed to be modeled directly on the Cold War-era NORAD command center inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs; the government refused to give the film permission to shoot second-unit footage there. Sharp eyes will recognize the Colossus entrance as the redressed Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley.

Eric Braeden as Forbin

A key in the success of the film is the believability of Eric Braeden as Forbin. Born Hans Gudegast, he got his start as the last of the post-World-War-II Teutonic bad guys, working extensively in film and in TV shows such as Combat! and The Rat Patrol. In Colossus, he would demonstrate a reserved, leading-man integrity and charisma that would mark him for later success, most notably in a 35-year career as villainous Victor Newman on the soap opera The Young and the Restless.

Braeden changed his name, but not his accent, an important choice in Colossus that reminds us of the Faustian bargain America made with many émigré German scientists who collaborated with the Nazis, but whose sins were forgiven in the name of national security. Forbin, the pure digital scientist, creates a ruthless tyrant that implements terror via an implacable logic, much like the ideological dictators of the 20^th century – Hitler, Mao, Stalin – who proved supreme at scientifically calculated mass murders on an industrial scale.

(Please note, all Aryan-German scientists in film are amoral; however, Jewish-German scientists in film all possess consciences, rational doubts, AND dispense really good spiritual advice. They are like rabbis with PhDs. At our house we call this the Sam Jaffe syndrome.)

Sam Jaffe as kindly Professor Jacob Barnhardt in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951).

Colossus becomes more despotic and violent as the film proceeds, but the human players never play a scene over the top. No one blanches, makes a stirring speech, or breaks down; the scenes are buzzing with the aura of intelligent people working in quiet desperation, trying to defeat something that can think faster than they can. Only Forbin’s final rebellion causes him to emote.

Other highlights: the supporting cast is a who’s-who of solid and recognizable character actors. Susan Clark is Forbin’s fellow scientist and nominal love interest. Look close and you’ll see Marion Ross, Georg Stanford Brown, James Hong, and Martin Brooks (the last bet remembered as Dr. Rudy from TV’s Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman franchise). Dolph Sweet plays his usual military man. Bill Schallert, who normally plays the most genial of dads, finally gets to play someone cynical here, the CIA director.

As the film moves along, Colossus grows senses – first pervasive audio surveillance, then a worldwide network of camera eyes, followed by a grating, menacing electric monotone of a voice (played by radio and voiceover legend Paul Frees). It is pushing its own evolution forward, and demands the removal of the population of Cyprus so the island can be converted into a new structure for its expanded self. When asked how to move half a million people immediately, “If man cannot solve that problem, I can,” it intones humorlessly.

The novel ends with Colossus asserting that mankind will come to love its reign, an echo of Orwell’s 1984. (Slyly, the movie shows a pudgy teenager listening to Colossus’s speech clad in – a Colossus T-shirt! Obviously the supercomputer is hip to the whole merchandising angle as well.)

The filmmakers end the film at an impasse of wills, an ambivalence that is much stronger than any contrived happy ending could be. Like Melville’s Bartleby, Forbin’s only capability in the end is refusing to cooperate, to say no, if ultimately unable even to turn on his creation and at least try to monkeywrench it.

Persistent through they may be, we continue to beat the machines in our fictional worlds, or least fight them to a draw, or go down defiantly. Wishful thinking? Artificial intelligence is so deeply encoded into First World reality that, if it is harmful, it may prove impossible to remove it without killing the patients. Films like Colossus celebrate our presumed ability to continue to choose.

NEXT TIME: The 10,000 transgressive pleasures of the original Vanishing Point

Jurassic Snark: 13 Ways of Smirking at a Blockbuster

Chris Pratt running from his new acquaintance in "Jurassic World" -- it's all our own damn fault.

 I liked it, actually. Yes, I did. Yikes.

“Jurassic World” is enjoying the biggest movie opening of all time. It’s a remake in all but name of the original “Jurassic Park,” Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster about genetically revived dinosaurs and the CGI mayhem that ensues. Many of my fellow critical pygmies are busy jabbing their tiny javelins into its ankles. I’m going to join in – it won’t accomplish anything, it’s just fun.

To criticize the most successful film ever made to date takes the temerity of an ant attempting to upend a bulldozer (although with “Ant-Man” coming out soon, that image may become obsolete). Spielberg is the most successful storyteller in human history. You want to give him a few notes? It’s not going to impact the film’s success, impact, or sequels. And in fact the movie’s lowest-common-denominator appeal is an important choice that presages what your next 30 years of mainstream films is going to look like, whether you like it or not.

But first, there’re so many little things to carp on! In no particular order:

1. Why is Chris Pratt staring intently at everything at all times during the film? I know his character has eyelids.
2. In the post-Nolan era, many directors are framing their fight scenes much more closely than they used to, and editing more rapidly. The result is the action is choppy, and the antagonists difficult to differentiate. This vague thrashing about plagues most of “Jurassic World.” (Can the dinosaurs wear T-shirts with numbers next time?) The movie crams a number of compensatory schematics, maps, video imbeds, and vitals charts into the film. They don’t help that much. It is still wise to have a clean narrative line in a fight sequence. 
3. It’s profoooooooooooundly sexist. In imitation of Laura Dern’s character in the original, Dallas Howard’s Claire, the director of Jurassic World, is a driven professional. Claire is lost in tasteful businesswear and high heels in a theme park that is, in parallel incongruity, set in the middle of a dangerous, stinking jungle. Unlike her married sister, whose two sons she hosts absentmindedly at Jurassic World until all hell breaks loose, is not a complete woman. She has no man she has borne no children, evidently: she just has a career. Tragedy. Fortunately, she becomes a tough ‘n’ tearful surrogate mother by movie’s end, and gains hot dino-training boyfriend who never blinks. That this change should still be seen as a viable issue to drive character on is, in the literal sense of the word, retarded. 
4. Speaking of relationships, it seems that confronting fanged death is really good for them. Two alienated young brothers unite, becoming suddenly in touch with their feelings and capable of articulating them at the same time, something which has NEVER HAPPENED. EVER. Also, it looks like their parents were in the process of getting a divorce, but evidently being helpless bystanders at the potential gruesome dismemberings of their offspring snapped them back together like a couple of Legos. Thanks, T-Rex. 
5. Really? You played the gifted child card? Is that a thing now? Making younger brother Gray a sensitive savant does nothing to make him cuter, but does provide a helpful funnel for exposition and background. 
6. The racial hierarchy persists. The leads are white, and live. The head bad guy is white (a suitably greasy Vincent D’Onofrio) – dies last. Male lead’s helper is black – almost gets killed. The well-intentioned billionaire owner of the park is from India – dies about halfway. And BD Wong as the token Asian smart guy – saving him for sequel. The careful parceling out of subsidiary roles to various ethnicities gives the semblance of balance without actually providing any. 
7. However, the ethnic distribution among the various park workers, security personnel, and armed bullyboys that serve as Dino Chow throughout the movie is pretty fair. It’s easy to track their character’s ethnicity, as that’s about all we determine before their infrared GoPros show them being eaten, dragged into the brush, mutilated, etc. It’s soooo CUTE when their individual vital-signs readouts go flat, one by one! 
8. Speaking of killing, what in the hell is the point of killing Zara, Claire’s personal assistant, in a gratuitous sequence? Actress Katie McGraw should get dibs on a decent future role for putting up with this. 
9. Another important theme of “Jurassic World” is the curse of middle management. You can’t win in that precarious position. You know how it is – you’re getting bad data from the ground troops, and the big bosses want results now and don’t care how. You make decisions that seem good in the moment, but unleash devouring herds and flocks of genetically engineered primeval beasts. A little organizational therapy, a retreat, or just some trust exercises in the office might have prevented this outcome. 
10. “Jurassic World” is self-sealingly meta, answering its own arguments before they are raised. It creates a theme park on Isla Nublar just like any of the ones we might go to – complete with restaurants, hotels, shopping, leisure activities, etc. – the crapulous carapace of the entertainment experience .The park is a cookie-cutter copy of the capitalist shitstorm that plagues almost every tourist destination, natural feature, or activity or sight of interest on the planet. There is a Starbucks, and a Brookstone, and Samsung gets its name slapped on an exhibition hall. Supposedly, the creative team did this as a commentary. Then why didn’t they do more with the premise? Georre Romero would at least have shown a pterodactyl eating one of those hopelessly overpriced gadgets like the Motorized Grill Brush with Steam! The Consumer Society consumed. “Jurassic World” wants to have it all – it wants to be hip and ironic and earnest and political and message-y and neutral and cutting-edge and story-driven, all without losing anchorage to the lowest common denominator. 
11. There is logic. Then there is movie logic Then there is blockbuster logic. Everything is a component, including people (note none of the tourists are killed; they are simply chased about, wounded or damaged purely for decorative effect). Do the velociraptors have shifting loyalties? Why? Because the movie needs it. Does Indominus Rex need a special skill? Then we can backfill by announcing that its genetic engineering borrows from many species, that allow it to mask its heat signature (used twice), camouflage itself (used once), and so on. If a song and dance had been needed, I’m sure mad scientist BD Wong and company could have spliced in a little Al Jolson. The most pathetic acknowledgement of this logic is given by Larry, the Loveable Loser and Living Plot Point at Jurassic World’s HQ console, who stays behind during the island’s evacuation why? “Someone has to stay behind.” Exactly. Larry knows his place in the world. 
12. What the movie does get right is that it is totally down with the fact that it is what Ebert called “a thrill machine.” Like Indominus Rex, it does what it’s engineered to do, and it will plow through anything that gets in its way to achieve that goal. It is part of what I think of as the New Silence in cinema, a style of filmic storytelling that will play anywhere, just as silent films were capable of. To maximize profitability, films have to be able to be viewed in any country in the world. Let’s get real – if something in a movie won’t play in China, for instance, it gets removed. This restricts controversy, complexity, ideas, ambiguity, replacing them with sure bets – the template forged by Spielberg 40 years ago with “Jaws,” and perfected since. Film as video game, characters as action figures, very mechanical. A to B to C, beat after beat. Toning down any idiosyncrasies, creating a smooth and palatable smoothie of a film, is the legacy America will bequeath to the world over the next few decades. With the independent-film world toiling along in the margins, we may soon be in a mainstream film world composed primarily of CGI blockbusters and boring-ass Oscar-seeking historical dramas may exist. 
13. “You didn’t ask for reality, you asked for more teeth.” Dr. Wu’s snide comeback to the park’s owner encapsulates the vicious-cycle nature of the film’s problem, while negating any negative response to it. If only people didn’t want to see scarier dinosaurs, they wouldn’t have created a big giant scary one that happens to be a serial killer. Ah, if only our first-world appetites weren’t so difficult to sate. And hey if we don’t like “Jurassic World,” that’s our fault too. We wanted more spectacle, didn’t we? The stakes get pushed higher and higher with every film, and Hollywood will definitely do whatever it has to do to keep our attention. You lousy tourists/moviegoers, you brought this on yourselves.

 When does it end? I am sure we will get sick of superhero movies long before the projected interlocking production cycles of these huge fantasy epics are completed, and so it will be with the revived franchise of “Jurassic” – we will keep running that formula until it wears out and the zeitgeist demands something different. But people raised on lazy, condescending, unchallenging storytelling have a hard time processing more interesting work.

“Jurassic World” succeeds on its own terms. It’s not trying to change the world; it just wants to entertain us. And that’s fine. I just think we need a little more fiber in our cultural diet. 

The Limitation Game: How inaccurate does a historical film have to be to succeed?

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing -- lies as truth?

By BRAD WEISMANN

“When you lose use the language of ‘fact-checking’ to talk about a film, I think you’re sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how arts works. You don’t fact-check Monet’s Water Lilies. That’s not what water lilies look like, that’s what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That’s the goal of the piece.” – Graham Moore

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” – Mark Twain

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” – Flannery O’Connor

First of all, let’s get over our collective and recurring indignation at the fact that historically inaccurate films have been made, are being made, and will continue to be made. The furor over such recent films as The Imitation Game, Selma, and American Sniper ceased resonating shortly after this year’s Oscars ceremony. Certainly those who film writer Bilge Ebiri calls “historical-accuracy hit squads” (1) are gearing up for the next assault wave, which will begin as soon as the historical-drama Oscar-bait dramas start issuing forth in the fall.

Long before D.W. Griffith turned the Civil War inside out in The Birth of a Nation in 1915, reality on film was entirely malleable. The Edison Company’s documentary footage of American troops going to Cuba in 1898 included a spliced-in reenactment of battle. (Military veterans would later become the most vocal critics of war films that glamorized combat or presented completely spurious scenarios.) Later, in the sanitized Hollywood biopics of the 1930s and ‘40s, films like Yankee Doodle Dandy, Sergeant York, Young Mr. Lincoln, Night and Day, They Died with Their Boots On, and Words and Music set the gold standard for repurposing history for entertainment and/or ideological purposes. (The representation of Custer, in particular, changes with the times -- Richard Mulligan plays him as a psychotic popinjay in 1970's Little Big Man; in the 1991 Son of the Morning Star, Gary Cole plays him as flawed but relatable.)

Errol Flynn as Custer -- one heck of a guy, according to 1945's They Died with Their Boots On.

There are a host of volumes out there on historical films and their shortcomings, most entertainingly George MacDonald Fraser’s The Hollywood History of the World, and a notable website, History vs. Hollywood (historyvshollywood.com), that continues to vet film and TV projects large and small that purport to serve as history’s handmaidens.

A movie’s primary mission is to prevent the audience form ceasing to watch it, and no one should be apologetic about that. Imitation Game writer Moore talks about how many historical films are bogged down with a boring literalness – a point well scored in Ricky Gervais’s 2009 fantasy The Invention of Lying, in which a truthful world makes movies that just consist of people reading facts out of a book into the camera.

The dynamics of good story are of essence different than the random jumble of banalities, irritations, and epiphanies that make up daily life. Our storytelling consciousness demands a protagonist, a conflict, obstacles overcome, denouements inflicted. We need closure. We like to see someone win. We want meaning.

And by golly, if it’s not there we will insert it. James Thurber’s classic short story “The Greatest Man in the World” describes a heroic flyer that is the antithesis of the ideal represented by Charles Lindbergh. He is so crass and uncouth, in fact, that the powers that be deem it better to shove him out a high window and burnish his image posthumously. John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the notions of truth, fame, and manliness are put witheringly under the microscope. At the end of the film’s revelations, the newspaper editor to whom they are made coolly replies, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Senator Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) gazes at the coffin of the an whose heroics made him famous in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Our addiction to truth is provisional and value-specific. We want to know that what we are watching is “based on a true story” (David O. Russell’s recent film American Hustle has an opening title card that declares, refreshingly, “Some of this actually happened”). However, we want the “truth” to conform to our sense of decorum – whether religious, political, moral, or ideological. Liberals hated American Sniper; conservatives hated Milk. Reality shows are scripted, sculpted, the loose ends snipped, the irritating unresolved conflicts ignored.

In fiction, we need to round off our experience with a wedding, a killing, a conversion. My quibbles with Imitation Game isn’t that it’s inaccurate; it’s that its dialogue is more wooden than Washington’s false teeth. In Imitation Game we get people stating their character points instead of showing them, of expository speeches below the level of a garden-variety BBC docudrama, a valedictory coda that never took place. We are told what to think and how to think it. It’s didactic filmmaking at its condescending worst.

Compare it to Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play Breaking the Code, which takes similar latitude with facts, but produces a much more complex and nuanced portrait of Turing (fortunately, Derek Jacobi reprised his stage role as Turing for a 1996 BBC adaptation). By doing so, it doesn’t build Turing into a gay proto-hero, or elide criticism of society’s continuing inability to tolerate difference, both of which I feel Imitation Game does.

But hey, Imitation Game made money, which is the bottom line. Right? I will never have any problem with creating income-generating work that helps people feed their families. And many will argue that any distortions are justified in creating a narrative that people can buy into – an entry point for learning more about the topic.

Was Cole Porter gay? Not if Cary Grant plays him. Night and Day, 1946.

This to me seems like a slippery slope, as difficult as attempting a career as a classical conductor after only whipping once through the Reader’s Digest “100 Most Beautiful Melodies” compilation. We think of FDR as a loveable scamp because he sings in Annie, and because Bill Murray played him. 50 years ago, Roosevelt was still portrayed as a demi-god, in the famous Ralph Bellamy Sunrise at Campobello interpretation. Perhaps half a century hence he will be as demonized as only my Republican ancestors were capable of stigmatizing him (my grandfather was the only guy in the state of Nebraska to vote for Goldwater).

Think about the poor saps that had to play Stalin. The Soviet dictator had not one but two actors, Mikheil Gelovani and Aleksei Dikily, who, in film after patriotic film, were inserted as Stalin. The deification of the Stalin character helped to imprint a cult of personality diametrically opposed to the conscienceless killer American students have been taught he was.

Mikheil Gelovani as Stalin

After Stalin died, all these roles were banned or snipped out of the offending films, and the two actors couldn’t get work due to their association with the role. Since then, he’s been portrayed as a monster. In resurgent Russia, where popular affection for him remains, will he become a heroic screen character again? If need be, certainly.

So – how far do we take it? Do we retool every true story without remorse to make it work on screen? When does a story reach the tipping point, so that it becomes just one more piece of misinforming crap that has to be overcome to achieve real understanding? And do documentaries, with their similar need to compress and simplify, do any better? I moderated a dialogue on this topic once at the Boulder International Film Festival, among a dozen filmmakers of both narrative and documentary films. The talk went on for two fascinating, heated hours and could have gone on for much longer.

Every film sits somewhere on the spectrum between slavish attention to detail and complete disregard for same. When we dumb down a story so people will get it, we lose the not-so-inspiring but necessary wisdom that comes with maturity, the fact that real truth is far less inspiring than we would like it to be. 

1.     1.  Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, “Oscar Films and the Prison of Historical Accuracy,” 1/7/15.