+1/2
The tagline: "Fear for her." She is Susan Harris (Julie Christie), estranged wife of the creator (Fritz Weaver) of Proteus IV, a thinking machine so far advanced of human capabilities that it devises a cure for leukemia in only four days. The difficulty: the movie has no suspense. Soon after being activated Proteus is questioning its human masters and seeking a way to escape its "box." It infiltrates an open terminal in Harris' house, usurps the environmod that controls its every function, and imprisons Susan so that it can use her body to produce a child. It is so powerful and so superior that Susan never has a chance. A better tagline would have been, "Listen to Proteus." For that is about all we can do, listen as it embellishes its egomaniacal fantasy of taking over the world. (We are, however, rewarded with one nice line, something about Proteus not wanting to make humans obsolete but to so improve on humanity as to make computers obsolete.) Based on the book by Dean Koontz -- the original version, of course, not his 1997 rewrite. Improves on the book in the sense that Proteus itself is slightly more adult (Koontz imagined it as an adolescent with dreams of becoming flesh so as to ravish women), but falls far short in that the book's best feature was the suspense of its first half. Adding nothing to the film are its special effects, which serve clunky machinery on the one hand, and are used, on the other, to produce meaningless light shows that are possibly intended to be profound.
The tagline: "Fear for her." She is Susan Harris (Julie Christie), estranged wife of the creator (Fritz Weaver) of Proteus IV, a thinking machine so far advanced of human capabilities that it devises a cure for leukemia in only four days. The difficulty: the movie has no suspense. Soon after being activated Proteus is questioning its human masters and seeking a way to escape its "box." It infiltrates an open terminal in Harris' house, usurps the environmod that controls its every function, and imprisons Susan so that it can use her body to produce a child. It is so powerful and so superior that Susan never has a chance. A better tagline would have been, "Listen to Proteus." For that is about all we can do, listen as it embellishes its egomaniacal fantasy of taking over the world. (We are, however, rewarded with one nice line, something about Proteus not wanting to make humans obsolete but to so improve on humanity as to make computers obsolete.) Based on the book by Dean Koontz -- the original version, of course, not his 1997 rewrite. Improves on the book in the sense that Proteus itself is slightly more adult (Koontz imagined it as an adolescent with dreams of becoming flesh so as to ravish women), but falls far short in that the book's best feature was the suspense of its first half. Adding nothing to the film are its special effects, which serve clunky machinery on the one hand, and are used, on the other, to produce meaningless light shows that are possibly intended to be profound.
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