The story of a robotic monster bent on vengeance, however, could perhaps be allowed to rest now for a year or so. We could have done with the likes of her in Westworld (which Crichton wrote almost simultaneously with Terminal Man), and the likes of Hodges too, for that matter. That Hodges (not Crichton) gives her a quote from The Wasteland and plants her cowering in the bathroom as the killer pounds up the stairs, seems an act of fate rather than of misjudgment she has the exact vulnerability for either extreme. And if George Segal has little opportunity to do more than roll his eyes and intensify his air of dejected preoccupation, it’s pleasing to see Joan Hackett again, coping in wistful horror with a world of wisecracking chauvinist surgeons and suicidal patients. In slow-motion, accompanied by Bach, and rounded off by close-ups of the formal patterns of flowing liquid, the sequence ends in a kind of vulgarised beauty.Įven at its worst – in the crude suspense of a fist breaking through a locked door or the colourful but idiotic scenes at the cemetery – Terminal Man certainly makes good watching. We are in for high-gloss mayhem – all splashing blood and punctured waterbed and fluttering rose-petals. Elsewhere, as in the big murder scene, he simply seems to have tried too hard: a parrot trembles in its cage, an extract from Them whistles suspensefully on the television set, a girl paints her fingernails black, and the killer’s eyes snap open. Hodges constantly poses white figures against black, or stands them awkwardly among blocks of monochrome furniture, incompatible with physical or mental comfort the listless party sequence and the frankly unbelievable environment of the psychiatrist’s home are settings that reinforce the sense that man is gradually programming himself to extinction.Īt times like the splendid tracking shot across row after row of desk screens on which Segal is describing his fears of mechanical superiority, Hodges is impressively precise in style. ![]() For the opening shot, a helicopter rises slowly through darkness until its spotlight dazzles the camera lens George Segal, bound for computerised zombiehood, is wheeled from the night into the false daylight of the hospital, eventually to be swallowed again by darkness as the camera pans down the walls of his grave. On the surface, most obviously, it’s about light and dark, a formal counterbalance used by Hodges in a sometimes effective, sometimes pretentious manner. On one level, Terminal Man is about vanity, its causes and its consequences. Hodges picks up Crichton’s cues and improvises superbly: as orderlies snigger coarsely in the corners in the tradition of Frankenstein’s imbecilic assistants, the brain surgeons posture with fragile arrogance, vomiting with terror before the operation, smug at its apparent success, and stunned when it goes wrong. Man is not, Crichton would remind us (like Asimov and Clarke and, dare one say, Mary Shelley before him), an exclusively rational creature to ignore his innate perversity is to increase the chances of breakdown. Their maverick victim is one of the four million Americans still behaving irrationally in a society where computerisation toils for order and method. In their crystal labyrinth of screens, monitors and mirrors, his hospital characters tremble with the unrecognised expectation of failure, checking printouts like horoscopes before daring to operate. With the spectacular assistance of Richard Kline’s photography, Hodges creates a mood of precarious efficiency that exactly catches the Crichton tone. ![]() The film of Terminal Man, adapted and directed with admirable assurance by Mike Hodges (who made Get Carter and Pulp), is faithful to both the best and the worst of Crichton. One recalls that in The Andromeda Strain and in Westworld, Crichton went sailing off into melodrama for the concluding scenes. ![]() He wanders the city in this malfunctioning condition, somewhat to the detriment of friends and acquaintances, until cured like so many renegades by a gunshot or two. A patient is fitted with a tiny computer connected to wires inserted in the brain, intended to nullify the homicidal effects of brain damage but his brain finds the computer’s signals so pleasant that he is soon stimulated into a state of perpetual violence. Crichton’s case is so plausible it sounds like yesterday’s news – more of a post-mortem than a warning (if warning it is there is a characteristic ambivalence here). ![]() In 1971, according to Michael Crichton, the first human could have been similarly implanted, and with his novel The Terminal Man he set out to demonstrate the method and the possible consequences of placing the brain under artificial control. In 1969 the first hapless chimpanzee was directly linked by radio to a computer which took over the functioning of its brain. SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
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