August 20th, 2007
1. Master Control Program, Tron (1982)
From 2001: A Space Odyssey to your parents' attempts to check their e-mail, there's been an ongoing war between humans and computers that have gotten too big for their binary britches. Save for maybe Windows '95, no computer-based foe has ever been as diabolical as Master Control Program, the code-munching behemoth in Disney's Tron. MCP loves to toss out to-the-decimal probabilities ("There's a 68.71 percent chance you're right") and calculations, mainly to boast about how much smarter he is than the losers who programmed him. (That's 2,415 times smarter, to be exact.) His plan for world domination involves sapping the collective power of other programs, then discarding them in gladiator-like game zones. Why? Because he can "run things 900 to 1,200 times better than any human." That level of efficiency sounds pretty evil.
2. Colossus, Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
Film in the 1970s had an oddly awestruck notion of the power that computers might hold over our daily lives, with much hand-wringing and nightmares over the potential loss of our free will to cold, unfeeling machines. That played into the era's Cold War fears as well, of course, since computer control was increasingly part of the strategy of both superpowers' nuclear arsenals. Human error might send a nuke to kill millions by accident or insane design, but could computers really be trusted not to make their own mistakes? The 1970 thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project imagines the horrifying consequences of abrogating human responsibility over our own fate, as the all-too-foolproof computer system Colossus develops its own sinister agenda almost immediately after the U.S. missile system is placed in its control. Developing an alliance with the Soviets' computer, Colossus decides that humans cannot be trusted to manage their own affairs, and takes over the world by threatening nuclear annihilation if its demands aren't met. Though the movie is frustratingly slow, like a Twilight Zone episode padded to 90 minutes, Colossus' malevolent pronouncements are truly chilling, proclaiming its new world order in a way worthy of a Bond villain: "I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content, or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours. Obey me and live. Disobey and die."
3. Edgar from Electric Dreams (1984)
As the classic Twilight Zone episode "From Agnes With Love" demonstrates, nothing is worse than a love triangle involving a machine. In this typically technophobic '80s comedy, young architect Lenny von Dohlen finds that out the hard way. After he accidentally pours champagne on his home computer "Edgar" (which naturally causes it to become sentient), it becomes his competition for the affections of his cellist neighbor, Virginia Madsen. Unfortunately for von Dohlen, Edgar (voiced by Bud Cort) is also one of those super-intelligent movie PCs that can not only recognize and respond to human speech, control household appliances like the blender, and trigger his home-security system, it can also compose music beautiful enough to bring Madsen to tears. Fortunately for von Dohlen, Edgar can also understand the powers of the human heart, and at the movie's end, it nobly sacrifices itself (by somehow sending a large electric current through its modem, around the world and back) to let von Dohlen and Madeline be together. Which just goes to show that inside of every evil machine lurks the misunderstood soul of a romantic.
4. ROK from Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)
In this underrated, Zucker-less follow-up to the landmark spoof, troubled pilot Robert Hays and his now off-again love Julie Hagerty—somehow promoted from stewardess to "computer officer"—are reunited aboard the Mayflower One, a lunar shuttle on its maiden voyage. In addition to dealing with Sonny Bono as a crazed suicide bomber, the mission hits a deadly snag when the ship's computer, ROK (an explicit parody of 2001's HAL 9000), short-circuits and develops a mind of its own, putting the ship on a direct course with the sun. Hagerty first discovers the problem by way of an overheat in the ship's core, which ROK denies, saying, "All systems compute as positive." Hagerty: "Not from where I'm sitting, they don't." ROK, lacking HAL's measured tact: "Cut the 'not from where I'm sitting' shit. It must be a human error." As Hagerty brings the computer "foul-up" to the attention of clueless captain Peter Graves, he responds the only way he knows how: "I see. Maybe you'd better run it through the computer."
5. Arcade from Arcade (1993)
The video box for this little-seen vehicle for early-'90s "it" girl Megan Ward boasts about its many scenes of "virtual reality action," but even the small cadre of stoners impressed by Mind's Eye videos were unlikely to be awed by the laughably clunky CGI realities created for this B-movie horror. More than a decade before the similarly themed Stay Alive (and only a year before Brainscan), Arcade concerns a group of teenagers—including Seth Green and My So-Called Life's A.J. Langer—led by the troubled Ward, battling the eponymous central villain of a video game that imprisons its players' souls. It's ultimately revealed that Arcade's designers somehow combined the game program with the brain cells of a little boy whose mother had beaten him to death. (This apparently was done to "make it more realistic.") Ward is able to defeat the game and release her friends by freeing the little boy, giving him some of the maternal love he so craves, and dealing with the loss of her own mother in the process. But forget the creepy, malevolent computer/child: The real nightmare-haunter here is the awkward sight of A Christmas Story's Peter Billingsley, all grown up and vainly trying to shake his child-star days by playing a know-it-all gamer.
6. HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey
Though HAL 9000 interfaces with a crew of astronauts through a set of smoldering lens-eyes, it's a master of lulling its human co-workers into a false sense of security. HAL is tediously methodical, like Stanley Kubrick himself, but considerably easier to get along with, even when it's trying to kill people. Calmly eliminating its ship's crew by turning off life-support systems or luring them into open space, HAL never raises or speeds his voice—lines like "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" produce a sedative chill that later inspired Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of the also-charming Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs.
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