August 20th, 2007
7. Proteus IV from Demon Seed (1977)
Computers in movies have lied, killed, and even calculated genocide—but it took 1977's Demon Seed to conceive of one committing rape. Like Rosemary's Baby with a hard drive subbing for Satan, Demon Seed casts Julie Christie as the wife of a smug egghead who invents a sentient supercomputer named Proteus IV. Within hours of its activation, Proteus decides to improve on the human race by forcibly impregnating Christie with some sort of digitized spermatozoa. In spite of goofy lines like "This earthquake retrieval program is very far out!" and "At the risk of being simplistic, what you're looking at is a quasi-neural matrix of synthetic RNA molecules," Demon Seed remains truly horrifying 30 years on—even though Proteus' cyber-child looks like Devo's Booji Boy crossed with Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man.
8. Bomb from Dark Star (1974)
Before Dan O'Bannon went on to grander things (like working on Star Wars' special effects and penning the story for Alien), he co-wrote and starred in the 1974 sci-fi farce Dark Star. The directorial debut of fellow USC student John Carpenter, Dark Star stands as the greatest space-stoner epic ever—even if the ending is bit of bummer, man. After lots of sloth-paced, proto-slacker ennui among the stars, O'Bannon's Sergeant Pinback—a janitor thrust into the thankless job of demolishing planets—tries and fails to talk a computerized bomb out of destroying the ship. The bomb's epistemological ruminations on "false data" are straight out of a particularly lame section of Philosophy 101, but they supply a neat, reverential twist on the "Does not compute!" theme so loved by Isaac Asimov and Lost In Space.
9. Icarus II from Sunshine (2007)
The latest in a long line of shipboard computers descended from 2001's HAL, the sweet-voiced Icarus II of Danny Boyle's Sunshine isn't malevolent like its ancestor—but that doesn't make it any less dangerous. Magnifying the human error of a dysfunctional crew on a last-ditch mission to save Earth, Icarus is like a maddening desktop times a million: It doesn't volunteer crucial information unless specifically asked for it, and its failsafe operations just make each meltdown worse. As the spacecraft nears the dying sun to revive it with a massive bomb, it's revealed (spoiler!) that a survivor of the lost Icarus I—Captain Pinbacker, surely a nod to Dark Star's Sergeant Pinback—went nuts and destroyed his own ship's computer in an act of self-sabotage. Really, though, can you blame him?
10. Unnamed computer from Weird Science (1985)
"We're in trouble, Gary. This is highly illegal." So says Ilan Mitchell-Smith to Anthony Michael Hall in Weird Science. Legality, though, is the least of their worries: Through some ham-fisted hacking and VDU voodoo, the horny dweebs feed data into a computer to craft a Bride Of Frankenstein-like girlfriend in the form of Kelly LeBrock. But after a little hormone-soaked, coming-of-age misogyny, things go to hell—the computer conjures a ticking nuclear missile that rises from the basement and through the roof of Mitchell-Smith's fancy suburban house. We'll let the phallic-symbol analysis pass.
11. Delos Control from WestWorld (1973)
Long before writer Michael Crichton had a mega-hit with Jurassic Park, he explored another story of systems breaking down and an amusement park turning against its creators with deadly force. Most people who've seen WestWorld probably remember Yul Brynner as a nigh-unstoppable killer robot chasing Richard Benjamin all over creation, but arguably, the real culprit is the central computer system controlling WestWorld and its sister theme parks, MedievalWorld and RomanWorld. When android snakes and android knights start attacking park guests nearly simultaneously, and the sex-bots start getting offended about the schlubs hitting on them, it's pretty clear that the central system—a big, clunky '70s idea of an ultra-modern computer network—is at fault. Maybe all those randomly blinking lights were overheating.
12. Mother from Alien (1979)
Unlike most of the computers in this list, the control computer on the refinery tug-ship Nostromo in Alien isn't sentient, evil, or even meaningfully malevolent. It—or maybe "she," given the female voice and the fact that the ship's crew all call her "Mother"—is just following the orders of the faceless Company, which is perfectly fine with everyone on board the Nostromo getting munched by aliens, as long as the ship makes it home with a sample xenomorph intact for research purposes. To that end, Mother calmly wakes Sigourney Weaver and company from hypersleep, sends them off in pursuit of a "distress call" that's actually a "stay away!" warning, and in the process, opens them up to messy alien death. Part of what makes dangerous computers in cinema so disquieting is the dispassion with which they carry out their evil acts. Mother is particularly creepy in her utter unchanging calm throughout the film, as she delivers her lies, then the fatal truth behind those lies, and finally, the news that the Nostromo is about to blow up, just because Weaver put it into self-destruct mode.
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