KLAATU YOU (41)

By: Marc Weidenbaum
October 7, 2020

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite pre-Star Wars science fiction movies.

COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT | d. JOSEPH SARGENT | 1970

By all appearances, Colossus: The Forbin Project dispenses with much of its production budget during the film’s opening minutes. The largely wordless sequence depicts a lone scientist surveying massive banks of computers. As he (Forbin) steps across a retractable bridge to the outside world, the gleam in his eye is that of a new parent. This (Colossus) is his baby.

The movie takes place in the tantalizingly near-ish future, but it was released in distant 1970, so those computers are truly monolithic. Miniaturization and processing power don’t correlate here. Instead, the mainframe equipment recedes as far as the eye can see, in picture-perfect perspective like nothing so much as the floors of some soulless federal prison complex.

Soulless, but quite stylish. Audiences at the time might have noted a modernist association with how Jacques Tati, three years prior, depicted corporate headquarters in Playtime: sleek, monastic, encompassing, geometrically deterministic. In both films, architecture is destiny.

And perhaps not soulless, either. Tati concerned himself with how such spaces transform employees and consumers alike into cogs of a globe-spanning business machine. In Colossus, the space is the machine. Those computers house a powerful artificial intelligence developed to put the Pentagon out of business. Whether or not it has a soul is up for discussion. There’s no doubt regarding its appetite for power.

Like most AI stories, Colossus nods toward Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and neglects the fourth leg of the table: the law of unintended consequences. Inevitably, the AI decides the best way to protect humankind is to enslave it.

Colossus works all too well. Forbin proves to be an exceptional computer scientist, as do his colleagues. (A mix of genders and races, their diversity provides a low-cost signal of the future, shades of Star Trek, which ended its televised mission the year prior. Colossus director Joseph Sargent, best known for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, directed the early Trek episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.”) When the AI gets smarter, learning at an unfathomable pace, their response is that it’s exceeding expectations. When it locates another powerful AI in the U.S.S.R., they note that scientific history is filled with simultaneous discoveries.

And when Colossus uses nuclear weapons to blackmail world leaders, they say we’d better do as we’re told. Apparently the scientists learn quickly, too.

Unlike the 1966 D.F. Jones novel on which it was based, the Colossus film had no sequel, but it echoes to this day. Jonathan Nolan’s excellent pre-Westworld TV series Person of Interest (2011–2016) was essentially Colossus fan fiction; it explored tensions between the two superintelligent AIs that in Jones’ story merely become cybernetic buddies, congealing into a single globe-spanning panoptic authority. Alex Garland’s multiverse-spanning Devs, released this year, coincident with Colossus‘ 50th anniversary, takes place largely in a space not unlike the one in which Colossus begins, right down to the telltale receding bridge between the computer complex and human civilization.

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KLAATU YOU (41)

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