Prototype

'THE FUTURE IS NOT FRIENDLY' intones the cover. While this may or may not be true, the movie is set in 1983. I suppose that being suckered into buying this bargain DVD at Wal-Mart in 2005 is the unfriendly future they were referring to.

The cover art is a lie. There are no skeletal Terminator-style robots with red eyeballs in this movie. The android guy wears a white turtleneck and is less threatening than Star Trek's Data, and he doesn't do anything interesting. He's a wuss. This movie is crap.

If you are responsible for the marketing of this DVD, you should be ashamed of yourself.

I, too, bought this movie out of some bargain bin and it lay around our house for quite some time before my wife and I watched it. We were, in a word, quite surprised and pleased to encounter a science fiction movie about an intelligent robot that for once did not rely on special effects to make its point.

"Prototype" is a thoughtful look, not only at the emotions of a man who has dedicated more or less his whole career to creating a human-like robot , but also at the thought processes of such a creature as it actually goes into the world and has to react with real people and situations. The story builds to an inevitable climax very smoothly.

The cast is quite good and the production values, such as they are (the budget was obviously rather low), do not detract at all from the story. In fact, a great deal of the story takes place out of doors or in real buildings, giving the whole film a touch of reality.

A great deal has been left unexplained, such as the building of the robot, which has already been accomplished as the story begins. One also wonders what powers the robot. The viewer must simply pass over that and concentrate on the existential dilemma of the robot and its creator.

I definitely recommend this movie. It is a pleasant change of pace from the current spate of SF films that depend so much on spectacular visual effects. "Prototype" is definitely an example of the thinking man's science fiction. Just the kind of story that John Campbell would have published in the old Astounding Science Fiction magazine. (Just to make sure that there is no misunderstanding, that is a compliment, considering how much of the maturity of modern science fiction resulted from Campbell's wise editorship of that great magazine.)

But I was quickly reassured. From the moment Christopher Plummer shows himself to be a genuinely irascible old man and not your typical 'hero', and David Morse as the android, in his elongated pants and wide-open baby-face, made their first appearances, I was held. With its' plot -- professor wants to keep his invention out of the hands of the military -- this is nothing new in the plot department but it is written with care, and the cast (including the wonderful Frances Steenhagen as Plummers' feisty wife) and a good director, David Greene, make the most of it. The ending is a stunner, both clever and touching. On my list as one of those films I was expecting nothing of and was delightfully surprised.

I am thinking of the 2016 "Arrival" as I watch this beautifully crafted story in which the military believes it is in charge of the "miraculous"--for the questioning mind of Michael, the laboratory-created being,is sensitive and creative. He processes both literature and experience, and asks questions. During his first venture into the world beyond the laboratory he is sensitive to expectations, and capable of wonder--seeing the toy train and being mesmerized by "the little puffs of smoke". The laboratory has produced something which is in fact a someone, a new person. And, as in "Arrival", the appearance of something not understood elicits two kind of response--the need to control it, and the need to understand it. I recognize that we are stuck with institutionalized fear in our military establishment--and by "we" I mean humans. Still crawling forward out of the primordial ooze. And now I'm going to finish watching the excellent movie which gave rise to this realization.

Christopher Plummer plays Dr. Carl Forrester, who is part of research team experiment an android with artificial intelligence. David Morse plays Michael the android. When Dr. Forrester finds out that the team is using Michael for a soldier in military. He hides Michael and starts a new life but for how long? Well worth your time to watch.