Oh man, the Golden Age of science fiction movies, just two years after 2001: A Space Odyssey and five years before the start of the Blockbuster era[0] with Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).
I feel like Science Fiction back then was purely understood as psychological concepts and ambiguous desires, mostly questioning the very essence of reality and our human minds. There were intelligences and ambitions in us that felt alien, but weren't extraterrestrial in kind. I always thought of it as if Science Fiction tried to turn any progress from the Age of Enlightenment inside out.
A great gem is also World on a Wire (1973)[1], which takes the concept of a machine controlled intelligence and questioned whether we're living in a simulation and are already influenced by a virtual world.
My favorite quote from Colossus: The Forbin Project, after Dr. Forbin is held hostage by Colossus:
Colossus: How many nights a week do you require sex?
Dr. Forbin: Every night.
Colossus: Not want. Require...
Dr. Forbin: [looks sheepish] Four times.
Yeah, Star Wars more or less killed sci-fi as we had known it. I liked the weird Logan's Run, the depiction of class stratification in "Soylent Green", the banality of corporate control of "Rollerball".
The idea of a computer virus in the film "Westworld" was, to me at the time, something out of left field. (And speaking of Michael Crichton, "The Andromeda Strain" was "intelligent" sci-fi and we enjoyed it.)
"Mad Max", though it came after "Star Wars", drew inspiration from "A Boy and His Dog", "Deathrace 2000"…
I love collecting old SciFi and hadn't heard of "World on a Wire", so am grabbing a copy now (Criterion have a version). I've long been a fan of Colossus as it raises the spectre of being under constant observation (now almost commonplace it seems).
I miss the days when SciFi didn't mean an action film in a future setting that just ends up being the good guy(s) being chased by the bad guy(s).
Edit: Apparently I had heard of World on a Wire, but forgot about it as I've already got a copy as a series rather than a film.
If you enjoy this age of SciFi and don't mind radio drama rather than film, then X-1 is well worth checking out. It's a 1955- radio drama with a different short story each episode, quite a few stories from well recognised authors.
I find that one over-long and sometimes shoddily done. The payoff at the end is nice though. Fassbinder, the director, was obsessed with his work and made a lot of "legendary" films, but never really made them up to the highest standards.
Back when I worked as a civil engineer I had a coworker named Joe. He was... I think 78. Poor guy didn't save up enough for retirement so he worked a bit part time. He knew the ins and outs of the field better than anyone, but had no idea how to use a computer (he marked up drawings and I put them into CAD). He mentioned this movie to me as AI (gpt) had just become a thing saying "it'll scare the hell out of you", and he recommended I watched it - I'm glad I did!
Great guy, always told funny stories - "I was not a great dad but I was a damn wonderful grandpa!"
I rewatched this recently; I think it held up well. It’s probably re-entered the zeitgeist given the recent developments in “AI” and “agents”. So far accidents seem to have destroyed only data, but it’s only a matter of time before some fool hooks up an “AI agent” to a missile.
Much of the film was shot at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the hills above Berkeley, California. This building was probably chosen because of its unique brutalist hexagonal architecture. I spent a bunch of time there as a kid.
Eric Braeden (Forbin) is still alive, but his house in Pacific Palisades burned down in the 2025 fires. :-(
I watched it for the first time a few months ago and it totally holds up. Very enjoyable film and more relevant now than ever. It is probably considered a little slow for modern low-attention-span audiences.
>Definitely see this. The 1970s hardware is archaic, but the concept is still relevant.
Indeed. There is nothing in the film that contradicts the notion of Colossus being a very, very large LLM.
Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.
Rollerball has the central premise that society is outsourcing all decisions to a central computer and everybody just blindly follows, to the point where nobody checks whether it’s functioning properly.
First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.
The short scene where they are in the "computer room" and the operator mentions that they lost the entire history of 14th century painting, or something like that. So relevant to contemporary memory holes and wholesale data losses.
"Logan's Run" is similar, but with the idea pushed further. I think Rollerball is more political in specifically targetting corporations as being malignant forces.
I’ve been trying to get some of my younger colleagues to give both movies a chance without success so far. I think they find it tough to get past the practical effects and old school actor acting.
I had 2 main fridge-logic issues which made it very difficult for me to suspend disbelief and limited my enjoyment of the film:
First: Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control, with no means of overriding it; and with its computing hardware sealed in an impenetrable fortress (no maintenance access?).
Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor, all solely interested in not-dying-at-Colossus's-hand - which is an unworkable assumption.
Unfortunately, the story is driven by these 2 points - without either then the film's story would just be yet-another-cliché-movie where the plucky humans beat the advanced AI overlord, the end.
---------
I still like _Colossus_ because it's "different" to all the other 20th century films with an AI character (c.f. tripe like Will Smith's _I, Robot_ or the Matrix sequels).
> Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor
The plan would still work. Colossus couldn’t be destroyed with nuclear weapons and would retaliate against any attack. It could force compliance of conventional forces as well, and force automation on them, also force populations to rearm it.
In the end, the population would appreciate the eradication of poverty, hunger, disease, and the surplus from not maintaining military capabilities. Colossus could afford democratic institutions while acting as a guard rail against humanity’s worst impulses.
Colossus was not a panopticon, it was operating on limited intelligence and information about the world. Now, consider a hypothetical secret and clandestine science and engineering team (think: Black Mesa East) could exist completely hidden from Colossus and fabricate a workable fission bomb, then place and detonate it somewhere as a false-flag attack that Colossus would act against.
...or even just from recent middle-eastern history: an outrageous death-cult militant faction like ISIS.
Colossus didn’t have infinite intelligence, so it might be possible to hide an effort like that. Not trivial though, as it would have satellite surveillance and likely cooperation from governments who fear what it could do as a retribution. This incentive should be sufficient to make governments police violent activist groups.
Point #1 might seem unrealistic, but it's exactly how IT security of most companies operate now: "We are concerned about malware so we give full control of our systems to CrowdStrike". That is, having a single point of failure is shocking common.
I've worked with companies whose infosec dept. is little more than "see tool alert, ask user what's going on", and then keep searching for the right _tool_ than injecting any human agency in that loop.
If any role is ready for an LLM to take over (or even a shell script), it's that one.
Great film, I thought. The ending is quite dark—and then Colossus tells Forbin that he will come to love him…
Turns out it is prescient. The film was based on the first book of a trilogy. You can look up the plot of the following two novels if you want spoilers, but indeed, Forbin does have a reconsideration of Colossus.
I would guess that's due to Nolan focussing on great visuals rather than the underlying ideas. I did enjoy The Prestige, but often his stories become somewhat nonsensical e.g. Inception's plot doesn't really make any sense when you look into the characters' motivations etc.
Yeah half of his films are super flashy and quite watchable but you really have to turn your brain off to avoid thinking "what? that makes no sense" constantly. Inception, Tenet & Interstellar at least.
… and turn on the subtitles ‘cause they can’t be bothered to mix for legibility.
It’s suicide, that’s what it is.
For years the American culture industry has the advantage on its home court that people in other countries would watch our movies with subtitles but Americans wouldn’t watch other countries’ movies with subtitles.
Now the sound mixing of American films has gotten so bad that Americans have been trained to watch with the subtitles on and once you do you might as well watch Italian crime dramas or subprime anime on Tubi.
I have no comment on sound mixing in general, but just to add context here, Chris Nolan intended[0] for the dialogue in some of the scenes to be inaudible over the score.
I think this is often difficult for people who treat films as logical instead of experiential.
Nonetheless, it is inaccurate to characterise it as poorly mixed, since the goal was for the score to somewhat drown out the dialogue, and the mixing achieves that goal. You can disagree that this is a desirable outcome for the viewer, but art is ultimately subjective.
Perhaps because these movies were mixed for theaters with very specific digital sound setups and now lots of people see them for the first time at home.
Traditional action movies: Turn off your brains and have fun.
Christopher Nolan movies: Turn off your brains, and at the same time feel intellectual/smart!
> The film was based on the first book of a trilogy.
Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.
Dean Koontz? I've read a couple of his books, and I'm not surprised at the suggestion he had bad or awkward sex scenes, but weird rapey AI level awkward? Yikes.
He started off as a porn writer. Awful, atrocious sludge. Wrote most of those under pen names, so it's not provable what is and isn't his, but it's 80% certain on quite a few of them. But that wasn't even uncommon for science fiction writers and scifi-adjacent writers like him.
Demon Seed is schlocky, but it’s perhaps worth watching once. That said, I will readily admit that the film is bad for many reasons. Though horror films aren’t generally known for being inoffensive, the ending is disturbing in content and gratuitous in presentation. Perhaps the film works best as a warning and as a critique, though I’m really scrounging and scraping here. I blame Dean Koontz for the premise of the original novel, though I have no idea why anyone thought that the book needed to be adapted to film, but here I am talking about it.
I’m glad you brought up Demon Seed all the same, as I was reminded of it while reading TFA.
When the computer system from the film commands a character to “open that door, and clean these lenses” in a particular scene, the absurdity and mundanity of being commanded to clean a camera by an AI is subtly horrifying.
For a modern analogue, I’m reminded of DoorDash workers being dispatched to close doors left ajar by passengers of autonomous Waymos.
And when that movie played on the Caltech campus in the early 70s, everyone waited for the point when the US and Russian computer started exchanging a private language and one engineer exclaims "That's like five years at Caltech in thirty seconds!" The entire theatre exploded and my ears hurt from the screams.
I cottoned onto the film a couple years ago after Ready Player One’s Ernest Cline recommended it on a Weaponized podcast. I like that the exterior facility shots were filmed at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. In the film context I really would construe it as projecting some sort of Cold-War era “secure government science facility” architectural archetype. When one learns about the career arc of E.O.Lawrence, the stylistic allusion to Cold War science feels all the more fitting. Viz. Lawrence Livermore lab has the reputation today of being the more secure, clandestine lab, while nearby Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) has the reputation of being the stand-up academic science lab that welcomes international academic all-comers. But prior to Lawrence Livermore’s founding (like while Edward Teller was closer to the then Berkeley Rad Lab, now LBL). And so for several years, 1940s to at least the early 1950s, Berkeley Rad Lab would have been possessed of what would become those same Livermore-esque secure spooky Cold War science vibes.
A favorite film of mine. I was very happy when a decent quality bluray became available a few years back. I know someone who uses "Warn. There is another system." as an alternative to "Hello, world".
I've wondered if D.F.Jones knew of the British Colossus code breaking system and named his computer that to tweak the security people. They couldn't really object, since Colossus was still a secret. Jones was in the British military and it's not impossible that he knew of the project.
I've always wondered if it was perhaps the inspiration for the novel Neuromancer (2 AI's in different continents plotting to combine with each other to form a global super-intelligence)
Tangential: movies are not necessarily the best medium for cautionary tales about super-intelligence, with their penchant for hiding educated reasoning and their need for showy visual effects that always age poorly but get all the viewer's attention. Writing, on the other hand, can do the trick. The same way American schools have periodic rehearsals for "if a shooter comes," they should have a mandatory exercise to "write your own story that features super-intelligence." It might make the kids think[^1].
[^1]: Even if, or especially if, they let ChatGPT write it.
I came to this film late. Somehow, despite being quite active at the time of its release, I never knew of it until a colleague turned me onto it in the 90s.
Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.
I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.
I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.
I feel like Science Fiction back then was purely understood as psychological concepts and ambiguous desires, mostly questioning the very essence of reality and our human minds. There were intelligences and ambitions in us that felt alien, but weren't extraterrestrial in kind. I always thought of it as if Science Fiction tried to turn any progress from the Age of Enlightenment inside out.
A great gem is also World on a Wire (1973)[1], which takes the concept of a machine controlled intelligence and questioned whether we're living in a simulation and are already influenced by a virtual world.
My favorite quote from Colossus: The Forbin Project, after Dr. Forbin is held hostage by Colossus:
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Bl...[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire
The idea of a computer virus in the film "Westworld" was, to me at the time, something out of left field. (And speaking of Michael Crichton, "The Andromeda Strain" was "intelligent" sci-fi and we enjoyed it.)
"Mad Max", though it came after "Star Wars", drew inspiration from "A Boy and His Dog", "Deathrace 2000"…
A Golden Age for sure.
I miss the days when SciFi didn't mean an action film in a future setting that just ends up being the good guy(s) being chased by the bad guy(s).
Edit: Apparently I had heard of World on a Wire, but forgot about it as I've already got a copy as a series rather than a film.
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles
Much of the film was shot at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the hills above Berkeley, California. This building was probably chosen because of its unique brutalist hexagonal architecture. I spent a bunch of time there as a kid.
Eric Braeden (Forbin) is still alive, but his house in Pacific Palisades burned down in the 2025 fires. :-(
So is the scale. For the 1980s and 1990s, the huge Colossus system seemed obsolete. The age of the personal desktop computer had arrived.
Now Colossus looks small compared to Amazon's AI training system from 2025.
Indeed. There is nothing in the film that contradicts the notion of Colossus being a very, very large LLM.
Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.
First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.
I had 2 main fridge-logic issues which made it very difficult for me to suspend disbelief and limited my enjoyment of the film:
First: Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control, with no means of overriding it; and with its computing hardware sealed in an impenetrable fortress (no maintenance access?).
Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor, all solely interested in not-dying-at-Colossus's-hand - which is an unworkable assumption.
Unfortunately, the story is driven by these 2 points - without either then the film's story would just be yet-another-cliché-movie where the plucky humans beat the advanced AI overlord, the end.
---------
I still like _Colossus_ because it's "different" to all the other 20th century films with an AI character (c.f. tripe like Will Smith's _I, Robot_ or the Matrix sequels).
The plan would still work. Colossus couldn’t be destroyed with nuclear weapons and would retaliate against any attack. It could force compliance of conventional forces as well, and force automation on them, also force populations to rearm it.
In the end, the population would appreciate the eradication of poverty, hunger, disease, and the surplus from not maintaining military capabilities. Colossus could afford democratic institutions while acting as a guard rail against humanity’s worst impulses.
...or even just from recent middle-eastern history: an outrageous death-cult militant faction like ISIS.
If any role is ready for an LLM to take over (or even a shell script), it's that one.
Were you able to suspend your disbelief when watching Idiocracy [1], either in the year of its release or in the subsequent decades? (^;
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
You are not the president of the United States. That is Donald Trump.
Do you see how the plot is consistent?
Turns out it is prescient. The film was based on the first book of a trilogy. You can look up the plot of the following two novels if you want spoilers, but indeed, Forbin does have a reconsideration of Colossus.
I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed.
Taking the thinnest of fair slivers, I think that's reasonably common in pre-(80s?90s?00s?) sci-fi/fantasy.
Are you sure it is dubious?
Woman used as sexual party favors still happens in real life today. Since it is a common weakness, why can't an AI exploit that.
Some might say our own government is now in control of a foreign government, purely on exploiting that weakness. So it is realistic tactic.
Just hope that it is not Christopher Nolan.
It’s suicide, that’s what it is.
For years the American culture industry has the advantage on its home court that people in other countries would watch our movies with subtitles but Americans wouldn’t watch other countries’ movies with subtitles.
Now the sound mixing of American films has gotten so bad that Americans have been trained to watch with the subtitles on and once you do you might as well watch Italian crime dramas or subprime anime on Tubi.
I think this is often difficult for people who treat films as logical instead of experiential.
Nonetheless, it is inaccurate to characterise it as poorly mixed, since the goal was for the score to somewhat drown out the dialogue, and the mixing achieves that goal. You can disagree that this is a desirable outcome for the viewer, but art is ultimately subjective.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cjtlzp/comment/evg2js...
Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.
(Except for Demon Seed. That one jumped the shark - but I did love their rendition of what an AI data center looks like)
I’m glad you brought up Demon Seed all the same, as I was reminded of it while reading TFA.
When the computer system from the film commands a character to “open that door, and clean these lenses” in a particular scene, the absurdity and mundanity of being commanded to clean a camera by an AI is subtly horrifying.
For a modern analogue, I’m reminded of DoorDash workers being dispatched to close doors left ajar by passengers of autonomous Waymos.
I always enjoyed the reference as well as this movie’s a kid!
I've wondered if D.F.Jones knew of the British Colossus code breaking system and named his computer that to tweak the security people. They couldn't really object, since Colossus was still a secret. Jones was in the British military and it's not impossible that he knew of the project.
[^1]: Even if, or especially if, they let ChatGPT write it.
Both seem to be influences of War Games.
Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.
I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.
I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.
Actually, found it online :)
It seems that the people who don't care to make their old movie available as VOD also don't particularly care about copyright violations.