The Final Eye (Computercide) 1977

The Final Eye: Computercide

This is a TV movie (likely a pilot episode for a series that never happened, filmed in 1977 but appearing only later on television in 1982) from 1977.  It stars Joseph Cortese and Donald Pleasence and is directed by Robert Michael Lewis. 

A rich guy (who is a takeoff on Ayn Rand's "John Galt" from Atlas Shrugged) has built his own 'futuristic gated community' which is segregated from the rest of the world to take 'the most perfect people' (artists, engineers, scientists) and allow them to live in the most technologically advanced city so they can develop technology even further. This movie takes place in 'the future' (the 1990s) where computers run everything and people use video phones everywhere and electric cars. Joseph Cortese is one of the last private detectives and drives a gasoline powered car and hates new technology and likes old things. The daughter of the rich guy hires him to find her father who has 'disappeared.' He actually is seen running at the beginning of the movie trying to escape his own cultish compound and is electrocuted by some sort of electronic fence. However, she believes he might be still alive, since the recovered body wasn't the same age as her father, and though it looked like him, it was younger.

They decide to go into the "Eden Isle" future-city compound undercover posing as potential candidates to investigate what could have happened. They get in miraculously and snoop around, and find the place is run like some sort of scientology cult, and see the old rich man in a wheelchair, and Cortese meets Donald Pleasance who shows him their genetically engineered crops, chickens and clones. 

Something must have gone on in the 70s that people have forgotten (well--a lot seems to have been forgotten from the 70s) there seems to have been a craze about clones that vanished for a while up until the 90s. There were all kinds of movies about clones for some reason and perhaps there was some media hype going on at the time, but there were actually more movies about clones in the 70s than the 80s and they were always presented as a particularly disturbing thing, and there must have been a bunch of people thinking a lot about this at the time. 

This movie ties the Ayn Rand philosophy in Atlas Shrugged to the cybernetic movement (correctly in my opinion--which would later develop in the 1980s) or what we might call 'transhumanism' today. (A movie called "Colossus of New York" also hit on this idea). Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and many of the computer developers of the 70s were Ayn Rand fanatics, leaving the long-hair and hippie lifestyle behind to go on into the 80s to fulfill the yuppie stereotypes we'd later see emerge... The hippie cults that did not embrace cybernetic ideals all died out, and the ones that did developed into corporate and academic cults which would create institutions and think tanks and "Biosphere II."

Don't get me wrong, this TV-movie isn't going out of its way or even cleverly saying anything extreme, but it's all there in its weirdness (as many cheaply made movies do) where it's approach is 'matter of fact,' and presents ideas and situations as if they were cliches--as if everybody knew what they were talking about or referencing. This isn't really all that clever or intelligent, but it is interesting that they're just presenting it all as if it were all the way everybody else would have presented it. This movie does have its own take on whatever it decided was happening there in the late 70s, and clearly it's criticizing it all, but in somewhat of a rather bland fashion. 

This film runs along making commentary on various changes in society and technology in it's cheap tv-movie style which is quite familiar to me, and the production reminds me of "Battlestar Galactica" (the orignal, not the remake) or the Buck Rogers television series. It's pacing is very much familiar to tv-movies of the 70s and 80s, and it's slow, but there's some entertaining and interesting projections of 'the future' and various jokes and concepts that are fun to watch. The main character is constantly in favor of old things, 'the way it used to be,' and has an attitude about going against the grain and is sort of rebelling against all this futuristic shit, which on one hand is not exactly well done, but is interesting nonetheless. I think people would appreciate this movie more if it had a better quality format, but unfortunately I'm not aware of this thing ever being released on VHS, DVD or anything. You either taped off TV or you didn't, and you either saw it when it was on or you didn't. 

There's some interesting stuff in this 'comedic' tv-movie and I'd say if you like to look back at how people believed the future would be like a long time ago, this has a lot to offer in it, it's pretty much the premise of the show. It is a 1970s look at what the future is going to be like, and has a character who's not particularly happy about any of it. 

It's pretty low-budget, but could be interesting to those looking for commentary on 1970s utopianism which people are still mulling over today and trying to figure out. You see, for some reason or another there was a lot of this weird utopian futurism in the 1970s that went pretty weird. Zardoz wasn't the only commentary on it, and for some reason or another there is a sense in a lot of 70s movies about how 'the future' seemed to be imposing itself on everybody, while others were sort of mindlessly going along with it.  There were a lot of people setting up their utopian experimental communities in the 70s, and a lot of people trying to build and influence society with 'futuristic utopian' ideas. Everything from architecture to art, politics and graphic design, there was an anticipation of some sort of funky future utopia that we eventually never went anywhere near. Shit got so weird that people are still baffled by a lot of it, and still attempt to dig it up and understand it.

Many simply attribute it all to 'hippies,' but this certainly was not the case in my opinion because what people are forgetting is that before the 1980s, there was a different view of 'cybernetics' which had nothing to do with the hippies, though this 'cybernetics ideology' infiltrated the counter-culture movements of the 60s, and many long-haired rebels got heavy into it, they neither created the cybernetics-ideological movement nor did they use it to make anyone into hippies over the next couple decades. As a matter of fact it caused a lot of schisms in different 60s counter-culture movements and was later taken over by right-wing think tanks. (See Adam Curtis' "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace." ) Ultimately the emergence of the personal computer and the internet is where to look for answers, when Wall Street yuppie met cybernetic-hippie and in the back corners of industrial parks all kinds of weird and mysterious things were going on that the public wasn't privy to. (See "Brainstorm." starring Christopher Walken). Money became the focus of the lives of many of these utopians in the 80s, where they'd build either their personal fortunes in the technology business and follow the Ayn Rand style of personal politics which is a kind of bizarre utopian-contradiction, or they'd end up writing self-help books, or how-to-get-rich books. The era of the progressive-civil-rights-interested and social-change oriented hippies died out when they took on cybernetic idealism. A lot of people say 'the hippies sold out' and if you're talking about the ones who worshipped Bucky Fuller, you might be right. There were cybernetics idealists and the self-improvement idealists, environmentalists and civil rights activists, any idea of any counter-cultural movements being all part of one single generalized 'movement' would be incorrect, though many at the time might have seen it that way.  When computers finally arrived, it ultimately was all about money, and anyone left who had not jumped on board the cybernetics ideology was dealing with the changes that had occurred that would have forced them to change to survive. Most of all these 'movements' of the 60s had been re-directed into bureaucracy, self-improvement, cybernetic utopianism or commercialism, and the rest tuned in, turned on and dropped out as 'psychedelic casualties' which everybody had contempt for. Ronald Reagan was elected president, and the rest is history.

Computercide seems to imply either a computer kills a person, or a person kills a computer, and neither of which happens in this tv-movie which ends up being all about clones and not really computers. You do get the idea that they were trying to set up a TV series where we'd see the rest of this computerized world they live in which would have been interesting but the main character was kind of dull, and probably why this show never went anywhere.  This is for hard core fans of films attempting to look at visions of the future, especially the ones which don't end up being entirely accurate, at least in terms of what technology they knew at the time, and what would obviously come later in the 80s that would change or tweak that. This is by no means a fantastic vision of the future for its time, it's actually kind of cynical about it, which also means people were looking at the utopianism coming out of the 70s and had criticism of it. (Think Demolition Man in the 90s.) This isn't so much about technical accuracy as it is about the mentality of 'futurism' of that time. It really is ultimately predicting the transhumanist movement to come in the 80s, and what they're all about. 

Definitely a Cybertronica Obscura must-watch curiosity though, and it's by no means terrible or stupid. Whenever somebody says "oh, it's dated" I kind of want to take that person and shove them through a plate glass window off the 13th floor to their death. "Dated?" That's exactly what I'm looking for. It's dated, but there is something there that is telling us something about the time it was made. It isn't just 'dated' and therefore 'wrong' and thus 'obsolete,' in fact it may tell us more than the films that are not 'dated.' It tells us what people were thinking at certain times, and demands we ask more questions about why certain ideas show up (especially when certain concepts show up in so many movies and TV shows they are like cliches). Why did those ideas become the usual thing? Why did those ideas become like a trend or fad at that time?  "It's dated" is why people have forgotten the 70s, and though they might smugly say "I don't want to remember the 70s," it is never a smart idea to ignore history. 

If you can find this thing, it's got Donald Pleasence, and that should be enough for you. If not, it is a most interesting thing to see an attitude about going against the utopian ideas of 'the future' from a 1970s perspective and see how far along we've come.

Follow ups to this film in terms of subject matter to watch, I'd recommend THE COLONY starring John Ritter, BIODOME with Pauly Shore, Zardoz, and possibly THE CLONUS HORROR and the documentary TRIUMPH OF THE NERDS, and the Adam Curtis series.  Also, THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK makes subtle commentary on the Ayn Rand philosophy vs. altruistic humanitarianism. The shift which took place was being predicted by it.  It projects the future of how certain ideas about technology will challenge the idea of altruism, and how the people who accept certain technological ideas may not see it coming, and may in turn become a contradiction and the complete opposite of altruists. (In other words, by accepting certain technological ideas, a humanitarian altruist (counter culture hippie) would become a "Randroid" (Ayn Rand follower) and  end up the complete opposite of what they started and resultant hybrid would be a strange new monster.  There are always subtexts going on under layers even in the most ridiculous and terrible of movies, which is why one should never just ignore films which are classified as 'bad' or 'dated.' Those who are looking only for accurate depictions of the future neither have any idea of the reality of cinema, nor do they have the capacity for understanding the point of even classic movies.