Colossus the Forbin Project

Great film. It reminded me of the 1959 movie, On the Beach, with its doomsday warning of man's inability to control his technology. As I stated in class, it also had the familiarity to it of all those classic Star Trek episodes that had an all powerful machine/being that Kirk or Picard would lecture at the end of the show about what a piece of work man was. However, in this film, there was no speech at the end, just a bunch of small, insignificant and powerless beings finally coming to realize that they have been bypassed on the evolutionary ladder. Given the film was made in 1970, I think it was meant more as a warning against man's hubris, a sort of retelling of the myth of Icarus, but given the advances in technology and our constant awareness that we are destroying the world we live in, I can't help but feel that perhaps machines will be the only thing left in a few hundred years. If man does manage to wipe himself out, then perhaps we are just one chain in the evolution of consciousness. A thousand years from now, conscious machines may think of us as we now view the Neanderthal or Lucy. The fact that we are doing this to ourselves makes the thinking machines seem less scary (as perhaps Colossus was seen back in 1970) and more a sign of hope that some part of humanity could live on once the organic beings become only images on a database and fossils.

My favorite image in the film (and there were many great moments) was the bridge being withdrawn by Dr. Forbin. What was left was only emptiness, with no way left to ever bridge the gap between man and machine. What a powerful image to capture before any dialogue even begins.