Running Amuck

By J. C.

THE TERMINAL MAN

Directed and Written by MIKE HODGES

From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde through A Clockwork Orange, research scientists have been gumming things up, thereby giving the screaming fits to threatened humanists who run out to sound the alarm. In The Terminal Man, the machines, true to form, run amuck, but it is only a two-alarm panic. The twist--it can hardly be called a novelty--is that this time the machine is a man, one Harry Benson, who has had a computer implanted in his brain. Subject to unpredictable fits of rage, Benson used to beat his wife and take potshots at the neighbors. He has been diagnosed as a paranoid psychotic and has volunteered for the implantation. Still the operation reinforces his deepest fear: that mankind, at the hand of science, is being changed into a race of machines.

The movie--drawn from Michael Crichton's novel--is the work of the gifted Mike Hodges, whose two previous features (Get Carter, Pulp) displayed a cool virtuosity. There are pyrotechnic scenes--the operation itself being the most dazzling. But the film does not really succeed beyond its embellishments. It has all the depth of a petri dish.

Hodges apparently realized this, because he takes great pains to bury the thematic superficiality beneath a superstructure of desperate metaphor and elaborate production. The movie is rendered largely in frosty, antiseptic hues, giving every scene the air of the laboratory. The hospital where the operation is performed on Benson (George Segal) is called Babel. The doctors (Joan Hackett, Richard A. Dysart, Donald Moffat, Michael C. Gwynne) dress in white uniforms that make them look almost military, like shock troops of the future. After Benson has had the operation, which misfires, he runs all over Los Angeles killing at random, until he is violently dispatched by a couple of police sharpshooters.

It is all Frankenstein revamped, of course, but the signals seem to have gone wrong somewhere. Clearly, Hodges intended a caution against science that can mistake mind warping for mind mending. Despite all the patent disapproval, though, the operation still seems feasible, the only alternative to Benson's previous condition. The unresolved conflict lends the film a rather archaic tone, like those old horror movies that ended in the smoldering ashes of some laboratory, where a dim but wise policeman would shake his head and say, "Man wasn't ready for such knowledge." qed J.C.

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