Classic sci-fi/horror about a sentient computer imprisoning a woman in her home with the goal of using her body to become human. Explores existential themes of human existence and personal autonomy in the best classic literary science fiction tradition.
It's hard for me to judge this movie objectively. I first saw this as a kid, and loved it then, and although now the visual style seems slightly cheezy and low-budget to me, and the pacing definitely isn't the punchy pacing modern viewers are used to, the better points of the storytelling and themes hold up for me as an adult. I see this as perhaps the last of the great tradition of small, personal, humanist, character-driven sci-fi and horror movies that started perhaps in the 1950s, which began to be supplanted by a new, more grandiose, almost mythic or archetype-driven storytelling style in 1968 with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and had completely taken over by the end of the 70s.
Though the production errs on the side of cheezy in the tradition of older and lower-budget mid-20th-century sci-fi movies, it has its share of cerebrally creepy moments that elevate it beyond the norm, such as when the computer, Proteus, begins asking more philosophical and purpose-driven questions of its creators, finally asking ominously, "Dr. Harris... when are you going to let me out of this box?" It's not punch-you-in-the-gut scares, but it's effectively shivery creepy-if-you-think-about-it-for-a-second existential horror, a more literary than cinematic form of horror.
I don't think I'll ever stop liking this movie.
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