FANTASIA OBSCURA: Diagnosis of Michael Crichton’s First Adaptation After ‘Westworld’? Terminal
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, it’s hard to see the funny side of it when you’re plugged in…
The Terminal Man (1974)
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
Directed by: Mike Hodges
There must have been a bad connection when they wired this up.
The picture takes place over a period of time identified only by white-on-black title cards that go from “Tuesday” to “Friday.” Harry Benson (George Segal) is a brilliant computer scientist who starts blacking out after a car accident and lashing out violently, a fact we discover over dinner between doctors John Ellis (Richard Dysart) and Arthur McPherson (Donald Moffat).
They’re conversing with their publicist (James Sikking), whose job it is is to publicly finesse the particulars of what they are going to do; specifically, drilling wires into Benson’s head and inserting a device to keep his violent urges in check.
One person who’s not sanguine about the operation is Benson’s psychologist, Dr. Janet Ross (Joan Hackett). Knowing Benson’s issues with computers (he distrusts them, even as he understands them better than we do), she fears that instead of curing him, the operation may deepen some of his psychoses and make him even more dangerous.
This gets played out when a woman Benson arranged to help him escape from the hospital, Angela Black (Jill Clayburgh), is found murdered a few hours after he disappears from the ward. While the doctors are left unable to understand what happened, it’s up to the police to find and stop him, before their experiment in control gets completely away from them with further deadly results…
Speaking of actions with dire consequences, there were a number of decisions made in producing this film that just led things awry from the beginning of production. Michael Crichton was on a hot streak as the Seventies reached its midpoint, and after he had experienced some success with Westworld, his novel The Terminal Man was next to get optioned by Warner Brothers.
After Crichton had turned in an adaptation of his own book, however, the studio felt that the treatment was too much of a departure from the source material (?!?), and put the script in Hodges’ hands to adapt as well as direct.
From the beginning, Hodges’ choices seemed to have ensured the film’s doom. By telling a story set mainly in a hospital in as antiseptic a manner as possible, there’s nothing that allows the audience to hold on. Because it’s simply an experimental procedure for them to try, just a job for them, Dysart and Moffat have no chance of becoming villains to root against, and the cold, impersonal settings and cinematography don’t give viewers a chance to hate the game any more than we can the players. Allowing the only soundtrack element to be Bach’s “Goldberg Varition #25” played by Glenn Gould further isolates the viewer.
Of singular waste was casting George Segal as the troubled Harry Benson. There have been plenty of successes when comedic actors have played troubled roles, such as Jack Lemmon in Save the Tiger or Michael Keaton in Batman. Segal, whose chops were proven in The Owl and the Pussycat and A Touch of Class (and would go on to have success later on in Fun With Dick and Jane and The Goldbergs), could have brought something only a comedian could have to a tortured character. Hodges, however, allowed no humanity of any sort to permeate his shoot, preventing Segal from finding anything to exploit and denying any possible reason to look back on this film.
As a further challenge, time and progress itself keep the modern viewer from finding anything here. When the film was released, the idea of using cybernetic feedback to affect personality disorders seemed shocking (sorry, pun not intended). As of late, however, research has started and is ongoing on performing an operation much like the one in the film. And reading these accounts in real life, which are far warmer than Hodges’ telling of the story, does the film’s legacy no justice.
Crichton’s novel about using cybernetics to promote psychological changes in the disturbed was certainly meant to be a thoughtful nightmare. Sadly, the film we’re left to watch proved to be more of one that the story it tried to tell.
NEXT TIME: We’re supposed to send lawyers, guns, and money, but this being a Roger Corman production, will you settle for two out of three…?
