Space 1979 Prototype Trilogy 1: The other one about a cyborg assassin from the future

 

Title: Cyborg 2087

What Year?: 1966

Classification: Prototype

Rating: What The Hell??? (3/5)

 

In the course of doing this feature, one thing that caught me by surprise is that I never made that many exceptions for films before the intended 1970s-‘80s timeframe. This time around, I’m starting a mini-series to cover that gap, and the first entry of all hails from the most counterintuitively underrepresented period, the late 1960s. When I started this, I didn’t even see this period as a major exception, but the only ones I got to were The Green Slime and The PhantomTollbooth, with the latter in a gray area because of a delayed release. For this review, I finally have one more, and it happens to be one of the most bizarre arguable coincidences on record. Here is Cyborg 2087, a film with nearly the same premise as Terminator from almost 20 years earlier.

Our story begins, after a view of a 1964 World’s Fair-style futuristic cityscape that will have no part in the rest of the movie, with a view of a woman and a man in a control room and an older gentleman climbing into a sort of pod. As the countdown approaches, the future police burst into the control room, but the lady operator presses one more button and the pod disappears, headed for the very current and hip year of 1966. We then find our time traveler in what looks like an Old West town, until a couple sightseers show up in a jeep. He commandeers the vehicle using a ray gun that stuns people, and seeks out the lab of a scientist researching telepathy. He manages to make contact with one of the scientist’s assistants, a spunky woman in a will they/ won’t they relationship with her colleague, and reveals his mission: He is a cyborg, sent back in time to kill the scientist, whose research will become the basis of mind control by a future dictatorship that he served before being reprogrammed. However, two more cyborgs have already been sent to stop him, with weapons that don’t just stun, and meanwhile, the lady is getting the hots for the gentleman. Can he succeed, and if he does, will he ever exist?

Cyborg 2087 was a film by United Pictures Corporation, part of a nominal series from director Franklin Adreon and screenwriter Arthur C. Pierce. The film starred Michael Rennie as the title cyborg Garth (??), with Karen Steele as the romantic interest Sharon Mason. Other cast included Harry Carey, Jr, John Beck (see The Time Machine 1978), and Jo Ann Pflug of the movie MASH as a future resistance fighter. While it would later be known for its similarities to the Terminator franchise, the film received limited interest in near-contemporary reviews, with Philip Strick deeming it among the “more conventional” treatments of time travel. Adreon and Pierce went on to make Dimension Five, another film involving time travel that starred Jeffery Hunter. Rennie died at age 61 in 1971, only 5 years after the release of Cyborg 1987.

For my experiences, my interest in this film really starts with the controversies surrounding Terminator and particularly its association with Harlan Ellison’s story “The Soldier” and the adaptation of same for the original Outer Limits television series. My reaction has always been that this is a distraction from more interesting works, notably to Philip K. Dick’s story “Second Variety”, which didn’t get an official adaptation until Screamers (which I will review if I have to make a new feature to do it). Then there’s other Outer Limits storylines dealing with time travel, like “The Man Who Was Never Born” and Ellison’s own “Demon With A Glass Hand”,The most purely random parallel I ever ran across is a totally obscure 1942 story titled “Barrier” (by the sometimes-great Anthony Boucher) in which a time traveler goes to the future in the nude. It will be clear from even anecdotal evidence that there was already plenty of groundwork for this movie and Terminator to have developed independent of each other. What’s strangest and truly inexplicable is that this movie’s setup in many ways comes closer to that of Terminator 2 than the original, meaning that the charge of a direct “ripoff” still doesn’t explain why key elements were left out in the first run.

Of course, these considerations don’t address the quality of the movie. I went in with singularly low expectations, and the best thing I can say coming out is that it does indeed “feel” like an Outer Limits episode, which if you’ve seen any is high praise indeed. Between the loopy premise, good camerawork, low-tech effects, and slightly over-dramatic music, it could all be taken as an earnest tribute to the show, which crashed and burned about a year before this movie came out. Of course, that leaves plenty of awkward and dated elements. The first act is slow-paced and heavy on tech talk. The two hostile cyborgs, referred to as “Tracers”, look more silly than sinister, and the action sequences are correspondingly slow-paced and toned down. There’s also an extra what-the-Hell factor in the use of the Old West town, culminating in a final showdown that comes across like High Noon with ray guns. Still, the one thing that comes closest to derailing the movie is a group of hip, partying youths (including Beck’s minor character) packed in around the middle. Fortunately, the lot of them are left behind after a little character development as soon as the story gets back in gear.

That leaves the central premises, the time travel plot and the cyborgs. If anything, the latter are better developed. Rennie makes a dapper and eloquent superhuman, all the more striking in the kind of role that would normally by given to a much younger actor. He declares that he is partly human but beyond human emotion, which we can well believe based on his subdued account of the future. At the same time, he acknowledges becoming a “free thinker” after the resistance freed him from mind control, implying that he has some capacity for freewill and gratitude. His opposite numbers are impressive in their own way. As mentioned, they look surreal as they chase after their quarry, but this is in no small part because of their total focus on their mission, to the point that surprised bystanders and suspicious authorities are simply ignored. (Ironically, avoiding attention is the counterintuitive rationale of Boucher’s protagonist.) They become more sinister when the surviving Tracer takes Sharon hostage, revealing a ruthlessness that doesn’t quite reach the point of outright sadism. By comparison, the time travel plot doesn’t get much further than the premises laid out at the start. The one thoughtful touch is that the hero and his allies try to reason with the scientist. However, it’s a poor balance against a resolution that is virtually a copy of what Outer Limits did just as nonsensically but with far more visual flare.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and the problem I faced this time was that the story’s developments are spread out enough that what would be solid sequences are instead interspersed with each other. Nevertheless, the standout is definitely the main effects sequence. After Garth reveals his mission to Sharon, she appeals to her colleague and potential romantic interest Carl for help, including the removal of an implant that Garth warns can be used to track him. When Carl is skeptical, Garth reveals a set of motors in his forearm and a plate with blinking lights on his chest. Carl remarks, “I don’t know what I believe, but I know what somebody who saw it might think.” He still objects that he cannot administer anesthetic, to which Garth answers that his nerves are “sealed off”. After an interlude with the tracers and the youths, we find the implant removed, in the closest parallel to any scene from the Terminator movies- specifically one that was cut from theatrical release!

In closing, I must say this is the one entry in this lineup I hadn’t already seen in whole or part. As such, it was a pleasant enough surprise, enough that I felt charitable enough to consider a higher rating. Yet, at the proverbial end of the day, this is a film where “good enough” is more disappointing than “bad”. I would have loved to celebrate this movie as an overlooked classic or roast it as a justly forgotten stinker, but the truth is that it is neither, and wasn’t trying to be. Comparison with Terminator in particular is simply a disastrous disservice. The later movie certainly had its problems, in some ways as bad as this one, yet nobody can dispute that it has stood the test of time. This movie, by comparison, is a self-dated artifact that never pretended to be anything else. It gets a passing grade, but it remains in its own time, and the people who made it can at least be credited for letting it remain there.