Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Cyborg 2


I guess I’ve always known about this movie.  When I used to work at a video store, this was on the new release wall.  They had a policy of not taking anything out of new releases until the tapes had paid for themselves (new releases used to cost about a hundred bucks & then drop down to twenty bucks a year later if there was a demand for them by the public) which took about thirty rentals.  It had Jack Palance on the cover of it right around the time his claim to fame was being Curly in City Slickers, so despite my affection for the first film (see the review on Nostalgia Equals Distortion) I never felt any need to check this out.

So I watched this after watching the original Cyborg.  This is odd right from the start because for whatever reason they call assassin androids cyborgs (I guess the Terminator franchise set the precedent with that) & it has some clips from the first film for no apparent reason (this really has next to no relation to the original).  Jack Palance is doing some sort of Max Headroom impression most of the movie appearing only as a mouth on a television screen trying to help an assassin android & her trainer that have fallen in love escape.  In general it’s okay as direct to video sci-fi.  It doesn’t try to be more than it is & the acting isn’t terrific & the characters act a little inconsistently at times (android assassin or damsel in distress?  Flip a coin to decide for this scene.), but it’s fine.  I guess I need to go ahead & mention this movie’s claim to fame – this is an early Angelina Jolie movie & she has no problem showing her boobs in the couple of sex scenes in it & probably that’s a big sale for a lot of people.

I’m interested in the questions of discrimination & slavery & the rise of artificial intelligence & when does something indistinguishable from human become human & when does a human that’s more machine than man stop being a human that this movie & other sci-fi brings up.  So I’ll go ahead & say you could do a lot worse than having this one play while you are doing some paperwork or whatever.


1 comment:

  1. I agree -- it's a decent, heady sci-fi b-movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I can't remember if I actually finished watching it or if I just fell asleep towards the end.

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