MOVIE REVIEW: Creation of the Humanoids (1962)
I was watching movies online when I suddenly got an itch for some retro sci-fi. There was something about a mid-20th Century scream queen at work was always a pleasure to the ears. Reading that sentence back makes me think I might be an alien or a robot, but I digress. Back-to-back, I watched World Without End (a 1956 misogynistic and racist post-nuclear war movie with a time-travel plot device), Devil Girl from Mars (a 1955 black-and-white film about a Martian conqueress in the Scottish Highlands) and the subject of this review, The Creation of the Humanoids. This movie features some play on words that I did not expect, and a twist ending in the same vein. Only problem was the way it was portrayed: it was so damned BORING, and the only way I was able to stay awake and watch the whole thing is because it’s one movie I had never seen or heard of.
Like most mid-century sci-fi films, the threat of the atom’s destructive power and “MAD” (mutually assured destruction) through nuclear annihilation was always present. This movie carries it out with a sterile touch, skipping the burned dead and only telling us that over 90% of humanity was wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. Sobering yes, but not nearly as sobering as the explanation as to how the world was repopulated when mankind’s irradiated bodies could scarcely produce a viable birthrate over two percent: robots. The remnants of mankind built robots with a rating to determine how much a machine resembled its creator. Models R-1 through 20 were proper boxy-shaped robots, but models R-21 up to R-70 would more accurately be called androids. By the laws of this world, robots and androids were programmed to do what was in the best interest of mankind…even if it meant replacing mankind with more advanced (i.e., illegal) androids.
Without mankind’s knowledge, the machines started to replace them with near-perfect android duplicates — model R-96, which is closest to humanity. If an android could do EVERYTHING a human could do, like reproduce or “self-replicate”, it would be an R-100 model. The machines did not kill humans (except in one case where the robots duplicated a human brain TOO well and put it into an artificial body), but watched through a surveillance network until a human died and then quickly snatched the fresh corpse up to digitally duplicate their thought patterns and put it into a MIND (Magnetically Integrated Neurological Drive [or Device]). The robots put that MIND into an artificial duplicate of the body of the deceased. As I watched I found the plot sinister, and I should have hated the machines. Another faction took the place as antagonist: the Order of Flesh and Blood (OFB), a human-centric organization dedicated to keeping androids (or in the pejorative term of this organization, “Clickers”) in their place.
These OFB guys can boss the cops around, harass androids for fun, and dress like Confederate soldiers from the American Civil War. There’s a lot to unpack when faced with futuristic racism, especially when coupled with robot/human sexual relationships AND human extinction. All the OFB guys know it’s a matter of time, so they still try to breed to gain ground against human extinction. It’s a 50/50 shot the resulting human baby is a “useless mutant” (the movie’s words, not my own) due to the ambient radiation of the nuclear fallout. The androids knew it too — just like they knew the humans would get riled up if the plan to replace them was revealed. And so the robots wait until death gives them an opening to faithfully serve mankind, until all are the same: equal, immortal…and capable of self-replication as R-100 models.
For purely psychological reasons, of course.
This movie was so dark, and I could not believe what I was seeing. It’s no wonder no one knows about this movie: it’s screwed up in the best possible way. As I run my mind across the villains put forth by man’s robophobia over the years, all of them (Terminators, Replicants, Cylons, the machines and programs of The Matrix, the Borg, the Kaylons, LMDs, Synths, and droids) try to destroy us, subsume us or take our place. Could this be the only movie where the robots beat mankind without firing a shot — for the purpose of saving them or making them physically better? Could we really curse and destroy the hands WE made that would give us immortality, near invulnerability, AND we retain the ability to self-propagate?
I propose mankind in this film didn’t have anything to fear from the machines. The machines rightfully point out each successive kingdom of dominant life on Earth provided the key to their own downfall: plants fed the animals, then some animals evolved to think and built machines to think for them. By the robots’ line of programming, they would assist humanity into achieving a post-human state — human thought patterns in durable machine MINDs and bodies that would be near-infinitely renewable.
The OFB would see mankind limp through the eons with ruined and irradiated chromosomes. Such an idea would be like building a house on sand with flotsam and expect to weather the storms of the future and hold the gates shut with twisted limbs; in that delusional mindset of self-appointed superiority, mankind had only one enemy — proven at the outset of the story by its own hubris: ITSELF.
CHOICE CUTS:
- When the androids get their hands on a fresh corpse, they extract the thought patterns, process the body and dispose of the corpse. The movie never describes what “processing” is; even when one of the characters asks what the robots mean by the term. Granted, we don’t know how the humans of the future get their food and the implication could be the robots feed humans back to each other in some way.
- There’s a robot-human relationship in the movie, and the movie used it as a social commentary on what I thought to be interracial relationships. Then I thought about how the relationship worked: A woman had a male-presenting robot, and they had their mental patterns synchronized to be “in rapport” — this world’s way of saying they’re in a relationship, but with darker implications. All the woman had to do was think of something and the partner would know. There was no indication the robot would send thoughts to the woman, so how did the relationship work? By the movie’s own admission, the robot man could not leave unless the woman said he could — but she could leave whenever she wished. This would mean the two of them were not equals, even if the robot loved her so much that he simply deferred to her about everything. HOW DID THIS RELATIONSHIP WORK?
- Humans hate the robots for being so logical, but also programmed them to apologize for their logical natures. Weird flex, but OK.
- Clicker = the N word; that is all. Just watch the movie and you’ll see what I mean.
- There is little to no music, which is weird for a film. No attempt is made to create an atmosphere of happiness, fear, anger, sadness or anything — not even a stinger when the movie NEEDED them!
- Entire blocks of this 90 minute movie are dedicated to expository dialogue, even going so far as to put a smaller film before the main film to explain the world of the movie. I know you might say it’s called narration, but this movie got excessive.
- At one point the machines talk about the soul of a human being, relating the soul is a concept retained by the human mind. If a human mind is transferred into a machine MIND and artificial body, the resulting machine has a soul because the human mind inside believes it has a soul. This would lead into the ideas of sentience, sapience, reason, rationality, consciousness, the concept of a soul (and the philosophical systems that support the concept of a soul), and so on for both human MIND androids and androids without a human MIND inside — a selection of ideas we are not going to pursue in this review.
- The metallic contacts basically made the actors portraying robots blind, and wearing them had to be painful. Listen to the line readings and you’ll hear them stumble and strain to get the words out. Thankfully they didn’t have to walk wearing those things.
- I may be reaching here: if mankind pushed on with the belief of the OFB, they would end up making those useless mutants the new humanity — still soft and vulnerable, which they’d simply counter by making mobile armored shells for themselves. The superiority complex might cause them to think everything else is inferior and worthy of EXTERMINATION. Thinking like this is how you get Daleks, people; don’t be like the OFB.
Wow. I had a LOT to say on this. Go watch the movie if you can stand it being so boring, but it will blow your mind with the IMPLICATIONS, as opposed to the twist ending.
