Disney's leap into the artistic future is also into an artistic void. Computer-generated movie images have plainly come a long way (one way or another, outwards if not forwards, breadthwise if not depthwise) from the 1960s avant-garde abstractions of the Whitney brothers, John and James, and on back to the experiments of pre-computer pioneers like Len Lye and Norman McLaren. And writer-director Steven Lisberger, with his first live-action movie, may have achieved something of a breakthrough in his full-length intertwinement of experimental filmmaking techniques and a conventional narrative line. At the same time, there is a sense that the arranged marriage between these two elements has been rather rushed into, without due care taken to ascertain whether the two parties possess similar interests and goals, and without working out an equitable division of tasks. The emergent problems may not suggest an inherent incompatibility, but rather just an unreadiness on one side or the other to pitch in and do its fair share. The urge to anthropomorphize and geographize computer programs is perhaps excusable as an idle daydream, but its palpable realization here, when Lisberger takes us on a tour of computer innards, suggests nothing so much as the sort of TV commercial in which stomach acid or carburetor sludge is given form as a human miscreant (or perhaps better yet, nothing so much as the concluding episode of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, with Woody Allen impersonating a drop of semen). And the software landscape, though filled with multiform wonders, looks quite like a cartoon — albeit with a plasticky, Pop-art surface to it — and quite uninhabitable by human actors. With Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, and David Warner. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd
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