Great film, I thought. The ending is quite dark—and then Colossus tells Forbin that he will come to love him…
Turns out it is prescient. The film was based on the first book of a trilogy. You can look up the plot of the following two novels if you want spoilers, but indeed, Forbin does have a reconsideration of Colossus.
Back when I worked as a civil engineer I had a coworker named Joe. He was... I think 78. Poor guy didn't save up enough for retirement so he worked a bit part time. He knew the ins and outs of the field better than anyone, but had no idea how to use a computer (he marked up drawings and I put them into CAD). He mentioned this movie to me as AI (gpt) had just become a thing saying "it'll scare the hell out of you", and he recommended I watched it - I'm glad I did!
Great guy, always told funny stories - "I was not a great dad but I was a damn wonderful grandpa!"
Lol okay cult film lovers. Give me something besides boring technical dialogue and three-at-most set pieces. You’ll have terrible taste, that’s fine. Doesn’t make the movie “good”. A little more honesty and a little less evangelism for concepts would make HN healthy place instead of a dead af opinion drop for wanna be successful swes.
I watched it for the first time a few months ago and it totally holds up. Very enjoyable film and more relevant now than ever. It is probably considered a little slow for modern low-attention-span audiences.
Tangential: movies are not necessarily the best medium for cautionary tales about super-intelligence, with their penchant for hiding educated reasoning and their need for showy visual effects that always age poorly but get all the viewer's attention. Writing, on the other hand, can do the trick. The same way American schools have periodic rehearsals for "if a shooter comes," they should have a mandatory exercise to "write your own story that features super-intelligence." It might make the kids think[^1].
[^1]: Even if, or especially if, they let ChatGPT write it.
Oh man, the Golden Age of science fiction movies, just two years after 2001: A Space Odyssey and five years before the start of the Blockbuster era[0] with Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).
I feel like Science Fiction back then was purely understood as psychological concepts and ambiguous desires, mostly questioning the very essence of reality and our human minds. There were intelligences and ambitions in us that felt alien, but weren't extraterrestrial in kind. I always thought of it as if Science Fiction tried to turn any progress from the Age of Enlightenment inside out.
A great gem is also World on a Wire (1973)[1], which takes the concept of a machine controlled intelligence and questioned whether we're living in a simulation and are already influenced by a virtual world.
My favorite quote from Colossus: The Forbin Project, after Dr. Forbin is held hostage by Colossus:
Colossus: How many nights a week do you require sex?
Dr. Forbin: Every night.
Colossus: Not want. Require...
Dr. Forbin: [looks sheepish] Four times.
Yeah, Star Wars more or less killed sci-fi as we had known it. I liked the weird Logan's Run, the depiction of class stratification in "Soylent Green", the banality of corporate control of "Rollerball".
The idea of a computer virus in the film "Westworld" was, to me at the time, something out of left field. (And speaking of Michael Crichton, "The Andromeda Strain" was "intelligent" sci-fi and we enjoyed it.)
"Mad Max", though it came after "Star Wars", drew inspiration from "A Boy and His Dog", "Deathrace 2000"…
1950 through 1987 were very good years for Science Fiction Movies and TV shows particularly the 1960s.
One show that wasn’t exactly science fiction but was really good was the Prisoner with Patrick McGowan.
They are still very good anthology Science Fiction being written, but unfortunately Hollywood today isn’t doing that many – adaptations as usual Hollywood doesn’t like hire writers outside Hollywood.
I cottoned onto the film a couple years ago after Ready Player One’s Ernest Cline recommended it on a Weaponized podcast. I like that the exterior facility shots were filmed at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. In the film context I really would construe it as projecting some sort of Cold-War era “secure government science facility” architectural archetype. When one learns about the career arc of E.O.Lawrence, the stylistic allusion to Cold War science feels all the more fitting. Viz. Lawrence Livermore lab has the reputation today of being the more secure, clandestine lab, while nearby Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) has the reputation of being the stand-up academic science lab that welcomes international academic all-comers. But prior to Lawrence Livermore’s founding (like while Edward Teller was closer to the then Berkeley Rad Lab, now LBL). And so for several years, 1940s to at least the early 1950s, Berkeley Rad Lab would have been possessed of what would become those same Livermore-esque secure spooky Cold War science vibes.
Rollerball has the central premise that society is outsourcing all decisions to a central computer and everybody just blindly follows, to the point where nobody checks whether it’s functioning properly.
First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.
The short scene where they are in the "computer room" and the operator mentions that they lost the entire history of 14th century painting, or something like that. So relevant to contemporary memory holes and wholesale data losses.
I had 2 main fridge-logic issues which made it very difficult for me to suspend disbelief and limited my enjoyment of the film:
First: Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control, with no means of overriding it; and with its computing hardware sealed in an impenetrable fortress (no maintenance access?).
Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor, all solely interested in not-dying-at-Colossus's-hand - which is an unworkable assumption.
Unfortunately, the story is driven by these 2 points - without either then the film's story would just be yet-another-cliché-movie where the plucky humans beat the advanced AI overlord, the end.
---------
I still like _Colossus_ because it's "different" to all the other 20th century films with an AI character (c.f. tripe like Will Smith's _I, Robot_ or the Matrix sequels).
Both of these are better addressed in the books. It was an intentional choice to have no override and no maintenance access. And book 2, Colossus and the Crab, actually spends a bunch of time with Colossus testing the rationality of various humans.
I love the movie but you have a point and I can see how it could make it hard to buy into
Interestingly I typed this prompt into a LLM and it was interesting to see it's lists. I'm not going to list the answers I got here but I kept asking for more.
> List 10 famous movies that have glaring plot holes or premises that make no sense. Example: In Star Wars, they have a planet destroying machine but don't just blow up the planet and instead wait to "clear the planet" before blowing up the moon (please, no arguments about reasons)
Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control
Not true.
It was both the US and the Soviets(creating Guardian) that did so, each competing with each other for the hope of reduced threat (the logic holds for cold-war logic, removing emotional, mercurial humans from the loop).
There is no requirement for anyone else to sign on at that point. The US and the Soviets held an incredible number of nuclear weapons at the time, about 40,000. Both Guardian and Colossus were in nuclear-safe bunkers, other countries having nuclear weapons would be meaningless. Should any country try to attack, what would they do? Destroy random cities in the USSR and the US? To what end? Destroy launching sites? The UK had a few hundred weapons, many of them plane carried. France had a few, China a handful in the 60s (when the movie was filmed), none of that would be enough to destroy all nuclear launch sites.
Not to mention, try it, and your entire nation would become nuclear ash.
Both complexes were self-repairing, had self-contained power supplies, and so on.
I think this is a fair threat model. And both Colossus and Guardian seemed to always be one step ahead of "the humans". They were tied into communications world wide, monitored everything telecommunications and radio wise, knew all secret codes used for communication, and even the direct lines between the US and the Soviets were eventually tapped (on the machine's orders).
Should some nation make preparations for war against Colossus, it would surely be detected. And blamo, no more nation, with a stark warning to others.
Of course, there are always plot holes and unrealistic situations. However I find it holds together, as much as any movie does.
I've always wondered if it was perhaps the inspiration for the novel Neuromancer (2 AI's in different continents plotting to combine with each other to form a global super-intelligence)
I came to this film late. Somehow, despite being quite active at the time of its release, I never knew of it until a colleague turned me onto it in the 90s.
Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.
I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.
I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.
A favorite film of mine. I was very happy when a decent quality bluray became available a few years back. I know someone who uses "Warn. There is another system." as an alternative to "Hello, world".
I've wondered if D.F.Jones knew of the British Colossus code breaking system and named his computer that to tweak the security people. They couldn't really object, since Colossus was still a secret. Jones was in the British military and it's not impossible that he knew of the project.
And when that movie played on the Caltech campus in the early 70s, everyone waited for the point when the US and Russian computer started exchanging a private language and one engineer exclaims "That's like five years at Caltech in thirty seconds!" The entire theatre exploded and my ears hurt from the screams.
I rewatched this recently; I think it held up well. It’s probably re-entered the zeitgeist given the recent developments in “AI” and “agents”. So far accidents seem to have destroyed only data, but it’s only a matter of time before some fool hooks up an “AI agent” to a missile.
Much of the film was shot at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the hills above Berkeley, California. This building was probably chosen because of its unique brutalist hexagonal architecture. I spent a bunch of time there as a kid.
Eric Braeden (Forbin) is still alive, but his house in Pacific Palisades burned down in the 2025 fires. :-(
43 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 60.2 ms ] threadI always enjoyed the reference as well as this movie’s a kid!
Turns out it is prescient. The film was based on the first book of a trilogy. You can look up the plot of the following two novels if you want spoilers, but indeed, Forbin does have a reconsideration of Colossus.
I would love to see the whole trilogy filmed.
(Except for Demon Seed. That one jumped the shark - but I did love their rendition of what an AI data center looks like)
So is the scale. For the 1980s and 1990s, the huge Colossus system seemed obsolete. The age of the personal desktop computer had arrived.
Now Colossus looks small compared to Amazon's AI training system from 2025.
[^1]: Even if, or especially if, they let ChatGPT write it.
I feel like Science Fiction back then was purely understood as psychological concepts and ambiguous desires, mostly questioning the very essence of reality and our human minds. There were intelligences and ambitions in us that felt alien, but weren't extraterrestrial in kind. I always thought of it as if Science Fiction tried to turn any progress from the Age of Enlightenment inside out.
A great gem is also World on a Wire (1973)[1], which takes the concept of a machine controlled intelligence and questioned whether we're living in a simulation and are already influenced by a virtual world.
My favorite quote from Colossus: The Forbin Project, after Dr. Forbin is held hostage by Colossus:
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Bl...[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire
The idea of a computer virus in the film "Westworld" was, to me at the time, something out of left field. (And speaking of Michael Crichton, "The Andromeda Strain" was "intelligent" sci-fi and we enjoyed it.)
"Mad Max", though it came after "Star Wars", drew inspiration from "A Boy and His Dog", "Deathrace 2000"…
A Golden Age for sure.
As does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor which is sort of a remake of World on a Wire(coming from Simulacron III).
One show that wasn’t exactly science fiction but was really good was the Prisoner with Patrick McGowan.
They are still very good anthology Science Fiction being written, but unfortunately Hollywood today isn’t doing that many – adaptations as usual Hollywood doesn’t like hire writers outside Hollywood.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/alternateversions/
First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.
Both seem to be influences of War Games.
I had 2 main fridge-logic issues which made it very difficult for me to suspend disbelief and limited my enjoyment of the film:
First: Colossus' is only able to implement its plan because the US, and US-aligned nuclear powers, agree to subordinate their entire nuclear arsenals to Colossus' full-authority defence control, with no means of overriding it; and with its computing hardware sealed in an impenetrable fortress (no maintenance access?).
Second: Colossus' plan - and its ultimate actions - assume everyone else on earth is a nuclear-disarmed-rational-actor, all solely interested in not-dying-at-Colossus's-hand - which is an unworkable assumption.
Unfortunately, the story is driven by these 2 points - without either then the film's story would just be yet-another-cliché-movie where the plucky humans beat the advanced AI overlord, the end.
---------
I still like _Colossus_ because it's "different" to all the other 20th century films with an AI character (c.f. tripe like Will Smith's _I, Robot_ or the Matrix sequels).
You are not the president of the United States. That is Donald Trump.
Do you see how the plot is consistent?
Interestingly I typed this prompt into a LLM and it was interesting to see it's lists. I'm not going to list the answers I got here but I kept asking for more.
> List 10 famous movies that have glaring plot holes or premises that make no sense. Example: In Star Wars, they have a planet destroying machine but don't just blow up the planet and instead wait to "clear the planet" before blowing up the moon (please, no arguments about reasons)
Not true.
It was both the US and the Soviets(creating Guardian) that did so, each competing with each other for the hope of reduced threat (the logic holds for cold-war logic, removing emotional, mercurial humans from the loop).
There is no requirement for anyone else to sign on at that point. The US and the Soviets held an incredible number of nuclear weapons at the time, about 40,000. Both Guardian and Colossus were in nuclear-safe bunkers, other countries having nuclear weapons would be meaningless. Should any country try to attack, what would they do? Destroy random cities in the USSR and the US? To what end? Destroy launching sites? The UK had a few hundred weapons, many of them plane carried. France had a few, China a handful in the 60s (when the movie was filmed), none of that would be enough to destroy all nuclear launch sites.
Not to mention, try it, and your entire nation would become nuclear ash.
Both complexes were self-repairing, had self-contained power supplies, and so on.
I think this is a fair threat model. And both Colossus and Guardian seemed to always be one step ahead of "the humans". They were tied into communications world wide, monitored everything telecommunications and radio wise, knew all secret codes used for communication, and even the direct lines between the US and the Soviets were eventually tapped (on the machine's orders).
Should some nation make preparations for war against Colossus, it would surely be detected. And blamo, no more nation, with a stark warning to others.
Of course, there are always plot holes and unrealistic situations. However I find it holds together, as much as any movie does.
At the very least, it engenders conversation.
Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.
I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.
I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.
I've wondered if D.F.Jones knew of the British Colossus code breaking system and named his computer that to tweak the security people. They couldn't really object, since Colossus was still a secret. Jones was in the British military and it's not impossible that he knew of the project.
Actually, found it online :)
Much of the film was shot at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the hills above Berkeley, California. This building was probably chosen because of its unique brutalist hexagonal architecture. I spent a bunch of time there as a kid.
Eric Braeden (Forbin) is still alive, but his house in Pacific Palisades burned down in the 2025 fires. :-(