Review: Creation Of The Humanoids.
I don’t often review non-anime movies here, but this one was so good that I couldn’t pass it up.
A little history. If you grew up in New England around the 1980s, one of the highlights of your week was WLVI-56’s Creature Double Feature. This was in the days before cable networks, so you had a bunch of local TV stations trying to fill the hours with whatever programs they could find. This station, located in Boston, MA, would broadcast old monster movies from noon till four on every Saturday. You had Universal monster movies, Godzilla and Gamera pictures, Hammer horror films, and more. This program created a tremendous number of geeks in the Northeast, and even now many people still have fond memories of being a child and watching bad b-movies and giant monster flicks. This was how I was introduced to Godzilla and Gamera, among others.
So bored at work, one day I found the site above. They had a list of every single movie played on that program, and I vowed to go down and watch every one of them. When I got to Creation of the Humanoids, I was shocked. It was one of the best pure science fiction movies I have seen, ever.
The plot is surprisingly sophisticated for a B-movie. In a future after atomic war, the human race is a shadow of itself. To survive, they create robots to do all the menial and difficult jobs that they can’t. However, not everyone likes how humanity has declined due to this; a society of anti-robot humans called The League of Flesh and Blood are campaigning against one model of the robots, the human-like Humanoids. One day on patrol, a man from that society named Cragus observes some odd behavior from a pair of humanoids. He follows them, and soon discovers a plot by them which will have grave implications for humanity as a whole.
It’s a basic plot, but what’s surprising is the depth and complexity of the ideas behind it. Cragus in any other movie would be a fanatic and destined to be killed, but the movie manages the incredible task of making him a fully realized human. It gets how a human can be resistant to change, and even violently so, and not be evil; it gets the conservative mindset in a time of drastic societal upheaval. You can feel his shock as the world is changing around him, conveyed brilliantly in a conversation with his sister.
And that conversation is one of the highlights of the film. Cragus’s sister is the liberal side of things. She has a rapport with her robot-she’s literally taken part of her personality, put it inside of him, and has fallen in love with the reflection he is to her. She’s also surprising; while she’s liberal, she’s triumphant, smug, and definitely dismissive of Cragus as her brother while having good points about adapting to change instead of pointlessly fighting it. This is a B-move made in the 60’s, yet it talks more intelligently about how science can disrupt mores and customs than many films made forty years later.
That sophistication continues through the film. The idea of humans racist against robots is a common trope today, but the hatred against the Clickers is done much better than later films. This predated Blade Runner by twenty years, and in a way is a better treatment of it. The Humanoids aren’t just toys or dolls, but are slowly building their own society and religion, and are also dealing with a future in which Man will one day no longer exist. They’ve begun the first steps to that by creating robots that forget they are robots: humanoids who are imprinted with the minds of men.
And amazingly, they talk about the implications of that, and even in some Christian terms. Even if you are a robot, you are not Godless, for in the end the same creator who made the humans made you. The question of whether robots have a soul is also done well; while the robots don’t truly know if they do, they do know they are possible of having the faith to believe in their own souls, and that has to mean something right? And there’s some discussion about whether or not a soul can be diminished by robothood, with some good points. If you cut off a person’s leg, does their soul diminish? No.
There is the main twist of the thing, which I won’t spoil but is slightly more than you’d think. There’s a second “gotcha’ twist which really needed some more developing, but is thought provoking. It’s not the strongest plot, but this is more about the ideas than the explosions or danger.
It’s not a perfect film, however. It’s more of a stage play set to film; there is little to no camera work, and a lot of talking. There’s a romance that’s key to the plot which to me developed abruptly. It is a B-movie made in the sixties, so it’s not triple A level production values. It does have some striking set design, with a retro-sixties Art Deco tinge to it which has aged very well. Ironically, it fails at being a B-movie; most people watch science fiction films of that era to enjoy bad storylines, campy acting, and the absurdity of the 50’s idea of the future.
What you get instead is a very thoughtful look at a human future in the middle of being absorbed into a transhuman one. There’s a complexity to the subject which is unusual for films even done today, let alone in an era where radiation was magic. You can find the film up on Youtube, or a DVD edition bundled with another sixties movie on Amazon. It’s worth a watch at least once though. A similar film, but with a higher budget, is Truffault’s version of Fahrenheit 451.
