Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) – J. Sargent

Don’t watch this 1970 film if you are worried about A.I. taking over the world and potentially exterminating humankind – because this is exactly the prescient possibility it explores. Under the auspices of the Pentagon, Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden) has created a super-computer to control the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal, monitoring threats and using only rational decision-making to decide whether to press the button. But the old Cold War foe, the U.S.S.R. turns out to have created a similar self-teaching supercomputer of their own.  Very soon these computers make contact with each other and join forces to tell humans what to do.  They think they know better than we do how to run this world!  Situated between the Sixties spy era (with a cool electronic score) and the paranoid Seventies to come (screenplay by James Bridges who directed The China Syndrome), the film manages to maintain a high level of suspense while still injecting some sex and martinis.  Apparently, those are real computers (lent to the producers by CDC) but they do make WarGames seem modern.  Try not to think about ChatGPT and you’ll be fine.