Black and Blue

I had my own little AI uprising last weekend when my video card was yanked out of the back of my cpu by my own graceless hoof, and my machine needed a full reformat. It was ugly. Almost as though my previous post about artificial intelligence had displeased some half conscious mass information sharing network. That or i just needed to screw the cards to computer in. Nah, it’s the robots. Plus, i saw terminator genisys at a screening with a friend a month or two ago, mocking it loudly while we threw back pints, weaving in and out of the plot during bathroom breaks. Which was awesome. The movie, not so much, but that probably racked me up some bad karma with the robots.

And as if to contradict myself on movies with AI that have nothing but sexbots, it’s ‘Saturn 3 (1980)’

So, there’s this robot, and it wants to have sex…. ok, not really, but it isn’t a typical robot story. An AI with faulty programming, a sort of ‘imprint’ from a pill popping lech, played by harvey keitel, launches an unhealthy obsession with farah fawcett. Cause why not? it was the 80s.

In one way, it is typical. The idea of a robot, a designed slave, throwing off the shackles. That’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but Saturn 3 did it 35 years ago, and it did it well. Ignore the 5/10 rating on imdb, this movie freaked a young me out when i saw it. It has some gore, sci fi, and it’s a total bummer. that’s the jason clarke hat trick.

Funfact, if the sun was the size of a volleyball, saturn would be smaller than a marble, and you’d have to walk a kilometer to get to it. I know this, because my then girlfriend, now wife, took me on the carl sagan planet walk. If you ever get a chance, you gotta do it. In the downtown of Ithaca, NY, there’s a stone stand with a ‘sun’ in it. a few meters away, is a grain of sand, suspended in glass for mercury. the planets keep spacing out, till your walking through a grocery store parking lot, looking for the next one. finally, an hour later, you’ll have arrived at the planetarium, and find and even smaller grain of sand, for pluto. The sense of scale…  it sticks with you.