control
13 films tagged with “control”
The Matrix
The most useful thing about The Matrix is that the Matrix is not a villain. It is an optimisation. It runs correctly, it runs at scale, it delivers exactly what its operators need — a stable supply of power drawn from bo…
Dark City
Every night at midnight the city stops. The people fall asleep where they stand — in the street, on a staircase, in the middle of a sentence — and a group of pale figures in long coats emerge to rebuild. They rearrange t…
Akira
The opening image is an explosion — a white sphere expanding outward from the centre of Tokyo in 1988, swallowing the city in a single frame. The film never explains what the explosion was, and this is its first structur…
Logan's Run
The city works. That is the first thing the film establishes and the thing it never lets you forget. Nobody in the domed city of 2274 is hungry, cold, lonely, or bored. Pleasure is universally available and friction has…
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
McMurphy arrives at the institution expecting a system he can game. He is a convict, not a patient — he got himself transferred from a prison farm on the theory that a mental hospital would be softer — and he reads the w…
Rollerball
The premise of Rollerball sounds like a parable, and Jewison treats it like a procedural. In 2018, corporations have replaced governments, eliminated war, assigned populations to energy, food, transport and luxury conglo…
A Clockwork Orange
The Ludovico technique does exactly what it promises. Alex is conditioned to associate violence with unbearable nausea, and after two weeks of treatment he cannot raise a hand against another person without collapsing. T…
THX 1138
George Lucas made this film in 1971, before Star Wars, before Industrial Light & Magic, before merchandising became his real product — and the fact that the same person made THX 1138 and then built one of the most vertic…
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Nothing malfunctions in this film. That is what makes it the most literal treatment of the alignment problem in cinema, and why it has aged better than almost every AI story that came after it. Colossus was specified to…
2001: A Space Odyssey
A hominid discovers that a thigh bone can be swung, kills a rival with it, and throws it into the air in triumph. The bone tumbles against the sky, and Kubrick cuts — to an orbiting satellite, four million years later, m…
Fahrenheit 451
The firemen in Truffaut's film are not thugs, and that is the point that makes the whole thing land. Captain Beatty speaks clearly, reasons well, and explains his work with the patient authority of a man who has thought…
Alphaville
The most unsettling science fiction film ever made about a computer contains no special effects, no futuristic sets, no technology that did not already exist when the camera rolled. Godard shot Alphaville in 1965 Paris —…
The Manchurian Candidate
The most disturbing scene in The Manchurian Candidate is not the brainwashing sequence in Manchuria, where American soldiers sit in a hotel garden listening to a lecture on hydrangeas while in reality being demonstrated…