Colossus: The Forbin Project
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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.
I miss the days when SciFi didn't mean an action film in a future setting that just ends up being the good guy(s) being chased by the bad guy(s).
Edit: Apparently I had heard of World on a Wire, but forgot about it as I've already got a copy as a series rather than a film.
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.
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.
Indeed. There is nothing in the film that contradicts the notion of Colossus being a very, very large LLM.
Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.
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. :-(
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.
Just hope that it is not Christopher Nolan.
It’s suicide, that’s what it is.
For years the American culture industry has the advantage on its home court that people in other countries would watch our movies with subtitles but Americans wouldn’t watch other countries’ movies with subtitles.
Now the sound mixing of American films has gotten so bad that Americans have been trained to watch with the subtitles on and once you do you might as well watch Italian crime dramas or subprime anime on Tubi.
So on top of movies that aren't legible in the theater there is plenty of trouble that comes up in the mixing for home theater.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRrjZWEZk9I&list=RDJRrjZWEZk...
I think this is often difficult for people who treat films as logical instead of experiential.
Nonetheless, it is inaccurate to characterise it as poorly mixed, since the goal was for the score to somewhat drown out the dialogue, and the mixing achieves that goal. You can disagree that this is a desirable outcome for the viewer, but art is ultimately subjective.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cjtlzp/comment/evg2js...
I think these are not "dumb" people. Being nerd is cool now, there is a subset of population who want to be "nerdy/intellectual" without being genuinely interested in stuff and putting in work that is required to be a "nerd/intellectual".
Nolan, knowingly or unknowingly, understands this and make very budget constrained wannabe blockbusters by tapping into this demographic.
Taking the thinnest of fair slivers, I think that's reasonably common in pre-(80s?90s?00s?) sci-fi/fantasy.
Are you sure it is dubious?
Woman used as sexual party favors still happens in real life today. Since it is a common weakness, why can't an AI exploit that.
Some might say our own government is now in control of a foreign government, purely on exploiting that weakness. So it is realistic tactic.
You'd have to ask 'ideonode who actually said that, not me.
Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.
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).
If any role is ready for an LLM to take over (or even a shell script), it's that one.
Were you able to suspend your disbelief when watching Idiocracy [1], either in the year of its release or in the subsequent decades? (^;
The plan would still work. Colossus couldn’t be destroyed with nuclear weapons and would retaliate against any attack. It could force compliance of conventional forces as well, and force automation on them, also force populations to rearm it.
In the end, the population would appreciate the eradication of poverty, hunger, disease, and the surplus from not maintaining military capabilities. Colossus could afford democratic institutions while acting as a guard rail against humanity’s worst impulses.
...or even just from recent middle-eastern history: an outrageous death-cult militant faction like ISIS.
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.
First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.
(Except for Demon Seed. That one jumped the shark - but I did love their rendition of what an AI data center looks like)
I’m glad you brought up Demon Seed all the same, as I was reminded of it while reading TFA.
When the computer system from the film commands a character to “open that door, and clean these lenses” in a particular scene, the absurdity and mundanity of being commanded to clean a camera by an AI is subtly horrifying.
For a modern analogue, I’m reminded of DoorDash workers being dispatched to close doors left ajar by passengers of autonomous Waymos.
I always enjoyed the reference as well as this movie’s a kid!
It "predicted technologies and cultural impacts similar to instant messaging, social media, and the Internet." (WPedia)
Apart from a 10-minute UK TV adaptation in 2009, ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1451714/ ) text and audiobook versions are widespread.
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.
Both seem to be influences of War Games.
Actually, found it online :)
It seems that the people who don't care to make their old movie available as VOD also don't particularly care about copyright violations.
The torrent now have over 50 seeders from the usual 5.
Thanks, i guess.
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.
[^1]: Even if, or especially if, they let ChatGPT write it.