984: Prisoner of the Future

984: PRISONER OF THE FUTURE was the pilot for a Canadian television that never went to series but was instead released as a TV movie in 1982. Having watched it twice now, I can understand why it was never picked up but I also want to be clear that I respect what they were trying to do. Buried somewhere in the poor direction, poor editing, and poor script is a story with the potential to have made for an interesting show. With a budget and proper filmmakers behind the scenes, this could have been a cool dystopian science fiction drama. Instead it's a bit of a mess with the occasional flicker of interesting material. It drops you right in the middle of the story from the very beginning. When we first meet our protagonist Tom Weston (Stephen Markle), he's locked in a nondescript prison cell. He's been assigned a prisoner number (984, obviously) and his only socialization from comes prisoner #30 in the cell next door. It's obviously sometime in the future because the guards are some sort of robot on wheels with glowing red laser eyes (also, it's stated plainly in the title) but otherwise there's little to see because the entire film looks as if it was shot in an abandoned warehouse. There's nothing but brick walls and concrete floors, and I'm pretty sure the prisoner intake flashback scene was shot on the loading dock. I found myself distracted by this obvious fact but, to be fair, I'd have been willing to forgive the low budget location restrictions if the movie had been executed better.

Weston is some sort of political prisoner, I think. The events leading to his incarceration are revealed in flashbacks over the course of the movie and exposition comes from Weston's interactions with the giddily psychotic warden (Don Francks). Here lies my biggest problem with PRISONER OF THE FUTURE; thanks to the poor editing, direction, and script (and the less than stellar audio transfer on my DVD copy), I was left completely baffled at the constant nonsensical backstory information. I believe he's a political prisoner who has been imprisoned for crimes committed against something called the Movement. I thought the Movement was a resistance faction but apparently they might actually be the ones in charge. The warden seems determined to squeeze a confession from Weston but Weston holds strong that he has no idea what's going on. He seems 100% convinced that he's been wrongly accused but the warden hits him with evidence that Weston's friends and associates (and mistress?) were all co-conspirators. But then I got the impression from some of the flashback sequences that Weston was actually in trouble for refusing to commit atrocities in the name of the Movement. So was he imprisoned because he refused to play ball with the baddies? At this point, I'm still unclear. Director Tibor Takács and screenwriters Peter Chapman and Stephen Zoller seem to have forgotten that, for the audience to care about our hero, we really should know and understand what he's going through. Since I have no concept of where he stands in all this, I have a hard time sympathizing. Is he a criminal? Or a victim?

PRISONER OF THE FUTURE is a pretty rough watch but I'll give it credit for trying. Unlike a lot of the Z-grade movies I've made myself suffer, at least Takács and cinematographer Alar Kivilo try to get creative in how they shot it. Rarely is the camera locked down while we're forced to watch the same static frame while characters rattle off dialogue. The camera does its part in trying to tell the story and for that it gets some respect. PRISONER OF THE FUTURE may be a lame TV movie but it's giving it an effort. Sadly the cinematography is one of the few positive notes I've got on the movie. But not the only one. I still love the robot guards and my interest piqued whenever they were on screen. There was an especially cool bit in the finale where they're pursuing Weston and flailing at him with karate-chopping action figure skills. The whole use of torture and brainwashing to break the prisoners was pretty cool (we see the effects of it on prisoner #1170, who goes from smarmy businessman to sniveling wimp over the course of his stay) and we get an interesting reveal at the end about Weston's imprisonment that I would've like to delve into further. I'm guessing that would've been the ongoing thread if this ever went on to become a full-fledged series. Really, that's the most frustrating part of this movie. It doesn't get truly interesting until the very last few minutes but by then it's too late and the credits are rolling. I can't really imagine where 984: PRISONER OF THE FUTURE could've gone with a full series run and I'm left to wonder if it was doomed from the start, but using this confusing mess of a movie pilot probably wasn't starting them off on the right foot anyway.

This movie (TV show pilot) is BORING! It started out interesting and then turned into one long borefest! I can see why the idea for the TV series was axed. The film makes no sense whatsoever... they should have reveled why in the heck they were really prisoners beside this "enemy of Dr. what's his name" stuff. I mean the potential was there for a good film and maybe an okay TV series but this pilot pretty much sucks.

I felt nothing for any of the characters. The one's that were captured and imprisoned for no real reason - I didn't feel bad for at all! They were very flat characters that I didn't care if the "bad guys" killed or let go. I really didn't care! That's one of the biggest problems with this film - flat characters in suits and ties that you can't sympathies with at all. It's like "who cares if they are imprisoned, they probably deserved it anyway but I really don't know because they aren't letting us know really anything solid about them".

1/10

Successful executive Tom Weston (Stephen Markle) is taken to a high security detention centre, accused of being in cahoots with a group of rich businessmen dedicated to toppling current ruling regime The Movement, whose leader Dr. Fontaine (Andrew Foot) seeks to punish the rich and powerful for past indiscretions and recondition them for life in his 'new world'. Weston continually denies his involvement, even after undergoing torture, but although the warden (Don Francks) secretly believes that his prisoner is innocent, he has his own reason for continuing with his sadistic game.

Directed by Tibor Takacs, the man who gave us entertaining 80s popcorn horrors The Gate (1987) and I, Madman (1989), this dystopian made-for-TV sci-fi has a cool central idea that might have been extremely effective as a half hour episode of a Twilight Zone-style series, but doesn't work as well stretched out over 76 minutes. Alternating between flashbacks and confrontations between prisoner and warden, the story becomes frustratingly repetitive, and the final revelation—which proves to be such a shock for Weston—is far too easy to guess for anyone paying the slightest bit of attention.

4 out of 10, rounded up to 5 for the hilarious roller-skating robot guards.

This movie strikes me more of a low busget Sci Fi film that, as part of distribution, ended up being shown on TV as opposed to the notion that it was a TV pilot, made for the purposes of being a series that wasn't picked up.

One reason is the story has a beginning, middle and end. There are no loose ends to build a series around when it ends. Another reason is that this was filmed in 1978 and wasn't shown on TV until 1982. A TV pilot would've gotten air time quicker even if it wasn't picked up. I've seen other TV movies that were sold to networks as is like George Montgomery's Satan's Harvest. That wasn't a TV pilot either.

Likening 984:Prisoner of the Future to The Prisoner isn't very fair for a few reasons. The Prisoner was a TV series with a budget, 984 really suffers from limitations in that regard. The Prisoner was also more of an allegory while 984 doesn't offer much beyond what is shown. 984 gives you all the pieces to fill the picture puzzle instead of doingnwhat The Prisoner did. In that we were imagining how the picture should look and were carving them up to fit how we think the picture should look. That's what made The Prisoner such a masterpiece. 984 doesn't try to achieve what The Prisoner did so the comparison doesn't work for me. A better comparison is to the various versions of George Orwell's 1984 that made it to the screen. We see who is in charge, we see how he comes to power, we then have to puzzle together what happens much like the protagonist, Tom Weston has to do during his tenure in prison. I do feel there is a homage of sorts to The Prisoner at times. The electronic doors make the same sound opening and closing as Number 6's home in the Village.

984 is about a corporate executive named Tom Weston who gets caught up in a political power struggle and is imprisoned by the side called "The Movement" after its leader comes to power. The ideals of the leader, a college professor named Fountaine are Marxist in that the common man will rise up against those with more power than them and become the power structure themselves. Given Tom Weston's profession, Corporations are one of The Movement's targets but as the story unfolds, neither side look like saints.

We get to puzzle together why Weston is a prisoner and the reasons for his imprisonment end up shifting dramatically as the story unfolds. 984 ends up serving a different purpose to The Warden and The Movement while he is there. That becomes apparent in one of the charges filed against him during a flashback Weston experiences while drugged by his captures and the ending tells the rest of the story. It is something I didn't expect though there are clues throughout it that hint to it that I missed.

As I said, this has no real budget at all. The prison itself is at times comical. The robots roll around and we never see more than 2 at a time. We see the same one guard who doesn't seem to age a day even though we see him when Weston is first taken into custody and he remains there after we learn Weston has spent more than 10 years in the prison. The block where Weston's cell is, is the same as all the others with the level number changed. There aren't enough characters for action sequences. The goal seems more to develop atmosphere than anything else. The prison yard where the prisoners get exercise is the same exact location where the prisoners are first detained. It clearly wasn't meant to be seen as the same location but I noticed it. Also there are shots and dialogue that are reused at different times. We are supposed to not care so much about these limitations and concentrate on the story. Being used to low budget movies I can manage this.

There's enough going on to keep me interested. Little asides between characters are clues to what happened when The Movement came to power and there is no doubt about it when it comes to an end.

An executive is taken as a political prisoner and detained in a detention centre. He, along with others, is accused of being a conspirator who wishes to topple the new dictatorial communist-like government who have taken control. From here he is tortured in an attempt to make him confess to his involvement.

984: Prisoner of the Future is an unnecessarily confusing film. Its story is really fairly straightforward but it's told in a way that results in more questions than answers. In quite a few other films this would be a pretty good thing but this one doesn't have the overall pay-off to really justify this approach. In fairness to it, this story-telling method was very probably a result of this being the pilot for a TV series. They obviously wanted to whet the audience's appetite with several unresolved plot threads that would get them excited enough to generated enough interest in a series. Unfortunately for the film-makers no series came of this, so this is all we have and this explains the vague nature of it. It's very possible they quickly put together the ending too, so that this pilot could go out as a standalone feature film. Whatever the case, the result is a pretty unsatisfying film. The low production values don't really help – the low budget would have been less of a problem in a TV series to be fair – but mainly it's the fact that the overall story seems to have little point that sinks this one.