Takeover

In this comic-fantasy made for Australian television, the marriage of George (Barry Otto) and Hilda (Anne Tenney) is undergoing strain for the familiar reason that George, owner of a computer firm, is spending too much of his time at the company office, thereby neglecting his needy wife and his small son Harvey, with a result that Hilda has come under the influence of a psychic renewal cult while Harvey has found a substitute for paternal guidance by withdrawing into a private world of computer gaming. After George's principal software engineer Frank ( Paul Chubb) creates a program that he names George One as mirror of the binary pattern, yet with an independent and developing personality, this illusory replicate begins to arrogate all aspects of its human model's existence, beginning with his company and moving soon from there to his family, forcing a desperate conflict between the Georges. As evidenced by its production values, director Rob Marchand's initial feature is handicapped by a skimpy budget and there is overmuch cutting that is harmful to continuity but the film's primary drawback lies in its script that too seldom explores its inherent elements of satiric effect, with such open targets as self-healing practitioners and the intrusion of computers into vulnerable psyches, while synch flaws subtract somewhat from capable Tenney's performance; in addition Otto, who plays splendidly as ever, is cast in a thorny dual rôle, one that must be perfectly managed during post-production processing, and is not.