Cyborg 2087

A cyborg from the future is sent back to the 1960s.

60s Outer Limits, 60s The Invaders and 60s Irwin Allen all rolled into one!

The plot has shades of a couple of Limits episodes, the lack of fancy hardware gives it a touch of QM's The Invaders and the general presentation/casting reminds me of Irwin Allen.

Michael Rennie is here, but don't expect The Day The Earth Stood Still 2 - you will not get that!

The DVD picture quality is fine and, despite some slow moments, I generally had a ball with Cyborg 2087. However, I viewed it as a blast of the 60s, younger viewers who only want science fiction thrills might find it all a bit too old school?

Let's see... Michael Rennie plays a cyborg. He is sent back in time by rebels to prevent a scientist from inventing a device that will have an impact upon the future by enslaving mankind. In turn, Rennie is being chased by agents from the future who are intent that he does not complete his mission. A woman in the present day begins to fall for Rennie. Sounds awful familiar to me. The music, as noted by the other comment, will have you rolling, it's from Saturday morning cartoons, you're almost expecting that Hanna-Barbera sound effect when someone starts running. Still, the movie has an above average cast for its low-budget, Michael Rennie, Karen Steele, Eduard Franz (the Jonathan Drake of "Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake"), Harry Carey, Jr., Warren Stevens (Forbidden Planet), Wendell Corey, and even future M*A*S*H star and Mrs. Chuck Woolery, Jo Ann Pflug can be glimpsed.

The term, cyborg, meaning cybernetic organism, relates to a human enhanced with mechanical parts, often robotic in nature.

Thus gave us the first glimpse into this genre. Albeit low budget (I mean, instrumentation from the future labeled with Dymo Label Maker Tapes?) and featuring actors who were at their peak not just a few short years before, including Michael Rennie, Klaatu from "The Day The Earth Stood Still" or "The Keeper" from "Lost In Space", or Warren Stevens, Doc Ostrow from "Forbidden Planet ("Monsters! Monsters from the ID!") and throwing the tem-oral twist of alternative time lines, this cyborg pre-dated "The Six Million Dollar Man" (and Martin Cadin's novel it was based on, "Cyborg"), the Jean Claude Van Damme dystopic future wasteland adventure, even Star Trek: The Next Generation's most relentless enemies, the Borg (sounds Swedish!...sorry. I couldn't resist).

Add to that the obvious Terminator references (and people still forget about Harlan Ellison's own legal action against Cameron due to similarities in his Outer Limits scripts "Demon With the Glass Hand" and "Soldier") and you have a low-budget oddity that hasn't made the rounds in the post-midnight TV info-mercial circuit in years, being swept aside by other B-Movie kings like the Band Brothers' Full Moon Productions or Bert I. Gordon's & Brian Yuzna's Lovecraft micro-epics.

Once again, Michael Rennie dons a tin-foil suit to come and warn mankind to amend it's ways. This time, though, he is a cyborg called "Garth 7" sent back from the year 2087 to try and stop an evolutionary process that will rob us all of our ability to think for ourselves. He manages to ally with "Dr. Mason" (Karen Steele) but pretty soon they are aware that the government they wish to thwart has also sent agents back and so not just time, but other folks from the future are against them too. This is cheap and cheerful, pedestrianly written, afternoon fodder that is very light on science or characterisations. Rennie looks like he maybe only did the one filming day, such is the truncated nature of the editing - and the special effects (his bio-implants, especially) are not up to very much, either. Oddly enough, it might have looked better in black and white, somehow the colour just makes it look even more sloppily thrown together. Potentially, an interesting take on a well used idea, but sadly it offers little we haven't seen before and the star is well past his best.

Yesterday, I saw the last of the three "Rings" movies. Ho-hum. CGI is great. So is a good book. CGI of a good book is, however, just eye-candy. "Cyborg" is a movie that, lacking money and computer graphics, was forced to tell a story. Michael Rennie (you know him as "Klaatu") is a man/machine from the future, come back to correct a few mistakes. His "high" tech looks a bit like your grand-dad's ham radio did about the same time this movie was made, but so what? Garth (Rennie) isn't here to show us ray guns or cell phones. (Who knows? Maybe his gizmos are all camouflaged to resemble '60s-era devices.) What he is here for is to undo the damage of some bad decisions (many of which will remind you of "The Terminator's" SkyNet, but you decide yourself if there's a connection).

Alas for Garth, if he succeeds, it may have dire consequences for him personally. That fact gives him a poignant nobility that many films, then and now, could use, but lack. Time-travel stories often rely on that kind of wrinkle for their drama, and I think that's an inherent weakness of the time-travel sub-genre: they all tend to ask the same question. Still, this one asks it well and Rennie's skillful performance leaves you exquisitely uncertain of just what the Right Thing to Do would be, in such a situation as his character finds himself.

Yeah, "Rings" was great. But so was this, and they don't make 'em like this one anymore.