Android

Android

By now it has become an initiation: A young film student wants to be a director, he goes to Los Angeles, he gets the money to make a cheap exploitation film in a reliable genre, and then he tries to make it so good that people will hail him as the new Stanley Kubrick.

You could have a festival of those first films: George Lucas’ “THX 1138,” John Carpenter’s “Dark Star” and “Assault on Precinct 13,” Steven Spielberg’s “The Sugarland Express,” Martin Scorsese’s “Who’s That Knocking at My Door.” And now there is another one, “Android,” by Aaron Lipstadt, who studied for two years at Northwestern University before going out West as Roger (“Attack of the Crab Monsters”) Corman’s personal assistant at New World Pictures.

When Corman sold New World, Lipstadt went off on his own but good. The science fiction movie called “Android” follows some New World traditions:

It was made on a low budget.

It contains one cheap but instantly identifiable horror star (Klaus Kinski).

There are heroines dressed in scarcely anything.

And it was shot on nice-looking sets that owe more to imagination than money.

But in one important way “Android” steps outside these traditions. This is thought-provoking film, an adventure based on ideas; its nearest ancestor may be TV’s “Star Trek.”

The movie takes place on an abandoned space station millions of miles from Earth, half-a-century from now. A mad scientist (Kinski) is trying to create the perfect artificial human being; her name will be Cassandra. He is assisted by one of his earlier creations, an android named Max. Life is dull out there in space, and Max is also something of an android teen-ager; he’s fascinated by pop culture from Earth during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Then a spaceship runs into trouble and sends out an SOS. Max guides it in for a landing at the space station, and then finds that one of its three passengers is a real, live female (Brie Howard). They are attracted to each other, and in a weirdly inventive scene he makes love to her while Cassandra lies inactive in the same room. The intensity of their passion ignites the spark of life within the android.

Meanwhile, more predictable things are going on with the plot. The castaways turn out to be crooks, Kinski becomes obsessed with finishing his experiments, and people creep around corners and attack one another.

This kind of movie was made for Kinski, who can play crazed obsession as easily as other people can wait for buses.

What’s interesting, though, is that the movie doesn’t simply end in a routine violent showdown. Instead there is a wonderful confrontation which questions the whole business of who is and who isn’t human. And it also asks an even trickier question: What if you’re not human but you do have human intelligence? Can you then love? And if love resides not in hearts but in brains alone, is it exclusively human?

Watch Android For Free On Gomovies.