Getting the emotion.

 

THE TERMINAL MAN, scripted and directed by Mike Hodges, is by some distance the most interesting and successful film of a Michael Crichton novel. While Crichton is not even remotely interested in people, giving his books a slick, diagrammatic quality as they move through intricately worked-out plot mechanics in order to illustrate some predetermined thesis, Hodges cares passionately about the humans in his stories. Yet a Hodges film can have a glacial, smooth surface that as first glance seems to deny us easy access to characters’ thoughts and emotions.

In TTM, George Segal has a tiny computer implanted in his brain to control his epilepsy. It doesn’t work out. While Crichton in his novel is very concerned with making explicit the esact nature of the foul-up, the better to prove a point about the dangers of mechanizing the organic, Hodges is more concerned with the very human consequences.

Halfway through the film, Segal, a robotics engineers, trashes his lab and slumps in despair, repeating a mechanical gesture endlessly, and Hodges slowly pulls away from the tiny figure of flesh amidst the metallic debris. “It’s too painful to watch. We want to give the man his privacy. The American producers didn’t understand why I was zooming away, they wanted to zoom IN.”

Hodges, in his first Hollywood movie, had stumbled across perhaps a key difference between American and European approaches to capturing emotion on the screen.

Mike Hodges, photographed by Fiona Watson.