Educational Media Reviews Online

This peculiar film goes nowhere. A weekend tournament of programmers crossing paths with a group of human potential “seekers” leads to some funny moments. But almost every thread the film picks up—the potential of artificial intelligence, the Pentagon’s interest in it, women in computer science, the personal situations of a few of the programmers—it quickly drops to no purpose. There seems to be no point to any of it. The old technology and styles are certainly evocative of the late 70’s / early 80’s, but atmosphere alone doesn’t make a movie, and as a result this ends up being mildly funny and pretty dull.

The technical quality is intentionally bad, but a time or two this does get in the way—when noise in the foreground makes it hard to understand dialogue it seems we’re supposed to be listening to, for example.

I see little educational value, although libraries supporting large collections in film studies may want to pick it up.