Keanen's Film Blog

Here’s another sci-fi movie I think is cool. If you’re a fan of Michael Crichton’s concepts but not his writing, this one is both hit and miss. It feels like a slower version of Timeline (2003). Watch it. It’s good.

Looker is not the greatest film ever made, but Crichton’s concept of digital forms replacing live human models is almost commonplace by 2021 standards, while it exceeded common understanding when the movie came out. A couple years ago I would have cited specific software and literature to prove my point, but by now it’s no secret that we have reached photorealism in human animation, and it’s easy too.

This stuff was fantasy in 1981, but throw the movie in a time capsule for another 40 years and the aliens that roam the barren wasteland of the future will find the technology as portrayed quaint human art. The figures only look like the models, but what about full brain simulation, what about interactive volumetric quantum point cloud models down to the bone marrow? If Moore’s Law holds, the future’s digital people will kick our teeth in, probably only 5 years from now.

The early ’80s idea of post-human entertainment was a little simpler, almost campy. The fear was of people using computers to replace people, not computers using people as fuel (or whatever the next Matrix comes up with). Back then, you scanned your models before killing them. Nowadays, you can make your model with a few keystrokes. Forget royalties. You don’t even need to book a meeting. You don’t even need an animator. AI will start making shit up on its own.

There was a moment in history when the film community feared CGI destroying the effects job market. This movie is an amplification of those anxieties, but a decade before anyone had them. It’s an odd thing seeing formerly bleeding-edge technology as a casual storytelling device. It’s amazingly accurate, until it gets to time-freeze guns, adversarial light patterns, and subliminal messaging. Empirical research has been done on hypnosis techniques, but public awareness of that stuff is not as common as public awareness of CGI, probably because CGI doesn’t scare normal people as much.

The topics the film touches on elevate it above schlock. There are some cheeseball elements, notably the theme song, but overall it’s a somber and gripping story. The ending feels a little rushed and there are no sequels, comics, or followup media of any kind, but the film gets its point across.