By Richard Winters
My Rating: 5 out of 10
4-Word Review: Having babies is forbidden.
In the future the earth has become overrun with smog that blankets everything and has killed off all plant and animal life and forces everyone to wear breathing masks when outside. In effort to control the population growth the government orders that no one can have babies and instead must visit ‘Babyland’ where childless couples will be given life-sized robotic dolls to take care of instead. Russ (Oliver Reed) and Carol (Geraldine Chaplin) are a young couple who defy this order and secretly have a baby, but when their neighbors (Don Gordon, Diane Cilento) find out and threaten to go to the authorities the couple is forced to go on the run.
This film was both a critical and commercial failure when first released, but was later turned into a novel called ‘The Edict’ that was a success and helped gain the film a bit of a cult following. The special effects though aren’t too great with an opening shot showing this flying vehicle that looks like it was connected to a crane flying over a city’s skyline that resemble miniature toy models, which to me should make it prime fodder for an episode of ‘Mystery Science Theater’. Blanketing everything with smog doesn’t help as part of the fun of watching a Sci-fi film is seeing the elaborate set design and this film has none.
I didn’t like that everyone wears the exact same black uniform either. This is not the first sci-fi film to do this, but it always comes off as phony to me. Do style and fashion trends just go out the window in the future? Every society in every time period has always had individuality and those that break away from the mainstream, so expecting that every single person in the future conforms to the norm and agrees to wear the exact same outfit as everyone else is just not believable.
The plot is skeletal and not well thought out. The first half plods along too slowly as it’s obvious from the start that Carol wants to have a baby and watching her come to this foregone decision is too draggy and the story should’ve started out right away with her having the child and then going from there to trying to hide it. Also, if the government really wanted to prevent people from having children why didn’t they just force every female to have a tubal ligation instead of trusting that after having sex they would go to their bathroom and press a button on an ‘abortion machine’ on the wall that would apparently send radiation, via a red glowing light, into the woman’s uterus.
The acting is good and Chaplin’s performance comes off as quite sincere. It’s also good to see Oliver Reed in a rare good-guy role although the script really doesn’t give him much to do. Cilento as the intrusive neighbor is by far the scene-stealer. The segment where she must be coached via a government official talking to her on a television monitor to show love for her robot child is one of the film’s best moments as is the later scene where she eventually destroys the doll by bashing its head onto a cement sidewalk.
Spoiler Alert!
The ending was the only time that I found myself slightly intrigued. Watching the couple get trapped inside a dome where after 12-hours they were set to be gassed to death and then having them dig their way out of it and into an underground cavern where via a inflatable raft they were able to escape was mildly interesting, but having them end up on an island where old nuclear weapons were buried was not satisfying. Did they end up dying of cancer? How could they survive without any plant or animal life and was anyone else on the island besides them? The ending like the rest of the film leaves far more questions than answers.
My Rating: 5 out of 10
Released: May 25, 1972
Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Michael Campus
Studio: Paramount
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 