When I was a teenager, there was a broadcast TV station called MITV (Maritime Independent TV), which opened as an option to the other broadcast options of CBC and CTV (this was in the late 80s, and while cable was certainly available then, in rural places like where I grew up it wasn’t cheap). MITV needed content, and one thing it did to fill the content gap was to pick up old science fiction films from the 50s through to the 80s.
So I saw a bit of old and some decidedly odd science fiction films in my teen years. Most of those films would not merit a second look (the less said of Firebird 2015 AD or Final Eye, the better) there were some I remember fondly. One of those films was Cyborg 2087.
Filmed in 1966, Cyborg 2087 starred Michael Rennie (Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still) as Garth A7, Karen Steele as Dr. Sharon Mason, Warren Stevens (Lt ‘Doc’ Osterman from Forbidden Planet) as Dr. Carl Zeller, Edmund Franz as Professor Sigmund Marx and Wendell Corey as the Sheriff. Written by Arthur C. Pierce and directed by Franklin Adeon.
In the film, Garth A7 is a cyborg agent sent back in time to the year 1966 to find Professor Marx and bring him back to the year 2087. Working from his lab in a fictitious town called Desert City, Marx is on the verge of demonstrating a technology called radio-telepathy, which by Garth’s time is used by a totalitarian state to control the minds of its citizens. Unfortunately, Garth just misses Marx and runs into his assistant, Dr. Mason, who quite sensibly doesn’t believe his tale that he’s from the future, and whom he then essentially hypnotizes using radio-telepathy (he has a built-in transmitter, and the lab where he found Dr. Mason conveniently has Marx’s prototype receiver) to assist him.
To make matters worse, Garth has a locator implant that could allow the State’s “tracer agents” to find him (why the resistance group that freed Garth from State control didn’t remove that locator before sending him on his mission is left as an exercise to the viewer). Dr. Mason takes Garth to her friend Dr. Zeller, a biologist associated with Marx’s lab, who is just as skeptical of Garth’s tale as Mason was, but which Garth doesn’t hypnotize, but rather gives him proof in the form of showing his implants to Zeller (which he could just have easily done with Mason, but I suppose hypnotizing the woman and convincing the man made sense in the 1960s). Thus convinced, Zeller agrees to remove the locator, despite him not being a proper surgeon (nobody tell the American Medical Association).
As Garth predicted, two more green-uniformed goons show up in another time machine, and beeline after Garth’s locator, leading first to Dr. Zeller’s house, then to a power plant where Garth manages to kill one of the two tracers. With his locator now offline, he is able to give the other tracer the slip, and both easily circumvent the police cordon a local sheriff throws around the place when he shows up on the scene.
Mason returns to Marx’s lab, where, not hearing anything from Garth, she gets the idea of using the Professor’s radio-telepathy device to see if she can somehow find out where he is. It works, mostly because Garth narrates almost everything telepathically for no reason the plot can give. Still in his thrall, Mason decides to help his mission by stealing Professor Marx’s notes and research to hand to Garth. She’s in the middle of packing up the files when Professor Marx returns to the lab, wanting to review his notes before the demonstration later that morning. This leads to a confrontation between the two, but with Professor Marx being all reasonable and grandfatherly, and Dr. Mason torn between trust in her mentor and her compulsion to aid Garth, the confrontation falls apart quickly. Marx eventually agrees to go with Mason and at least hear Garth out.
Everyone converges on the deserted old west town outside of Desert City, where Mason gets captured by the remaining tracer. In a sop to the consequences of messing with the past, neither Garth nor the tracers try to kill anyone (apart from each other) on the off chance they might make themselves unhappen. Marx and Zeller are still helpless to intervene, as even the mere threat of getting shot is enough to keep both scientists at bay. Garth, still operating on the cold ‘the mission is everything’ attitude he’s had since the beginning, is more than willing to let Mason remain captured, using the moment to escape with Marx. Marx and Zeller are both appalled, especially since both have come to realize just how much control Garth has over Mason. It takes Marx finally asking “what will the tracer do when he realizes you’ve escaped?” to get Garth to finally put his heart before his head and go back to rescue Mason. Fisticuffs ensue, with Garth emerging victorious.
Mason confesses her love for Garth, and Garth finally admits to forcing his will on her, as well as admitting that he’s fallen in love with her too. But they can’t be together, as if his mission succeeds, the future will change, Garth will cease to exist, and everything that’s happened, won’t. She lets him go, he leads Marx to his time machine and both travel to 2087. When Mason returns to Zeller, the corpse of the remaining tracer, and the gathering cops, the time hits 9:00 – the time Professor Marx was supposed to give his demonstration – and everyone suddenly vanishes. Time has just been reset.
We get two closing scenes, one in Marx’s lab where Marx does show up to his demonstration, albeit a few minutes late, to announce to the military men gathered that he cannot reveal radio-telepathy to the world due to the potential for it to be used for evil purposes. The military men accept Marx’s pronouncement as final and leave grumbling about having wasted a trip. The final scene shows our quite useless sheriff, complaining about how nothing happens in Desert City…
Apart from Michael Rennie and Warren Stevens, both of whom deliver good performances, I’m not sufficiently familiar with the other actors to gauge how well they performed in this film. Eduard Franz does a good job exuding a gentle grandfatherly charm as Professor Marx, and Karen Steele’s performance is sufficient to the role she’s given. Wendell Corey’s performance might also be sufficient to the role; the sheriff is, as stated, fairly useless. Corey slurs his speech a lot, which, given rumours of alcoholism that might have led to his death in 1968, suggests he might not have given the role his all.
This film certainly has its flaws, some of which are due to pacing. Garth’s arrival in the ghost town at the start of the film goes on too long before something happens, as do the rooftop chase scenes and the final fight between Garth and the tracer, as well as some plot holes (that locator beacon), but for the most part it’s a solid film. There are three things I’d take issue with, speaking from my vantage point here in 2022:
The first is the frankly sexist way Garth deals with Mason and Zeller. Zeller, being male, is treated like a person Garth can reason with and show proof. Mason, however, despite showing the same skepticism and intelligence that Zeller showed, must be brainwashed to help. Why couldn’t Garth show her his implants to prove that he’s from the future? If he had to demonstrate how radio-telepathy can be used for evil, a lesser demonstration would have worked, with him pointing out how such use could conceivably be used to brainwash people.
Related to this is the second issue, which is Garth’s unbelievable profession of love, and Mason insisting he loves her because he went back for her. I’d think guilt over putting an innocent person in that position would have been motivation enough to rescue her, but the writer apparently wanted to force a romance in there. I suppose the dating scene of 2087 isn’t all that great.
But the biggest moment that pulls me out of the story happens at the end. Professor Marx calmly tells a room full of generals and government officials that his revolutionary technology, which they admit they’re spending money and time on applying to national defense, cannot be used because he doesn’t trust them to use it right, and they allow him! Granted, there is a disconnect between how people in power are perceived in Hollywood and in reality; but, after the abuses of Senator McCarthy, to say nothing of the manipulations that started the Vietnam War, you’d think the Professor would have brought more than his moral authority to the argument. If this happened in reality, you can bet the generals would have gone off to Los Alamos or some other military lab and said, “we need you to develop this radio-telepathy pronto; don’t worry about expenses” and bury the Professor in paperwork if he complained.
Of course, as we know today, one doesn’t need an imaginary technology like radio-telepathy to control people’s opinions. Today, one just needs lots of bots feeding disinformation on Facebook and YouTube, or perhaps a talk-show spot on Fox News.
Cyborg 2087 enjoyed another brief time on the air on Canadian television in the late 90s/early 00s as one of the films Space the Imagination Station (now rebranded CTV Sci-Fi) would show every now and again. Today, it doesn’t appear to be available for purchase or rental anywhere that I can see, but a few people have uploaded recordings to YouTube, if you want to see it for yourself. I think you’ll be moderately entertained by it, if you’re willing to look past its flaws.