Here at Wired, we talk a lot about the evolving relationship between technology and culture. In order to help our readers keep up with the fast-paced changes of our increasingly digital world, we’ve decided to analyze the valuable lessons about technology contained within the most educational material that we as a society have ever produced: Hollywood films. Today’s lesson: 1995's Evolver (available for viewing on Netflix) in which a teenage video game fan wins an indestructible military robot in a contest and it works out pretty much exactly as you expect.
The Plot
Remember those giant Virtual Reality arcade games that you'd see in the mall back when arcades were something that still existed? Evolver imagines a world in which those things did something way worse than just leading kids to waste an entire dollar for the privilege of wearing an awkward helmet for three minutes. Ethan Embry stars as Kyle Baxter, a radically earringed '90s teen who spends his afternoons playing a VR game called Evolver, presumably because his local arcade doesn't have Street Fighter II.
The company that made the game, Cybertronic, is having a contest, but despite the time he spends on it, Kyle's only just okay at the game. He is, however slightly better at cyberhacking the database, so he's able to get into Cybertronic's records and alter his score so that he ends up winning their contest and claiming the prize: A super-adaptable killer robot created by TV's John DeLancie, originally created to utterly destroy enemy targets for the military, now retrofitted with Nerf guns so that it can be used as a toy. It also speaks with the voice of William H. Macy. It's one Kelly Kapowski and/or Jack From Titanicshort of being everything every kid in the '90s wanted.
At first, Evolver just bumps around the Baxters' living room making a nuisance of itself and occasionally playing Lazer Tag with Kyle and his assorted crew of hangers-on. But, sure enough, Evolver's military programming eventually reasserts itself, and after watching stories about war on the local news (because that's what elite cyberhacker teens kept on the TV for background noise in the '90s, right?) it starts going on a killing spree.
Given that its standard armament consists of ping-pong balls and Nerf darts, one might think that this would be a difficult task to accomplish, but it manages through a pretty amazing set of coincidences. Not only does Kyle keep a box of metal balls in his room that are exactly the same size as Evolver's ping-pong ammo, but the toymakers at Cybertronic also decided to leave in the terrifying metal claw that could be used to shoot out lightning or pick up a hatchet.
Kyle assumes that the only way to defeat Evolver is to beat it at Lazer Tag, but after about twenty minutes, two dead friends, one attempt to get his murderbot to spy on girls in the locker room (really) and a truly awful decision to leave his nine-year-old sister home alone with what he already knows is a killer robot, he finally decides to just beat it to death with a baseball bat. It doesn't take, though, because this is a movie that insists on having no fewer than three fakeout endings, and only ends when Kyle blows it up with a Lazer Tag gun in a scene that I can only refer to as "highly improbable."
It might seem like a flight of fancy, but at its heart, it's a very educational film, reinforcing a lesson that most of us started learning in 1987 and/or 2364: Always, always be wary of gifts from John DeLancie.
The Tech
At its heart, Evolver is a movie about the fear of technology, the paranoia that we'll create something smarter than us that we'll have to battle for survival -- sort of like Terminator, if the Terminator was a cross between Paulie's robot from Rocky IV and R.O.B. for the NES instead of a conspicuously Austrian bodybuilder. It's a fascinating topic for exploration that's been at the heart of speculative fiction for decades, largely because it's such a huge shift in the way the world works that it's impossible to predict what will change if and when it actually happens. For most writers, anyway. Writer/director Mark Rosman seems to have come to the conclusion that the Singularity will bump into a coffee table, fall into a swimming pool and be ultimately defeated by the star of Can't Hardly Wait.
I think it bears repeating that the actual premise of this movie isn't just that the government creates a robotic super-soldier that's capable of learning and evolving in response to changing conditions on the battlefield and cancels it when it starts mowing down generals in a blatant ripoff of the ED-209 scene from RoboCop, but that the scientist behind the project decides it'd be a swell idea to swap a missile launcher out for a paintball gun and give it to a kid who is only sort of good at video games. Unless they wanted to figure out how Evolver would deal with complex tasks like throwing high school bullies down stairs (exceeds expectations) and snapping pictures in the girls' locker room (disappointing), I cannot fathom why anyone thought this was a good idea.
My best guess is that it was responding to the fear that video games were conditioning kids to be super awesome at jumping around and blasting things with handguns by showing how that could actually be a good thing, but even that seems pretty tenuous when you consider that most people who play video games don't actually want to do that stuff in real life. I mean, I really like Street Fighter, but if the prize for a high score was getting punched in the face by a guy who could uppercut you so hard his fist caught on fire, I'd probably just stick with Dr. Mario.
What We Learned
- You can trap someone in a cage made of beams of focused light so powerful that anything that touches them catches fire by shoving a laser pointer into a kaleidoscope.
- Nerf guns can be easily modified to fire steak knives instead of foam darts, with enough force to embed them into a wall. Step one: Put steak knives into a Nerf gun. There is no step two.
- If you're building a robotic toy for children to play with out of an indestructible murderbot, go ahead and leave the flamethrower in there. Who knows? It might come in handy.
