MovieChat Forums > Looker (1981) Discussion > A prophetic movie!

A prophetic movie!

posted 16 years ago by buckaroobanzai50
11 replies | jump to latest

The scene in the lab, where Leigh Taylor Young puts the headset thing on Finney made wince, because a similar technology actually exists. I once saw on the news, that a company has created a machine which checks someone's attention while they do an indoor driving test. This equipment can follow their eyeball and record where they look while driving, and is used for research and to teach people to drive more safely. I cannot recall the name of it, perhaps some good person here knows.

Also, the use of CG superimposed background sets, is now commonplace on most news channels around the world.

[–] adventure2run 16 years ago

The headset device does indeed exist and has for years. I believe something similar has been used to allow quadriplegic's the ability to type out text on a computer keyboard, just by looking at a keyboard on a screen. Also, Google the company in Orange County, California called MaMoca. They have developed a system similar to what is used in Looker to scan a person and render a CG form. Very similar matrix grid patterns projected on a person using what I believe is a streo-based LCD projection system. The OC Register newspaper in Orange County, CA, did a profile of MaMoca I believe in May or June of 2007. Crichton was way ahead of his time...

[–] buckaroobanzai50 16 years ago

Chrichton was indeed way ahead. The Japanese are building theme parks with animatronic robots in them, ala West World. And wasn't the Looker novel written in the 1970s?

[–] patryk-cichy 15 years ago

Unfortunately, there wasn't a Looker novel, it was Crichton's original script. If it was written, I'd love to read it though.

[–] mikeflw1 14 years ago

If I recall correctly from the movie FIRE BIRDS with Nicholas Cage, Tommy Lee Jones, and Sean Young, the Apache helicopter minigun/cannon was aimed by tracking the pilot's eye(s). There was even mention of the 'safety' that shut off the weapon's movement (on the ground)... I wonder which came first - the military version or the LOOKER movie?

And FYI, there was an X_Men full-length feature movie with Finola Hughes as the White Witch(?), (she was the lead dancer in STAYING ALIVE, opposite John Travolta). Didn't see that one? No surprise, because it didn't rate well with the audiences I suppose, and never made a release. The idea of "adjusting" positions / stars / actors has been a fact well before LOOKER, but probably not as much a science as the movie portrays it to be. Some directors/producers watch audience reactions during early screenings of their movies to make final adjustments for the general wide release.

[–] mc7791 13 years ago

that was a TV movie called Generation X. It was not made for theaters

"so you cooked up a story and dropped the six of us in a meat grindah."

[–] BanuHaqim 15 years ago

Michael Crichton. That man was brilliant. He was truly a visionary. He predicted animal cloning at least 10 years before they cloned Dolly the Sheep.

[–] jpardes 15 years ago

To be fair, lots of scientific minds predicted cloning long before it was actually achieved.

[–] jpardes 15 years ago

I can't believe I just wrote that

[–] Balibari 15 years ago

Absolutely. His idea to populate real sets with CG actors is what happens today. Wait a minute...

[–] Xeokym 15 years ago

Yeah almost every one of Crichton's books have something that's a premonition of something to come. If you read them now, it might not strike you as prophetic, but if you read, say, "The Terminal Man" back in the 70s and then it's like got things that come true eventually, it's pretty amazing. I remember being really disturbed by the idea of brain implants when I was younger, and thinking "that'll never really happen," and now there are all kinds of people with brain implants for various reasons, either to help control epilepsy or other seizures, depression, and even (still experimentally) to give a kind of sight to blind people. And it doesn't even seem creepy or gross anymore.

I really like William Gibson's work, and people say he is the originator of "cyber punk," but I think Crichton was already on that track before Gibson; Gibson just took the idea and refined it into a distinct genre.

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[–] MuggySphere 10 years ago

The only book of his not likely to happen is Timeline