Digital Man

Digital Man. Phillip Roth, dir., story, co-script, with Ronald Schmidt. USA: 1994. USA: Green Communications, Republic Pictures, Sci-Fi Productions, 1995. Talaat Captan, prod. Digital Environments by Mach Universe. Visual SpFx David Wainstain.

Cited by Michele Lloyd, "The Loneliness of Cyborgs," as a cyborg movie, in which a prototype D-1 "cyborg soldier is used to stop terrorists who are threatening to launch 250 nuclear missiles." There is, however, a larger conspiracy by the military to get the prototype to upload the launch codes for the missiles, thereby activating them. "A special forces team, consisting of both cyborgs and humans, is sent to destroy the D1 [sic: no hyphen] unit. No one on the team knew that some of them were cyborgs, including the cyborgs themselves." The D-1 cyborg resembles a combination of a Terminator from The Terminator, a smart-gun operator from Aliens, and RoboCop in RoboCop). The special forces team is ethnically diverse and both men and women; they are trained in encapsulating VR units. For cyborg/human confusion, cf. P. K. Dick's "Electric Ant" and, more relevantly, "Impostor". Plot summaries from M. Lloyd, our initial source for this entry, cited under Background, confirmed, and expanded, by our watching the film. See also John Thonen, rev. of video release, Cinefantastique 27.7 (March 1996): 59, who hyphenates "D-1" and really didn't like the movie; Thonen compares DM to Hologram Man, Shadowchaser 1-3, Nemesis, Automatic in its use of "the well-worn sci-fi premise of the automaton, the artificial man". (RDE, 21/01/96, 24/05/96)