a review of 神秘美人局

Looker is an interesting dystopian tech-fiction concept by Michael Crichton. You can clearly recognize elements from his Westworld. I loved the 1980s Wave style look and sound of the film, which is often mimicked in Retrowave productions these days. Susan Dey is a feast for the eyes and James Coburn is cool as ever. On the negative side, Crichton shouldn't have directed this himself. The pace is too slow, the acting is often unconvincing, and the ending was just plain bad. Despite the direction flaws, the message is quite visionary for a 1981 film: commercials featuring computer-generated perfect people, brainwashing the screen-addicted viewers, and viewers being scanned to collect data of what their eyes are exactly looking at. It's creepily familiar to the developing possibilities of AI, to the widespread addiction to social media, and to the decline of privacy in favor of data retrieval.