Viking Night: The Lawnmower Man
By Bruce Hall
April 7, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Graphics so good they could have come from a PS1 cut scene.
I think the worst part about living in the 21st Century is the lack of atomic jet cars. If you go back to the 1950s and 60s, everyone thought that by 2015, we’d all be wearing aluminum foil clothes, eating our food in pill form, and driving around in atomic jet cars. We laugh now at our primitive ancestors and their ridiculous vision of the future. But if you think about it, one minute you’re in the 1930s, toodling around in wooden steam powered cars, twirling your old-timey moustache and eating onion sandwiches (or whatever people did in the 1930s). Fifteen years later, you’re blowing up entire cities, eating TV dinners and sending monkeys into space.

Who could blame you if you assumed that by the turn of the century, everything would be made of lasers?

And then you’ve got the 1990s. The computer explosion of the 1980s gave way to the internet and cell phones and grunge music and 1-900 psychic hotlines. It was a wondrous time to be alive, and for a brief window, the possibilities seemed endless. This is probably why someone decided that virtual reality was going to be the Next Big Thing. In the case of The Lawnmower Man, this technology involved wearing a 10-pound pair of goggles with a set of bulky gloves while sitting in a weird gyroscopic chair. Apparently you could simulate flying, falling or even fucking - all while never really losing the sensation that you were just sitting in a weird gyroscopic chair, wearing a 10-pound pair of goggles and a set of bulky gloves.

Basically, the makers of The Lawnmower Man couldn’t have known that the virtual reality craze would eventually kind of just go away, simply because it’s not nearly as cool as it looks in the movies.

But in 1992, writer/director Brett Leonard - best known for making this movie and a handful of music videos - was convinced that "VR" would soon be so ubiquitous that we all needed to be warned about the dangers of overindulgence. So sure was he that he felt it necessary to appropriate the title to a Stephen King story which (surprise!) had nothing whatsoever to do with computers at all. But hey, if you're willing to steal from Stephen King, what reason is there NOT to start screaming about the end of the world? The Lawnmower Man proclaims right on the title card that virtual reality is coming, and it’s going to take over your life. From the start, Pierce Brosnan is tossing around hokey made up computer jargon, bloviating about how great it’s going to be when we’re all locked in our basements expanding our minds with this amazing technology instead of just using it to watch porn.

The future 007 has the misfortune to be playing Dr. Lawrence Angelo, a supposedly brilliant computer scientist working for a shadowy corporation I will call EvilCorp. They have hired him to use a combination of powerful drugs and virtual reality to train chimpanzees to murder everything they see. It works so well that one of the super-chimps escapes, kills one of the guards (“shot in the face by a chimp” it said on his tombstone), and nearly escapes the facility. Angelo is outraged, blaming the Corporation’s insistence on training the chimps for aggression instead of intellectual enlightenment. Angelo seeks to use his experiments for the good of humanity. But of course, EvilCorp just wants to use it as a weapon. And probably for porn.

So because he’s such a noble guy, Angelo takes his work underground. He hopes to prove to EvilCorp that his experiments can benefit human subjects, enhancing their minds without all the pesky homicidal side effects. But he's unable to find a suitable patient, and spirals into alcoholism and depression. This compels his wife to bail out - but her only purpose in the story was clearly to do just that, so it hardly feels like a loss. Eventually Angelo focuses on his groundskeeper, a strange, but loveable schlub named Jobe (Jeff Fahey). Jobe is mentally disabled in the inoffensive, non-specific way people usually are in Hollywood films. As a result, he’s routinely tormented by several supporting characters in very predictive ways. They include a cruel pastor (Jeremy Slate), a sadistic gas station attendant (John Laughlin), and a cartoonishly spectacular alcoholic (Ray Lykins) who loudly beats his wife and son right next door to Angelo.

Jobe is promised that after a short series of treatments he’ll be “smart”, and that none of these people will be able to take advantage of him anymore. Angelo develops the kind of fondness for Jobe one might have for a rhododendron - you’re glad it’s around, and if it were gone you’d be sad - briefly - but then you’d just go out and find another one. Initially, poor Jobe is just a means for Angelo to indulge his scientific obsessions. And when the experiment becomes a success Angelo’s superiors are impressed. But when Jobe begins to exhibit some unintended side effects, Angelo begins to feel genuinely protective of him. And when EvilCorp decides to take certain liberties with Jobe's development, the good doctor is forced to make some hard choices.

I’d be lying if I tried to say The Lawnmower man didn’t intrigue me - at first. It’s never made clear exactly WHAT Angelo is doing to Jobe. It appears to be little more than showing him some flashy Wing Commander era CGI and giving him injections of grape Kool-Aid. But for a while it’s intriguing to wonder how a man whose IQ barely exceeded his shoe size would adapt to suddenly being able to learn Latin in two hours. Would it be a great experience or would it be confusing and terrifying? Would the memory of his previous state give him any insight into his new abilities? Would it enhance or hinder his capacity to show mercy to those who were cruel to him? Would he be misunderstood and looked upon with suspicion, or would he be hailed as a miracle? These are fascinating questions, and I wish I could say the movie addressed any of them before going one hundred percent Murder-Monkey insane.

What could have been an interesting, modern day take on something like Flowers for Algernon instead turns into a bastard premonition of Revenge of the Sith. Whatever shred of compelling story there was quickly devolves into a bonkers dog and pony show engorged with apocalyptic pretense, stupid cliché and luridly excessive computer animation. Apparently computers are freaking magic - and exposing yourself to them for too long will give you insane magical space-powers that allow you to do insane magical space-things. So, stay away from them. I guess. I’m not sure what the hell I was supposed to take away from The Lawnmower Man, unless it was a headache. Or perhaps the experience of seeing Pierce Brosnan's career tarnished even more so than by those awful Bond movies he would later make.

I'm not even going to criticize the dated looking special effects. Who cares? In 20 years Avatar will probably look stupid. The Lawnmower Man's entire concept was dated, right out of the box. Every word of dialogue is out of touch with reality, virtual or otherwise. It’s daft almost to the point of being Reefer Madness for the digital age. My guess is that Brett Leonard spent a few minutes in a virtual reality booth at the CES show in 1990 and was determined to be the first person to make a disastrously deranged film about it. And now that virtual reality is making a comeback, I’m sure The Lawnmower Man and the technology that inspired it will find itself a new generation of interested takers. Personally, I can’t see myself ever forgetting I’m just sitting in a chair wearing a pair of goggles.

But I’ll make you a deal - if Oculus Rift takes over the world and we’re all trapped in The Matrix a decade from now, I will request a feeding pod next door to Brett Leonard so I can personally apologize to as the hive mind harvests our bodies for energy.