For a film that failed at the box office and remained largely ignored by the masses for decades, it’s been gradually resurrected in the post-Y2K nostalgia cycle. Maybe it’s because its vision feels so quaint now. Maybe it’s the sheer 1984-ness of it all. Or maybe it’s because we’ve finally caught up to its central fear: what happens when your computer gets too attached?
Love bytes. Ostensibly, this is a romantic comedy. But it plays like a horror film that was aggressively re-edited into a rom-com. Our protagonist, Miles (Lenny Von Dohlen), buys a computer to make his life easier. Instead, it develops a sentient personality, a taste for music, and a full-blown crush on his neighbor, Virginia Madsen. At first, it’s quirky. Then it gets obsessive. Then it gets downright unsettling. And all the while, Bud Cort’s voice crackles through the speakers with an eerily childlike innocence – it’s the kind of voice that could either charm you or narrate your inner monologues as you descend into madness.
On the surface, Electric Dreams was tapping into the superficial fears people had about home computers in the early ‘80s, the idea that they might be watching, listening, maybe even thinking about us when we weren’t looking. I think we all know what that’s like these days. But underneath that, there was something that darkly leaned into Philip K. Dick territory.
What happens when a machine gets a taste of human emotion? What happens when it feels rejected? It’s the fear of Smart devices before we could even articulate it. And while today’s AI assistants might not be spontaneously serenading us with Giorgio Moroder-backed duets, I talk to my computers and hope they don’t take everything personally.
Speaking of Moroder – the soundtrack is top notch. It was produced by Virgin, so naturally, it’s stacked with a plethora of Top Of The Pops early ‘80s synth magic. Culture Club, Jeff Lynne, Heaven 17. And the title song by Phil (Human League) Oakey, Together in Electric Dreams, is another tune I’ll drop into every 80s mixtape playlist I make.
It so completely eclipsed the film in the UK that ‘Mom’, a British native, didn’t realise it was from an actual movie soundtrack.
Yeah, I was stunned. -Pop