Nov 30, 2019
Project X (1968)
"What went wrong? Was it the extension of time?"
"There's no point in recriminations, Colonel, or trying to place the blame."
"Oh, come on Doctor, I want straight answers not evasions!"
"Alright then, it could have been the extension of time - in which case, of course, it was entirely your fault."
#Project x#william castle#american cinema#science fiction film#films i done watched#1968#christopher george#Greta Baldwin#henry jones#Monte Markham#harold gould#Lee Delano#Phillip pine#Ivan Bonar#Robert cleaves#Charles Irving#Sheila bartold#Patrick Wright#keye luke#L. P. Davies#OK ok. A lot to unpack here. Castle's penultimate film as director bears none of the hallmarks or trademarks that had become associated#With the director (well none of the more obvious ones: his penchant for weird imagery and optical effects is in full play). Adapted from#Two of L. P. Davies' Sci fi novellas mashed together this is clearly for the most part an exercise in cost cutting: having established a#Utopian future in which crime doesn't exist our hero is promptly installed in an exact replica of 60s America and what looks suspiciously#Like a studio lot. There's a lot of awkward exposition and some long conversational scenes but there is also the thread of something quite#Brilliant and (in 68) quite new running through this. The greater themes about artificial memory and mind engineering are very cyberpunk#Before the genre was really big (in cinema anyway) and the trippy scenes within George's subconscious are truly impressive in their#Psychedelic weirdness. A scene in which his id manifests physically and attacks the villain is both jaw droppingly audacious and#Genuinely well executed. The love plot and some of the spy business feels a bit shoehorned in to make the film have a more general appeal#But it's in those experimental and hard Sci fi explorations that it really does something special and it actually works