Out of This World

THE MOST OBVIOUS PROBLEM with Android is that it doesn't live up to the blurb on its advertising posters, which claims that it's time for Max 404, our hero, "to get down to earth." After spending an hour watching life in this floating lite-bright set passing for a space station, we really want Max to get down to earth. But it's a tease: Max never gets there and, in fact, just when he is finally earthbound, suitcase in hand, the credits start coming on. Android is a parody which needs to be a lot funnier--as it is, it comes off worse than the stuff it makes fun of. A sci-fi movie has to display more interesting sets or else has to have some outdoor shots--there's really nothing here that you couldn't see by browsing through Crate and Barrel and then cruising through the video arcade next day. As it is, the atmosphere is boring and claustrophobic.

Max 404 is a lovesick teenage android living in a lonely space station where he assists his creator--an insane, Nazified professor played by Klaus Kinski--on "Operation Cassandra" (the ultimate android!). As the film opens, Max is hanging around the space station playing video games, listening to rock-and-roll, and watching video tapes of black-and-white Hollywood feature films from the last century. When a female voice comes on the monitor, sending out an SOS and requesting permission to land, Max becomes really excited--a real live woman. Without asking the boss for permission. Max allows the damaged spaceship to dock. As it turns out, three convicted murderers and political terrorists who have killed all the crew members are flying the damaged ship: An enormous macho brute named Mendaz; a cunning German political terrorist named Gunther; and their beautiful female companion, Maggic, over whom they both fight.

There is some cute interplay between these very earthy--both literally and figuratively--criminals and their hos', Max, a wimpy video-addict computer jock who is not even a real man in the literal sense. The professor becomes furious when he learns that visitors have been allowed into his station, but his heart melts--just like Max's--when he sees Maggie: he needs a real woman as a model for designing his female android.

The professor's infatuation with Maggie provides the funniest scene in the movie. He invites Maggie for lunch in his garden, which makes Max very jealous. (It's kind of like bringing home your first date and having your dad hit on her). Max boobytraps the professor's luncheon and watches the disastrous affair on a video monitor. As Max watches the professor propositioning Maggie to have sex with his new robot he is also watching a video-tape of the robot creation scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, while listening to an old blues tune called "Searchin' for My Love." This absurd overlapping of technology past and future with Max's discovery of the timeless facts of life lies at the core of the film's humor.

UNFORTUNATELY THERE JUST AREN'T enough moments in Android where the humor comes to the surface. This sort of parody would work much better or an outrageous level--as in Airplane, where things are so stupid, you have to laugh at them. Android instead comes across as an overblown premiere of a sci-fi television show, whipped up just in time for fall previews, with silly cardboard sets, silly stock characters, and lots of pointless footage.