Electric Dreams

Made at a time when personal computer were novel enough to be the subject of a movie, Electric Dreams in many ways epitomizes the early 80s with its fetishization of silicon chip technology and celebration of the new consumer power of youth.

From the days when Jeff Lynne and Giorgio Moroder ruled the airways and permed hair and padded shoulders were both big beyond reason, Electric Dreams, the story of a boy, a girl and a computer trying to find the meaning of love, is terminally daggy but in a likeable sort of way. Lenny Von Dolen, an actor who had his first film appearance the previous year in Tender Mercies but who disappeared into TV-land after this, plays the earnest young architect, Miles Harding, smitten by the charms of his cello-playing neighbour, Madeleine (Virginia Madsen, who went on to a solid feature film career). He brings home a computer which, HAL-like, starts to want to be treated as an equal, even to the point of competing with and for Madeleine.

Yes it’s a silly plot but in the 80s that wasn’t an objection. With its Space Invaders graphics and floppy disks, needless to say the computer technology is crude by today’s standards. The music is kitsch, including the purported classical music, which is pure Boston Pops but Electric Dreams is a film which probably will have nostalgia value to those who were in its target demographic at the time.

DVD Extras: Video of the hit single “Together In Electric Dreams”, by Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder

Available from: Shock Entertainment

 

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