Gog (

1954

)

Years ago I bought a copy of Gog from a bootleg DVD stand whose owner told me the film was a predecessor to The Terminator (1984) (incidentally, I have no way of verifying this though having watched Gog twice for this review I find it highly suspect), and was about a killer robot terrorizing scientists in a remote research facility. I was surprised then, upon watching the thing to find a movie that was less The Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and something far closer to a cross between Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Destination Moon (1950). Indeed, the best way to sum up Gog is to call it an atom age murder mystery, with a dash of McCarthy-era paranoia thrown in for flavor. It's a truly unique film, exemplifying many of the best attributes of hard sci-fi stories from this era. The film will certainly not be for everyone's tastes, as it is frequently slow, features some extremely hooky special effects, and includes a least one truly baffling casting decision. However, those with a love for mid-century sci-fi should check this one out. I downright love this movie, warts and all.

We begin with a scene that efficiently sets the stage for both the film's plot and its themes. A group of scientists working in an isolated research facility, conducting a strange experiment: They are flash-freezing a monkey, Pepe, and then seeing if they can effectively revive him after thawing him out. The idea is to eventually adopt this technology to humans so they can be safely placed in suspended animation during long spaceflights. The lead scientist, one Dr. Hubertus peers into the test chamber through a window kept clear of frost by an adorable windshield wiper while his number two, Dr. Kirby mans the apparatus that controls the temperature and shocks the monkey back to life. The experiment goes off without a hitch, and Pepe the monkey is revived. Then Hubertus sends Kirby out to fetch an instrument from the supply closet and goes into the test chamber to inspect the machinery, only to have the doors slam shut behind him as the temperature in the room rapidly drops. Hubertus desperately pounds on the observation glass trying to escape but it's no use. In a moment he's frozen solid, falling to the ground off-camera with a sickening shattering sound. When Kirby returns with the instrument, she rushes into the test chamber to help Hubertus only to have the door slam behind her, and the whole ghastly scene plays out again. It's a rather gruesome opening, especially considering the era this film came out in, but more compelling than the pure horror of the sequence is the way this scene not only reveals Gog's themes but gives us some insight into the larger cultural imagination.

I have often described the early Cold War period as a time defined by two competing ideas: the optimistic faith in a better tomorrow through technological progress and the fear of imminent annihilation at the hands of said technology (usually, but not always, in the form of nuclear weapons). The future will be wonderful... If only we can live to see it. The opening scene of Gog does an admirable job of capturing this dichotomy. First, we are shown the wonders of technology, here the ability to freeze a monkey and then revive him moments later and given a chance to contemplate what possibilities this new technology will hold for mankind. Then, without a moment's warning, this same technology goes haywire and kills two of the scientists in a manner that was about as grisly as you could get away in an American movie of this vintage. At a stroke, the wonders of technology are transformed into horrors. This is a pattern that the film will repeat, as we're given a detailed demonstration of each new technology be it solar mirrors, zero gravity suits, automated nuclear reactors, or hulking robots, only for these technologies to become menaces to their own creators. It's as neat a metaphor as I've seen for the contradictory fearful and hopeful view of technology that was so prevalent in the era.

It's not all doom and gloom though, even though Gog frequently presents the possibility of a grim future where mankind is either cowering in underground bunkers or eradicated by atomic weapons and orbital bombardment, the film is not at all certain that this will be the case. At its core Gog is a singularly patriotic film, that posits so long as America remains ahead of its foreign rivals in the development of advanced doomsday weapons and surveillance technology, then there will be nothing to fear from these weapons. America and its leaders alone are the only ones able to resist the temptation to use these devices for evil, and this it's vitally important that they maintain if not a complete monopoly, then at least a sufficient lead on their research and development.The more cynical readers in my audience (and the yet more cynical fellow writing this review as well), will probably find this to be sickeningly naive. While no reasonable person could argue that it would be better for the Soviets (particularly under Stalin) to have a monopoly of these dangerous new technologies, it's impossible to rest easy when the power to literally end the world is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals. Democratic elections are a poor safeguard against the abuse of literal god-like powers. However, this very naivety is an important aspect that is needed to understand this era. Most Americans in the 1950s trusted their government institutions, even as they worried about the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

The murder of two prominent scientists under mysterious circumstances would draw eyes no matter what they were working on or where they were doing it. However, in this case, it's going to garner a considerable amount more attention than that, because this pair were working at a secure governmental research facility dubbed The Project which is the seat of the nascent US space program. Just how secure is this location? Well, it's in a massive bunker complex located somewhere in the desert, so far underground that it could (mostly) withstand a direct blast from an A-bomb (though an H-bomb would still destroy the facility along with “a large part of the desert”). The location is so secret that even the Secretary of Defense doesn't have the exact coordinates, and all incoming air traffic is guided automatically by the facility's supercomputer NOVAC (Nuclear Operative Variable Automatic Compute) so even the pilots don't know exactly where they're going. Surveillance is nearly universal in The Project with “photoelectric cells sound [that] a warning when unauthorized personnel enter the corridor... [and] hidden television cameras along the ceiling.” Obviously, under such circumstances, they weren't bumped off in a drug deal gone awry or caught in a fatal love triangle. It's far more likely to assume espionage or sabotage. All the more so given the fact that The Project is entering a critical phase, and is perched on the cusp of incredible success.

In real life, such an occurrence would quickly result in all manner of alphabet agencies crawling over the facility. However here, rather than the FBI or CIA, the government dispatches a man from the OSI (Office of Scientific Investigation), one Dr. David Sheppard. This is a fictitious organization that serves as the common basis for a trilogy of pulpy hard sci-fi films produced by Ivan Tours (the other films in the series being The Magnetic Monster (1953) and Riders to the Stars (1954)). Of course, the government hasn't just been letting its proto-DARPA screw around in the desert unimpeded. The OSI already has an agent on the inside, Joanna Merrit, who is posing as the assistant to The Project's director Dr. Van Ness. She's also, as luck would have it, Sheppard's lover so the plot doesn't need to waste time having them fall in love just so the hero has somebody to kiss at the end. Thank god, because between the technical explanations of the base's technology, layout, and security systems a romantic b-plot would drag the pacing down from sluggish to downright glacial.

Sheppard gets the grand tour of the facility's various experiments and the key staff conducting them. He starts with Pierre and Madame Elzevir, the creators of the solar mirror, a device that can collect and reflect the sun's rays making it a great source of energy as well as a potent weapon. Indeed, one of these mirrors mounted on a man-made satellite could burn whole cities to the ground and flash-boil huge bodies of water. This thing makes a nuclear bomb look crude and ineffective in comparison. Madame Elzevir warrants further inspection because she's clearly supposed to be played by an older woman, but the filmmakers have decided to put the 28-year-old Valerie Vernon in a gray wig and try to pass her off as middle-aged. I've seen 50-somethings play high school students before (as seen in Earth vs. the Spider (1958)) but I've never seen a film pull the reverse before. I understand the desire to pack a film with as many nubile young actresses as possible, but this is downright ridiculous. It also makes it even stranger when we see her husband lusting after the young lady in the human augmentation experiments, as his wife arguably has the better figure!

From there, Sheppard heads over to the human augmentation laboratory where Dr. Carter is conducting experiments to see how adaptable human beings are to the rigors of spaceflight be it the intense g-forces of acceleration, the weightlessness of the void, or extended periods of exposure to cosmic radiation. Carter is quite confident that he will be able to develop space suits and technology that will allow human beings to not only live but thrive in deep space. Dr. Zeitman, the scientist in charge of maintaining NOVAC as well as The Project's robotics research, is less confident. He sees human beings as too fragile for all dangers waiting for them in outer space, and instead thinks that the heavy lifting should be left to his robotic creations; it's an argument that should be familiar to anyone who has seen Tobor the Great (1954). His robots, Gog and Magog, in a rare concession to realism in cinematic robots, are not bi-peds or even humanoid-shaped. Instead, they are multi-armed machines that move about on treads. You could probably build something like this in real life, and not have to worry about it falling down when faced with a staircase. I'm guessing that Gog and Magog had some popularity in England because the design looks quite a bit like the Daleks from Dr. Who. Still, as impressive as they are I think that Zeitman may want to reconsider their names, as Gog and Magog were nations said to be the servants of the antichrist. You're asking for trouble with names like that!

Once we've been acquainted with the major players in The Project shit starts to hit the fan. A technician is poisoned with a hunk of radioactive material, a g-force test in the human augmentation lab turns deadly, and the solar mirror activates by itself and nearly fries Madame Elzevir. All the while the base's long-range detectors keep picking up an unknown transmission beaming down from the upper atmosphere.

At this point, we're left with a few juicy possibilities as to what is going on. The most mundane explanation is that one or more of the scientists working at The Project have been compromised and are sabotaging their colleague's work at the behest of their masters in the Kremlin. Seeing as the real-life Manhattan Project (from which The Project here is obviously drawing a lot of inspiration) contained several spies who gladly fed information to the NKVD, this is hardly outside the realm of possibility. Yet, this is a sci-fi movie we're watching after all, and it could be that these mysterious transmissions from the upper atmosphere are the result of a malevolent extraterrestrial force, bent on keeping human beings grounded on earth like the aliens from War of the Satellites (1958). Then there is the possibility that we're dealing with a rogue AI, as NOVAC runs the entire facility if it has become self-aware it would be more than capable of carrying out all the carnage we've witnessed so far. Sure this movie was made before the fear of thinking machines became commonplace, and we were still more than a decade away from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Colossus from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). Yet even in the 1950s, there was the occasional rogue AI like the villainous supercomputer from The Invisible Boy (1957).

As it turns out, it's a combination of all three. The mysterious transmission being beamed into The Project is coming not from a UFO but from a Soviet spy plane (that bears a strong enough of a resemblance to the real-life U2 that I'm starting to wonder if producer Ivan Tours or director Herbert L. Strock had some connections in the CIA). The NKVD had installed receptors in NOVAC while it was being assembled in a neutral nation (that will teach the American government to trust those filthy neutrals), that allow them to remotely control the computer's systems. The Russians (though the film never names them as such, perhaps in a vain attempt to make the film feel timeless) have been using this technology to monitor The Project's progress, and now that it is nearing a major breakthrough they've decided to sabotage it. However, one has to wonder why they screw around with all this malarkey about killing off key research personnel one by one when their ultimate plan is to use Gog and Magog to trigger a meltdown of The Project's reactor. Surely it would be better to do this first and kill everyone in the base rather than pussyfooting around for a couple of days and giving the Americans enough time to figure out what is going on and how to stop it.

Plot holes aside, the premise and the action of Gog walks a tightrope of being at once realistic enough to be believable and far-flung enough to be interesting. Gog is not dealing with a manned mission to Mars, or an artificial intelligence that rivals human minds, to say nothing of outright fantastical elements like aliens and ESP. Instead, many of the startling new technologies depicted here would be realized with a few years of the film's release. As I mentioned above, the Soviet fiberglass spy plane that flies in the upper atmosphere and evades radar detection is remarkably similar to the American U2 spy planes that were being first designed and tested while this movie was still in theaters. At the end of the film, The Project announces that they have launched an artificial satellite not unlike the Sputnik launch in 1957 (though this satellite is a full-fledged eye in the sky that many in the late 1950s feared Sputnik was, not a bleeping ball of tinfoil). This is the greatest strength of hard sci-fi, it gives us a window into a possible future with all the details rendered with enough fidelity for us to see ourselves in them.

As I was watching Gog this time, something occurred to me: There are a lot of women working in technical roles in this movie. It's always amusing to see modern media pat itself on the back for showing women working in the sciences and engineering fields be it fluff like Charlie's Angels (2019), solid genre entertainment like Arrival (2016), or pseudo-historical works like Hidden figures (2016). I love to see the rapturous critical praise claiming these pedestrian films are breaking new ground and providing much-needed role models for young girls and women. Meanwhile, a film from 1954 with a reactionary nationalist subtext, had multiple female scientists and treated them as no different than their male counterparts. Nor is Gog unique in its depictions, Sally Caldwell from The Giant Claw (1957) is a female mathematician, the most compelling character in Rocketship X-M (1950) is a female chemist, the only scientist (the men are all either soldiers or engineers) among the crew bound for Mars in The Angry Red Planet (1959) is a woman, and 12 to the Moon (1960) has multiple female scientists/astronauts and all these examples are just from the mid-century sci-fi movies I watched recently! I'm sure an exhaustive study would turn up scores more.

That is not to say that everything about these characters will pass the muster of modern sensibilities, and I'm sure that these will be more than enough to completely disqualify these representations for the more puritanical of the cultural commissars. There are plenty of times where the lady scientists will fetch their male counterparts coffee and in more than a few of these movies where their emotions get the better of them. Hell, in today's film there's one scene where Dr. Sheppard has to slap some sense into a hysterical female radar technician, something that would probably get a modern screenwriter and director excommunicated from the Hollywood cathedral. Yet cultural quirks aside Gog, and the host of films like it from the era show that as long as there have been popular hard sci-fi films, there have been positive depictions of female scientists in them. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant of the genre's past, a huckster looking to pass off a stale film as revolutionary because of the contents of an actor's pants, or a combination of both.