The Power

This sci-fi thriller – veteran genre director Byron Haskin’s final film, made in collaboration with producer George Pal – was weak when it was released and hasn’t aged well. The main problem is a confusing and dishonest screenplay which squanders its few interesting concepts (an engineered evolutionary leap producing a “superman”, a man-god’s crazy power trips, the inability to control events that transcend our current cognitive abilities), systematically fragmenting the story’s cohesiveness and reducing the whole thing to a jumbled series of vapid scenes. Feeble pacing, zero tension, annoying main theme, forgettable dialogue (Nietzsche is quoted with unfathomable superficiality).

The cast doesn’t help: George Hamilton, nondescript protagonist, is surrounded by an excruciatingly dull mix of past-their-prime actors and fading former divas whose most appealing feature is their name. The film was inspired by Frank M. Robinson’s novel of the same name (1956), not exactly a sci-fi masterpiece (Clarke, Sturgeon, and even the maligned van Vogt have dealt with similar themes with far greater flair and inspiration).

When all is said and done, the ending resembles an early “Scanners” (1981): at least we finally found one nice thing to say about it…