The Lawnmower Man (1992)

The Lawnmower Man arrived in 1992 trailing litigation, which is a distinguished way for any film to enter the world. Stephen King, whose 1975 short story concerned a Pan-worshipping satyr with a self-operating mower, sued to have his name stripped from the title and won, twice. The surviving screenplay was an unrelated draft called CyberGod, retrofitted with a lawnmower, a victim named Harold Parkette, and the shadowy agency known as The Shop. The finished product is a simulation of an adaptation, wearing the skin of a source it never read.

The narrative concerns Dr. Lawrence Angelo, a researcher at Virtual Space Industries who raises a gardener's cognition through nootropic drugs and computer simulation. Jobe Smith begins intellectually disabled and ends superhuman, and the film treats this as an uncomplicated arc of improvement. His condition is raw material for an experiment, a defect the plot exists to correct. Marnie, his lover, is lobotomized during a cybersex sequence and removed from the story, which is the sort of thing that happens to women in films of this vintage when the plot requires the protagonist to feel something. Nobody in the cast introduces a perspective the film seems interested in examining.

The only political texture comes from The Shop, a clandestine corporate-military apparatus that hijacks benevolent research for weapons work, though the suspicion of institutions never hardens into an argument. Jobe's late monologues about evolution and becoming pure energy carry a faint sermonizing hum before the building explodes. The visual effects were once groundbreaking and now resemble a screen saver with ambitions. The film grossed a great deal of money anyway, which tells us something about 1992 that we may not wish to know.