Number Five Is Alive

In discussing Flight of the Navigator I mentioned how movies you watched as a kid normally can’t hold up once you’ve grown. There are some films you can appreciate as an adult (I noted The Goonies, but we could also discuss The Monster Squad or for some former kids Mac and Me or a host of many others), but most simply can’t hold up due to age, time, and changing tastes. What you found funny or enjoyable as a child doesn’t often translate into a good movie once you’ve grown and you’re no longer the age of the protagonists.

But then we get to Short Circuit, a film I really enjoyed as a kid (since it came out while I was still a wee one), that, surprisingly, actually does still hold up. Despite it having a cute, fast talking, silly robot for its lead character, the movie actually is able to avoid many of the pitfalls and tropes that other 1980s family-friendly films tended to fall into. It’s a light, fun, warm comedy that just so happens to work as an all-ages adventure. And, for the most part, it doesn’t even suffer in a technological sense from the passage of time and improvements in tech for the modern world. For the most part it just works.

The developers at NOVA laboratories have made a revolutionary breakthrough in robotics, creating the SAINT line of robotic soldiers. With five prototypes, the plan is to sell the robots to the U.S. military, for a tidy profit, and push the power of America’s fighting force generations forward. There’s just one small problem with this plan: one of the five robots. Number 5, gets struck by lightning in its outdoor charging bay, and this causes it to short out and malfunction. It gets confused while moving around the labs, ends up outside, and manages to break free of the compound, venturing off on its own on a quest for “input”.

This causes problems for Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg), developer of the SAINT robots. Number 5 is his creation, and it’s his job to track the robot down and get it back. But Number 5 is off having a grand old time. He ends up meeting Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), a mobile food business operator and collector of animals, and the two bond while Number 5 slowly grows his knowledge (via all that “input”), developing into something like a real person. Number 5 believes he is alive, despite being a robot, and Stephanie is the only one that believes him. NOVA wants him captured, or killed, and the two found friends can’t let that happen. They have to get in touch with Newton, get him out to see Number 5 and, just maybe, find a way to save the robot from an otherwise inevitable death.

Short Circuit is a cute, breezy, funny little comedy. Its whole setup is silly, yes, but with just enough plausibility that you don’t really think too hard on it. Could an advanced enough robot accidentally get reprogrammed due to a lightning strike, a power surge, corrupted data, and a lot of time to self-program and self-modify? Maybe. It’s unlikely, and we certainly don’t have A.I. advanced enough yet for that kind of malfunction to even lead to sentience, but if we accept the basics of the story then, sure, maybe it could happen. And once you’re willing to accept that leap of logic, the rest of the film happily flows from there.

The reason the film works as well as it does is because of Number 5. First and foremost, the puppet they built for the character is fantastic. He’s well articulated, well designed, and expressive enough that he can feel like a real creature. Despite it being a robot, they found enough things they could attach and apply that he can have expressions and a personality. He looks and feels real, and alive, such that you don’t doubt it when he really starts acting like a real person on screen.

Much of that credit goes to puppeteer and voice actor Tim Blaney. He gives Number 5 a good, amusing voice, one that works well in the context and never gets grating. When comparing this film to Flight of the Navigator, I can’t help but think that they should have gotten a good voice actor for that other film, someone like Blaney that can give the character life and personality without relying on set routines or canned jokes. Paul Rubens made the robot in Flight of the Navigator into an obnoxious, watered-down version of Pee Wee Herman. Blaney turns Number 5 into a real character all his own.

Aiding this are the two main human actors, Sheedy and Gutenberg. Up to that point Sheedy had mostly starred in Brat Pack films and teen dramas, and this was her first real time branching out past that. Although she still feels like she’s acting in a Brat Pack film, if we’re being fair, she’s able to build a genuine connection with the puppet in front of her and actually get real, friendly chemistry with the character. And the Gute is there to add comedy and fun. Gutenberg had starred in a lot of movies before Short Circuit, but he was best known at the time for the three Police Academy films he headlined, one of which came out right before this movie. He was the comedic lead, the “name” attached to the film, but he does a solid job of getting into character and actually feeling like a part of the movie.

If there’s any character in the film that doesn’t work it’s Fisher Stevens as Ben Jabituya. The character in the film is of Indian descent, but Stevens is a blue-eyed, light-haired white guy from Chicago. To play the role Stevens had to go full “brown face”, with makeup and hair dye and contact lenses. Now, no one really seems to think Stevens is a bad guy for this as, besides a stereotypical “East Indian” accent, he treats Ben as a real character and not a collection of tropes. Still, it’s the kind of character that really should be portrayed by someone of the right lineage (as mentioned by Stevens and Aziz Ansari when they had an interview about the role) or the character should have been developed to just be a white dude. If you can ignore this aspect of the character, Stevens delivers a scene-stealing performance, getting all the best lines and playing a lovable character. The brown face just makes it… sketchy at best.

Honestly, for the most part the film has its heart in the right place. It’s light and fun and really gets you into the little slice of the world it inhabits. It spends enough time with its characters that you come to care for them and enjoy spending time around them. The laughs hold up really well, and the story moves at a quick pace and never gets bogged down. This is the kind of film that avoid many of the tropes of the 1980s (yes, outside of “that one foreign character”) and is able to just enjoy being a story about a fun robot off on an adventure. If only more kid-friendly fare from the 1980s could hold up this well.

With that said, don’t bother going to watch the sequel. It’s not a good movie, lacking the heart and character of this film. Even as a kid I hated it, and I didn’t even bother buying it as an adult because it just can’t hold a candle to the original. We only needed on Short Circuit and, thankfully, it was a winner.