Subject: REVIEW: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1995)

From: [email-masked] (Ram Samudrala)
Date: Wed, 10 May 1995 15:33:11 GMT

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1995)
		       A film review by Ram Samudrala
			Copyright 1995 Ram Samudrala

     Imagine a scenario where our next evolutionary successors are
emotionless, telepathic, and highly intelligent.  VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED
presents such a scenario and details the struggle of this "superior"
race against the humans.

     John Carpenter has taken the original 1960's screenplay and
gorified it in this version, but the ideas in the movie are still
captivating.  A higher lifeform impregnates the females of the Damned
Village one night, resulting in the births of nine platinum-blond
children and one stillborn, all of which are siblings.  What's more,
they are telepathically linked and have the power to control people's
minds.  According to the movie, they are emotionless, but they do seem
to get angry for trivial reasons, they seem to have a great drive for
survival, and they are intelligent.

     The basic flaw in this story seems to be that you can have
intelligence without emotions.  I believe this to be a contradiction
because any reasonable definition of intelligence (say, the one that
requires the passing of the Turing test (i.e., any perfect simulation
of a human is intelligent)) requires a drive, a curiousity, and a
passion, that goes beyond mere survival.  But besides this, the picture
the movie paints is rather reasonable.  One of the main ideas is the
notion of a "collective soul", which I think is indeed a feature of
higher intelligence (low level examples include our own brain which is
simply a collection of smaller "intelligent" units, neurons).  However,
rigourous conformity, which is one of the aspects of eight out of the
nine children in the movie, is not a necessity and is certainly not a
sign of higher intelligence.  Without allowing for change within such a
collective, there is no room for evolution.  A successor species to us
would have emotions, intelligence, telepathic powers (allowing for
complete freedom of information), and individual free will, thus
enabling Thomas More's vision of Utopia coming true.

     The actual story is about how two doctors, one M.D. (Christopher
Reeve), and one Ph.D. (Kirstie Alley), battle with the children.  If
you do see Village of the Damned, see it not for the way Carpenter
kills off the cast, but for the lesson it teaches us about what our
next evolutionary successors would really be like.

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