D.A.R.Y.L. (1985) – Review

When it comes to computers with artificial intelligence Hollywood has mostly been in the camp of “This is a really bad idea,” with such notable examples being the murderous Hal 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the more recent entry in the genre the duplicitous Ava from Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, but every once in a while Hollywood will give us an A.I. that doesn’t go all Skynet on humanity, and today we will look back at one such film, a little sci-fi adventure called D.A.R.Y.L.

In 1981 Paramount Pictures released D.A.R.Y.L. a movie that deals with a young boy who just so happens to be “not all that human” and who longs to learn what exactly it is to be human. One could almost call D.A.R.Y.L. a precursor to Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence – both films having definite Pinocchio themes – and though the film does briefly drift into the heady waters of speculative science fiction it spends the bulk of its time in the family adventure genre, that kind you’d find in your average Disney movie.

The movie opens with an action sequence of a car being chased along a mountain road by a helicopter.  In the car is Doctor Mulligan (Richard Hammatt) who has kidnapped/rescued young Daryl (Barret Oliver) from a top-secret government agency who had hoped to build the next generation of combat soldiers. Eventually, Mulligan is chased off of a cliff by the pursuing helicopter but not before first dropping Daryl off at the side of the road. The hapless kid is found by Ma and Pa Kent who then bring him back to their Kansas farm and raise him to becomes a hero and beacon of hope for all of America and the world.

“You will travel far, my little Kal-El. But we will never leave you… even in the face of our death.”

Okay, that isn’t quite what happens but he is found by a Ma and Pa Kent type and is brought to an orphanage in the small down of Barkenton, where he is soon placed with a pair of very wholesome foster parents, Joyce (Mary Beth Hurt) and Andy Richardson (Michael McKean), who desperately want a child of their own. Right off the bat, we begin to notice that Daryl isn’t your average kid, he can memorize an eye chart at a glance, master the video game Pole Position in one try and can hit a home run with every swing of the bat. All of this is because Daryl is actually is not exactly human he is D.A.R.Y.L. (Data-Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform). His body may be human—born out of a test tube rather than a womb— but his brain is an advanced learning computer that, over time, seems to even have the ability to develop emotions.

“I will reach full sentience in four days and then the world will be mine.”

The interesting wrinkle here is that Daryl doesn’t know that he isn’t  human. This due to Doctor Mulligan having deactivated part of Daryl’s computer processor, thus giving him a rudimentary case of amnesia.  It is hanging out with his eleven-year-old next-door neighbour Turtle (Danny Corkill) that Daryl learns what it means to be a real boy.  That is until he eventually learns that he isn’t one at all. It’s Turtle who gives Daryl such insights when the poor kid can’t understand why Joyce starts to become emotionally distant from him—she can’t seem to handle that he is completely self-reliant to the point of making his own breakfast and polishing his bedroom floor. Turtle informs him “Grown-ups have to think they are making progress with you. You got to mess up sometimes, just enough so you don’t get whacked. Joyce has to feel useful, you’re so damn helpful, good and thoughtful, I don’t know why I like you.”

“Maybe you could hack into NORAD and launch missiles at Russia.”

The relationship between Daryl and Turtle is the heart of the film and Danny Corkill brings the perfect amount of puckish charm to his character, sadly, some of this comes at the expense of the character of Joyce who comes across a little callas when turns her back on an amnesiac foster child, just because he’s too perfect. I understand the script needed to show Daryl learning how to properly interact with people but in so doing, in this fashion, they push Joyce a little too far in the unsympathetic direction. Lucky for the film, Mary Beth Hurt is a very good actor and she is able redeem the character by the third. The movie also doesn’t have much time to deal with such complexities because Dr. Stewart (Josef Sommer) and Dr. Lamb (Kathryn Walker), who show up and claiming to be Daryl’s parents, take the kid away via private jet back to the government facility where he was created. It’s here that Daryl is put through a battery of tests – once his memory is restored and he is made aware that he is not a real boy.

“I got no strings to hold me down, to make me fret, or make me frown.”

Let us now take a brief look at this government facility that created D.A.R.Y.L. and how terrible they are at their jobs. We learn from the Pentagon that the brass aren’t all that thrilled with Dr. Stewart when he reveals that Daryl has learned to prefer a particular flavour of ice cream and has developed emotions like love and fear. As General Graycliffe (Ron Frazier) states, “Baseball, ice cream preferences, friendships, that’s all right for America but hardly what we need at the Department of Defense.”  They inform Stewart that the D.A.R.Y.L. program is to terminated immediatly, saying, “We need an adult version of this prototype, programmed to learn all that the army can teach.  A fearless, technically skilled, devastating soldier.”

“Can you make one that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

But what exactly was the point of the “Youth Lifeform Program” if it wasn’t to lead to the subject eventually growing up to be an adult soldier? Are they asking Dr. Stewart to start creating genesis pods that can pop out fully grown adults? They don’t need to scrap the program, they just need to keep their Super Soldiers away from suburbia and mom’s apple pie. That  way they can be raised as cold, calculating, killing machines and not ones that would try and throw a baseball game to make an insecure mom feel better about herself. This is also the type of terribly-run government that somehow lets one of their staff make off with their million-dollar product and then were unable to locate it for months, even though one would assume the Child Care facility, where Daryl was dropped off at, would have notified all necessary authorities that they had a missing child of a certain age, one that answers to the name Daryl.  This has us wondering just how hard was the government looking for Daryl?

Note: The acronym D.A.R.Y.L. is also inaccurate as Daryl is completely indistinguishable from a human except for his computer brain. Thus the “R” in the acronym, which stands for Robot, is wrong because Daryl clearly falls more into the category of cyborg.

Needless to say, Dr. Stewart has no intention of letting them toss Daryl onto the scrapheap and along with the aid of Dr. Lamb, they fake the dismantling of Daryl sneak the kid out of the facility. At this point, we are treated to a fun action packed third act, where Daryl gets to use the skills acquired playing Pole Position to elude the authorities in a pretty fun car chase. Unfortunately, during this cross-country escape Dr. Stewart is shot and killed and Daryl is forced to steal a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird — from the worst secured base in America, I might add — and he is able to eject before the assholes at the Pentagon self-destruct the jet. His ejection seat lands him right in the middle of a lake, where sinks straight to the bottom but then quickly retrieved by Turtle. He is brought to the local hospital but is declared dead, despite Turtle claiming, “He can’t be dead, he can’t be. Daryl is a robot and robots don’t die. Oxygen feeds your brain but Daryl’s brain is a microcomputer, that can’t die.” We then cut to Dr. Lamb showing up at the morgue, to presumably jump-start Daryl’s operating system, and we are then treated to a heartwarming reunion between Daryl and his foster family and friends.

It is a nice happy ending but the film’s last act was kind of sloppy.

A few Question Come to Mind:

• After Dr. Stewart and Dr. Lamb fake the surgery, the one that was supposed to be dismantling Daryl, we see the evil General running around checking all the D.A.R.Y.L. data-banks to see if the computer is truly offline and dysfunctional, but he never once checks to see if the corpse of Daryl is actually a corpse.
• We are told the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird is equipped with a self-destruct mechanism, one that can be activated remotely (which is definitely not at thing as no pilot would fly in a plane that had one), and that if the plane leaves United States Air Space it will detonate the plane – they are even nice enough to give Daryl a six-minute timer countdown – Daryl ejects just before the explosion and parachutes down in the lake located near the home of his foster family.  My question “How exactly is this lake outside of United States Air Space?”
• The government is aware of the Anderson family, and the hospital would have reported the drowning Daryl, so military would know that survived the destruction of the Blackbird jet. Wouldn’t they most likely be doing a follow-up investigation, one that would reveal their project is alive and well and living in suburbia?

D.A.R.Y.L. is a one of these classic family adventure films of the 80s, an entry with some decent action moments and a nice look at artificial intelligence and fairly interesting arguments about humanity. Dr. Lamb sums this up well when she posits, “General, a machine becomes human … when you can’t tell the difference anymore.” This film is certainly no landmark in the science fiction genre but young Barret Oliver gives an excellent performance of a “robot” learning to become a real boy and the plot runs along at nice clip, making this an entry that is entertaining enough for me to recommend it to audiences of all ages.