The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) and Primer (2004)

Welcome to the 3rd installation of the Double Feature Recommendation. You can consider this post either an assignment or a recommendation. Click here to see more double feature recommendations.

The reason I paired these movies is because both use conversation and dialog to address human needs. Both deal with the question what is a human, and what is the importance of that terminology.

First, you should watch The Creation of the Humanoids while you are eating your dinner. Your dinner should be some kind of comfort-food, home cooking, or whatever makes you feel human. Potatoes, mac and cheese, etc. In Creation there is barely a story, or what there is of a story is of less relevance; the movie mostly focuses on the internal struggle and the external politics of accepting people who are 94% human and 6% robot. There is plenty of great subject matter that is still applicable to today’s timing and lots of great dialog about what is a human, what is not a human, and how should an individual/group treat someone who is not like them.

Primer, similarly is very conversation focused. Watch this movie last while eating some kind of coffee ice cream, or something that is not crunch or loud. In Primer, the two characters discuss in detail, very nerdy things the entire time about what they’ve done and what they are doing. Don’t get hung up on this. It DOES have more of a story, however, you will get totally and completely lost if you’ve never seen it before. That is the point however. Because these two guys are going back in time, they are essentially creating duplicates of themselves and we become confused as to which one is the original person. But does that even matter? Is the original person the most important? Why and why not? The conversation in this movie takes place in our head, the movie allows us to think, which is very nice.