Herman Hoffman

(On Cable TV, May 2021) Hollywood history is littered with projects that beg explanations as to how they came to be. This is particularly true in the Science Fiction genre, whose subtleties are often downplayed or ignored by those who think the genre is an excuse to do whatever they want without rigour. (True practitioners of SF know that the genre derives its power from following some demanding rules, but I digress.)  So it is that The Invisible Boy is a particularly wretched example of 1950s Science Fiction in which various buzzwords were thrown together without much care toward plausibility. Director Herman Hoffman executes the material with competence, but the script itself is a jumble. Here, a lonely boy sits down at a supercomputer, is gifted with superintelligence, builds a robot (Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, sent back in time to the 1960s), flies on a kite, is turned invisible and discovers that the supercomputer is plotting world domination. No, it’s not a comedy. What’s most remarkable is the inclusion of an increasingly dark AI plot within a kid’s film. None of it makes any sense, but at a mirror into the techno-fears of 1957, The Invisible Boy pretty much suggests that very little has changed more than sixty years later. I’m frankly not sure I’d recommend the film for casual viewing, though — it may be fascinating to SF and science historians, but an ordeal otherwise.