Short Circuit (1986)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1986
	Director: John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, WarGames)
	Actors: Ally Sheedy (WarGames), Steve Guttenberg (Police Academy 1-4, Cocoon 1-2), Fisher Stevens (The Grand Budapest Hotel)
	Country: USA
	Genre: SF, Comedy
	Conditions of visioning: 25.05.2015, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: A military robot goes berserk after getting hit by a lightning. He will escape and start to learn in contact with Stephanie (Sheedy) while his creator Newton (Guttenberg) is after it.
Review: I liked this movie as a kid but couldn't remember much of it now. I only feared that it would follow the easy path behind E.T. and confront the loose robot with kids, which it fortunately doesn't. Instead it meets the slightly eccentric Stephanie, owner of hordes of pets, and is tracked down by its geek creator and a trigger-happy colonel. The movie is rather targeted at a young audience, with all the gags coming from the robot trying to learn about human habits and all the friendly characters (even the bad guy is shown in a ridiculous manner), so what I actually appreciated as an adult is the very realistic design of the robot that seems fully functional and whose movements are nicely executed on screen, much better than its role model from nice years before: R2D2 to which it steals some gimmicks and sounds. Kudos to the creators of that robot. However, I didn't like at all the character of Newton's assistant played by the otherwise good actor Fisher Stevens, but who was forced this time to play a man of Indian origins while he is not at all himself, so his accent looks completely fake and exaggerated, sounding like a bad copy of Raj in The Big Bang Theory and reminding of the time when Hollywood was using American actors to play the Asian characters (see Breakfast at Tiffany's).
Rating: 4 /10