CHERRY 2000 1987
40%
Directed by Steve De Jarnatt
Written by Michael Almereyda
Starring Melanie Griffith, David Andrews, Tim Thomerson, Pamela Gidley
Synopsis
A corporate worker leaves Anaheim behind for desert wasteland with a bounty tracker as he seeks a replacement for his rare sex robot. But maybe he’ll find something more along the way.
Why We Love It
Las Vegas has turned to sand. Unemployment is down to a cool 40 percent. And the CDC can wipe a little thing called love off their list of reportable diseases. Welcome to 2017—the future! It’s a place where adults have taken consent to an extreme end. Nightclubs employ lawyers to contract sexual encounters between two (or more) people, ironing out all the details down to when, where, and how long. Two pumps is fine, three’s over the limit!
But if you’re tired of that mechanized song and dance, how about something mechanical? In this society, it’s normal to shack up with a companion android, who will fawn over your every move and who looks, talks, feels, and frisks like the real thing.
That’s what Sam Treadwell did. He’s got a Cherry 2000, the fairest and rarest of them all. But when a soap suds snafu destroys Cherry, Sam (David Andrews) is called to the eastern desert with her memory chip in hand, where rumors whisper of a lost manufacturing plant deep among the dunes. To navigate the harsh environment and roving gangs, Sam hires bounty hunter E. Johnson, played here by Melanie Griffith as a cross between tough, intuitive cowgirl and lovey-dovey ingénue. Soon they’ll encounter the malevolent and cheerful Lester, who dresses his murderous cult members in pastel khakis and leads with positive reinforcement lines like, “Keep the sun out of your eyes and be yourselves!”
Cherry 2000’s premise is out there, but there’s enough visual wit and story surprises to keep the viewer going—if only to see how committed the movie is to its own weirdness (it’s like Buckaroo Banzai on benzos). It builds a world addicted to pleasure and gratification that ensnares men and enfeebles their masculinity. The cities are awash with twenty-first-century digital boys like Sam, a soft yuppie who’s obviously had it easy for way too long and who never accomplishes anything particularly amazing. The woman gets the work done. He may be the main character, but he’s not really a hero, or outsider, or the tragic figure these sci-fi stories usually call for. Sam Treadwell is simply another victim of a warped society, comfortably trapped in his own reality. Yet you come to root for him, to see where his demented quest leads. This is nothing you’d expect from a typical movie protagonist. But then, sci-fi isn’t here to be normal, is it?