LOOKER. Prophetic science fiction thriller

Looker is a paradoxical film: flawed and disappointing, yet still worth watching.
Larry Roberts is one of the best plastic surgeons in Los Angeles. His clientele consists mainly of young women—models and actresses who appear in television commercials. However, Roberts’ professional and personal life becomes complicated when his patients suddenly start dying: one perishes in a car accident, while two others jump out of windows. The circumstances of their deaths are so unclear that the police launch an investigation led by Detective Masters, who suspects Roberts of being involved almost from the outset. To avoid being accused and to protect other patients from a similar fate, the surgeon begins his own investigation. The trail leads him to the mysterious corporation Digital Matrix Inc., owned by the tycoon John Reston, which conducts experiments with computer technology: special scanners create digital replicas of models and actresses, which are then used in advertisements. Meanwhile, a hired assassin equipped with a powerful new weapon is sent after Roberts.
Michael Crichton was not only a bestselling author whose novels were frequently adapted for the screen—with better results (The Terminal Man (1974) by Mike Hodges) and worse ones (Jurassic Park (1993) by Steven Spielberg)—but also a filmmaker. Some of his most notable works include Westworld (1973), Coma (1978), The Great Train Robbery (1978), and the long-running TV series ER (1994–2009). Crichton conceived the idea for Looker in 1975, but the film could only be realized in the early 1980s when the necessary technology became available. Looker made history as the first full-length feature film to include a computer-generated, three-dimensional model of the human body—beating Tron (1982) by Steven Lisberger to the milestone. However, its pioneering use of CGI did not save it from box office failure, negative reviews, and eventual obscurity.
The film starts off promisingly, capturing the distinctive atmosphere of 1980s productions. However, as a sci-fi thriller, it surprisingly lacks suspense, ambiguity, or mystery. The identity of the culprit behind the models’ deaths is clear almost from the start, yet the motives of those pulling the strings remain unexplained—because that segment was cut during editing and restored only for the television version! Instead, viewers are subjected to unnecessary and sometimes absurd action scenes (including a car chase that ends with a crash into a fountain) and a clichéd shootout in the film’s finale. The main antagonist fails to inspire fear, instead provoking laughter with a look reminiscent of Krzysztof Krawczyk or Giorgio Moroder on the cover of From Here to Eternity. Adding to the flaws, Crichton’s script suffers from numerous plot holes and deus ex machina moments, making the storyline feel contrived and unconvincing.
Despite these shortcomings, Looker is an important and almost prophetic film. The phenomena Crichton foresaw seem even more relevant today than they were over forty years ago: the growing popularity of aesthetic medicine, the obsession with eternal youth, the media-driven absurd standards of “perfect” beauty, the omnipresence of CGI, deepfake technology, and the manipulation of emotions and consumer (even political) choices via algorithms and advertising—think of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Reality has written an eerie epilogue to the film’s message: just a few years ago, Hollywood studios attempted to acquire exclusive, unlimited rights to actors’ likenesses for AI-generated performances—one of the key reasons behind the SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023. That crisis was temporarily resolved, but the fears remain—making Crichton’s flawed yet deeply unsettling film more relevant than ever.