This movie has a unique tone that's hard to define. "Bleak" comes to mind but is inadequate. It's as if Bleak came alive and made an even bleaker movie.
That's one thing you need to know going in. The other is not that it's slow, but that it spends a ridiculous amount of time on the fictitious surgery. For example, the doctor almost hits a vein in the patient's brain which would have killed him. However, a surgical mistake can happen in any sort of surgery and this lengthy bit doesn't address the far more interesting ethical issues.
This is in contrast to The Andromeda Strain. In that film, there are enormously detailed and lengthy scenes of the Wildfire lab. But the difference is that movie was more about the scientists and the lab than the germ itself. Here, that's just not the case.
There's other parts of the film that provide a weird atmosphere yet seem entirely irrelevant. The doctor goes to a strip club to find Segal and while I like the music played, it's hard to see why this is here considering it's mostly focused on the stripper stage.
The far more interesting issues are of course the ethical ones.
The treatment they give this man is directly compared to lobotomies, a very dark page of medical history. After they install the device, they start activating different electrodes to see what happens... this isn't that much different than the lobotomy performed on Rosemary Kennedy where they kept cutting while talking to her to see the effects. It's incredibly chilling and plausible.
A curiosity here is that there is essentially an ad for Scientology on the radio in the background in one scene. This makes sense considering their disdain for psychiatry which was rather well founded at least at the time.
There's frustration here in that one huge theme seems to have been all but ignored-- that the patient was convinced computers would take over. I suppose the idea might have been that Segal was increasingly acting robotic... in several scenes when he's walking he does seem like a mindless drone. But I just saw him as a zonked out zombie and zombies are standard horror fare. It didn't occur to me that that might have been the idea until I was writing this review.
Anyway, it's a fascinating watch as long as you know what you're getting into. It's definitely NOT a thriller. There are many striking visuals, like a long curious zoom on a parrot.
