Cyberon (2000), by Bill Baggs

Fandom is a tricky concept these days. You have people who come up with new terms for describing their appreciation of a work, like headcanon and OTP, and then you have the people who hate those term-makers but will flip out when PETER VENKMAN IS A GIRL suddenly. Fanfiction is hated, but it's been around for literal millennia, such as with the Arthurian "canon" that people laud tremendously. And while it's true that fanfiction can be embarrassing, and in some cases, harmful (Fifty Shades, anyone?), I'm always curious to see where the interactions between creator and audience lead our stories and our concepts of them. I could drone on and on about Wold Newton and why you should get Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers series, and how I want to see mainstream examinations of the literary potential behind fan theories, but I want to get straight to the point: today's movie, Cyberon, shows that sometimes you can get a good story off of wanting to be something you're not.

Cyberon was the creation of BBV, also known as Bill and Ben Video, a company dedicated to fulfilling the staff's unrelenting love of Doctor Who. Over the years BBV put together works featuring elements from the Doctor Who universe, like the Sontarans and Zygons, as well as pieces that were heavily based on Doctor Who but weren't quite Who. This included The Stranger, starring Colin Baker as The Stranger and Nicola Bryant as "Ms. Brown," in what started as clear copies of the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown--this in turn was the spiritual to their audio series The Time Travelers, starring TV's Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy as "The Professor" and Ace's Sophie Aldred as...Ace. This one cut a bit too close for the BBC (especially since "Professor" was Ace's nickname for the Doctor), so it was rebranded as featuring "The Dominie" and "Alice." Like The Stranger, this eventually branched off to a point where it was clearly an original story. Though I don't want to go off on a tangent, I'm fascinated by how exactly BBV's use of Doctor Who elements was possible. Doctor Who isn't like most big-name sci-fi franchises: much of its individual parts are owned by their creators, rather than a central faceless entity craving only money (making Who like an inverse DC Comics, in a way). Therefore, use of the Krynoids, the Autons, the Rani, all that, was a matter of working with individuals for much lower licensing fees than what the BBC would offer. While they would never be able to tell stories about the Doctor, though companions Liz Shaw, Sarah Jane Smith, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Victoria Waterfield all made new appearances, played by their original actors, due to this unique situation.

Cyberon is pretty close to that second category of BBV productions, i.e. the not-quite Who stuff. Indeed, it's entirely absent of all canonical traces of Doctor Who, but if you know about the aliens from the show and you know that the title of the movie is also the name of the evil aliens the movie contains, then you should understand that the villains of this movie are going to be very familiar. Our hero is Dr. Lauren Anderson, a psychiatrist at a mental hospital of some kind. She meets Dr. Thomas Mortley, who is kind enough to let us know he will turn out to be morally bad by having the last name "Mortley." Lauren is frustrated with her inability to get results with patients whose afflictions are due to brain or spinal trauma, but Tom has discovered a new wonder-drug called Cyberon, which can cure literally any ailment. Cyberon is administered through a Star Trek-esque needle-less syringe, and Lauren has a good reason for her immediate distrust of it: it glows blue, and occasionally bizarre metallic faces can be seen reflected in it when it's in the syringe chamber. Of course, when these faces start appearing to the Cyberon patients, it's clear this miracle has a cost. And it's only going to get worse when those apparitions start killing the patients who resist the addictive qualities of the drug...

I think the thing that makes Cyberon so fascinating is its status as a sort of chimera--and I know just got myself in trouble for using that word. It really is a freak, a hybrid, and a beautiful one. (And if you got past "chimera," the Doctor Who fans present will hate me for saying "hybrid"...) It definitely tries to be its own movie, but it's still trapped in its presumed origin as a Doctor Who-linked Cyberman film. And even then, it has difficulty determining which type of movie its own movie is. These qualities work both against it and in its favor. First, let's talk about the Doctor Who elements. It turns out that the Cyberon drug somehow connects humans to another dimension where the Cyberon race lives. While they have some changes, saying that the Cyberons don't look almost identical to the Cybermen is like saying that Donald Trump is a good person--it's just wrong. The voices are the last tip-off. Whether the Cyberons are Cybermen or not, the premise behind them is kind of cool. Having them exist outside our dimension gives them a real menace, especially if you allow yourself to ignore that it's impossible to believe that the drug and these mysterious apparitions aren't related. In a way this story sort of precedes the New Who episode "Army of Ghosts," which also had Cybermen appear as specters before being revealed as other-dimensional and breaking through into our world to wreak havoc. I think, though, that episode ultimately did the premise better, because the insertion of the Cyberon drug into the story is pretty clunky. The drug has both physical and mental effects--healing all ailments while inducing a pleasurable psychedelic state--so it's unclear if the contact with the Cyberons is purely psychic or if the user's bodies are somehow integrated with their dimension as well. When he succumbs to addiction (because the drug apparently causes heroin-level cravings), Tom gains a metal hand, implying he's either becoming a Cyberon or the host of one. What's odd is that it seems unclear if Tom invented Cyberon by himself or if the Cyberons somehow gave him to the formula to it. There's a reason why the drug plot was inserted, though, and there's a reason why it's so clunky.

I do want to say that while I call this site my "A-List" because it is for reviews of movies that I consider to be "A-class." The creme de la creme, as it were. Cyberon is not A-class--it would probably be on my B-List at worst (with its fellow BBV movie Downtime), but it's more like to join its sibling The AirZone Solution on my C-List. By no means does that mean it's a bad movie--it's just not one of my classics. Cyberon shares many qualities with The AirZone Solution, honestly, though sadly this is a BBV production entirely without Doctor Who actors, whereas AirZone had four whole Doctors in it in its own way. No, AirZone and Cyberon both have a problem with their messages being all kinds of heavyhanded. AirZone's obsession was with pollution, which is a good thing to cover, but its subtlety leaned to the Birdemic side of things. Cyberon has two messages, one bigger than the other. The small one is about the horrors of modern technology. I was interested in this at first because Lauren is portrayed as being incredibly technophobic--she rages at a pub quiz video game and calls it rigged, and she criticizes electronic music for not being real sound, man. I thought this was going to be tied to the fact that the villains of the movie have a mechanical appearance, but the Cyberons don't really seem mechanical outside of having the word "cyber" in their name. So there's some wasted potential there.

The bigger message is that Drugs Are Bad. Really, extremely Bad. It's not made a secret that Cyberon sort of stands for medical marijuana--you have the well-intentioned hippie activist in the form of Tom, who believes his medicine will save the world but is nonetheless is addicted to it; and you have the level-headed, old-fashioned doctor in the form of Lauren, who believes that there is a way to get through medical tragedies but it can't involve shortcuts. In the end, it is Lauren who lives and Tom who perishes, and the film nearly ends on a shot of a "JUST SAY NO" poster or some equivalent. The AirZone Solution's heavy-handedness lives on as well in the fact that in the beginning we see that Tom has--choke--financial gain to be made from Cyberon, and he has a little bit of the Corporate Pig feel about him. Actually, if Cyberon is a movie about greedy people turning the helpless into Cybermen for fun and profit, AirZone Solution is a movie about greedy people turning the helpless into Sea Devils for fun and profit. Both movies even have ghosts in them...!

The A-List site will sometimes feature C-List material because the C sometimes stands for "curio." A lot of movies I like to make note of just because they are unique, even if they aren't really entertaining or worth watching. They are "hidden gems" as it were. And, despite the disappointments they bring, I've learned recently that I like learning firsthand about these freakish things. Cyberon is a fascinating example of when fan ambition is allowed to grow, but decides not to get far enough away to be its own thing. It happens to the best of us. There is nothing that is not derivative, and it's all about the sell. Cyberon was slow and repetitive enough to not quite sell me--but I'll keep it as a curiosity, and you should too. If you're a Doctor Who fan you can't've seen worse (read: Dimensions in Time), and if you're not that means there's no tiresome continuity here, so you can call it a beta for Sci-Fi Original Movies and get some joy out.