Music of the Spheres (1984)
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Contact.
IMDB meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.8 by 102 cinematizens.
DNA: O Canada.
Verdict: Garbled.
Tagline: Pythagoras now and forever
In distant 2017 super computers interface with receptive humans, like Melody. She and her super computer, nicknamed the Beast, are on a spaceship doing an important job. Things go fine and then….
She starts having strange dreams, and Beast experiences power surges. Since this is impossible, the managers shrug it off. She is sure there is a hacker in Beast, but no diagnostic finds it.
The project involves changing the orbits of asteroids, and this change upsets the music of the spheres, i.e., the radio waves generated by celestial bodies. The homework is Pythagoras. This has led aliens to hack Beast to stop the project. First they try negotiating through Beast to Melody, but there is an ‘or else’ behind that. She is unable to convince Bureaucrat to whom she reports.
The stilted acting fits with the idea of that humanity is degrading through reliance on and integration with computers. And it certainly is stilted.
Much of it is incomprehensible and the effects are zero budget. The reprise at the end is padding. It is bilingual with some German and Russian in the background. Some of it was filmed in a Toronto car park for the space ship. It doesn’t work.
Yet overall, unlike so much science fiction, it is full of ideas.