I don’t put forth much effort to hide the fact that I love genre films. I do this for several reasons, though primarily it is simply to weed out those who do not like them. I have no problem personally if someone doesn’t enjoy them, far too frequently genre films rarely attempt to cross over and gain new fans, but if someone doesn’t like genre fare I immediately know whether or not we will have somewhat comparable taste in movies. Genre films are the anchor in which all of my film interests are held together by, and I am rather proud of that.

Now my particular kryptonite of which I am powerless to resist are science fiction films. While Star Wars is probably primarily to blame, their certainly were plenty of other science fiction franchises indoctrinating my toddler brain. Since that time, if your film had a hint of futuristic technology, machines dealing with their own developing Artificial Intelligence, or even alien populated cantina bands I have probably already watched the film at one point or another.

Being a child of the 1980’s meant I was able to gorge on these types of films on a weekly basis, as the only genre seemingly more numerous was the one involving one or both of the two Coreys. But as I watched these movies, it became increasingly easy to forget just which movies I had watched as I rocketed through the genre. And all too often, I would watch a film I loved and then lose it to antiquity because I wasn’t making any effort to record which films I loved and which I didn’t.

This is the tale of one such relic, lost to the celluloid aisles, seemingly, forevermore.

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Being born in the mid-seventies, I grew up with a pretty severe lack of exposure to computers for the majority of my schooling. Sure we had a computer lab where we would learn how to use a computer, but that was rarely more frequent then once a week and the majority of that time was spent playing Oregon Trail. My family didn’t even have a PC until I was in High School, and even then most of my teachers preferred papers to be typed rather then printed on computers. Even when I went off to school at a Big Ten university in the mid-nineties, computers still were not a huge component of the work I did. Though it was in college that I finally began to use the Internet. First on Gopher and later through the World Wide Web. Back in those days 28.8k modems was scorching fast, and texting wasn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar.

Today college is a vastly different environment. Most students own their own laptops, attend classes online and have never lived in a world where computers and the Internet weren’t simply a seamless extension of their lives. So when director Melody Gilbert came up with the idea of filming a documentary about three students (Mitchell Lundin, Andrew Tate and Caitlin Magnusson) at Carleton college who choose to not use any computers for three weeks, I was immediately intrigued. Just how would they pull this off, and just how miserable will they become trying to accomplish such a task?

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