Yesterday, I saw the last of the three "Rings" movies. Ho-hum. CGI is great. So is a good book. CGI of a good book is, however, just eye-candy. "Cyborg" is a movie that, lacking money and computer graphics, was forced to tell a story. Michael Rennie (you know him as "Klaatu") is a man/machine from the future, come back to correct a few mistakes. His "high" tech looks a bit like your grand-dad's ham radio did about the same time this movie was made, but so what? Garth (Rennie) isn't here to show us ray guns or cell phones. (Who knows? Maybe his gizmos are all camouflaged to resemble '60s-era devices.) What he is here for is to undo the damage of some bad decisions (many of which will remind you of "The Terminator's" SkyNet, but you decide yourself if there's a connection).

Alas for Garth, if he succeeds, it may have dire consequences for him personally. That fact gives him a poignant nobility that many films, then and now, could use, but lack. Time-travel stories often rely on that kind of wrinkle for their drama, and I think that's an inherent weakness of the time-travel sub-genre: they all tend to ask the same question. Still, this one asks it well and Rennie's skillful performance leaves you exquisitely uncertain of just what the Right Thing to Do would be, in such a situation as his character finds himself.

Yeah, "Rings" was great. But so was this, and they don't make 'em like this one anymore.

Once again, Michael Rennie dons a tin-foil suit to come and warn mankind to amend it's ways. This time, though, he is a cyborg called "Garth 7" sent back from the year 2087 to try and stop an evolutionary process that will rob us all of our ability to think for ourselves. He manages to ally with "Dr. Mason" (Karen Steele) but pretty soon they are aware that the government they wish to thwart has also sent agents back and so not just time, but other folks from the future are against them too. This is cheap and cheerful, pedestrianly written, afternoon fodder that is very light on science or characterisations. Rennie looks like he maybe only did the one filming day, such is the truncated nature of the editing - and the special effects (his bio-implants, especially) are not up to very much, either. Oddly enough, it might have looked better in black and white, somehow the colour just makes it look even more sloppily thrown together. Potentially, an interesting take on a well used idea, but sadly it offers little we haven't seen before and the star is well past his best.

Michael Rennie of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" fame stars as Garth A7, a cyborg sent by a future civilization back to 1966. His mission is to make sure that the revolutionary "radio-telepathy" technique being engineered by Professor Marx (Eduard Franz, "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake") does not come to fruition. The thing is, in the future, this technique will be misused by evil minds and bring out about chaos. Once he is back in the past, Garth gets scientists Carl Zellar (Warren Stevens, "Forbidden Planet") and Sharon Mason (Karen Steele, "Ride Lonesome") to help him out, while being hunted by assassins dubbed "Tracers".

If this premise sounds familiar, it should: it was also utilized around this time by Harlan Ellison, as an episode of 'The Outer Limits' titled 'Soldier'. Of course, it would eventually be appropriated again, famously, by James Cameron for "The Terminator". While this ultimately upbeat diversion is nowhere near as atmospheric or grim as Camerons' film, it's certainly a reasonable bit of entertainment. Its obvious low budget and TV movie-like nature will inevitably invite descriptions like "cheesy". It does get positively goofy when, at one point, Zellars' daughter (Sherry Alberoni, "Nightmare Circus") and her friends (including a young John Beck of "Rollerball") groove to some hip tunes while he's trying to perform an operation on Garth. Various people get zapped by Garths' odd weapon, which really does no more than paralyze living things, rather than kill them. The music, while credited to Paul Dunlap, seems to consist of stock cues (such as one memorably used in "Night of the Living Dead"). Franklin Adreon (a TV veteran whose theatrical credits also include stuff like "Panther Girl of the Kongo") directs capably, if not stylishly.

The cast gives a straight faced go at this material. Rennie is good as a character committed to being ruthless in pursuit of his goal, yet who might just find some humanity after all. Wendell Corey ("Rear Window") is a sheriff, Harry Carey Jr. ("3 Godfathers") a pesky reporter, Adam Roarke ("Hells Angels on Wheels") Corey's deputy, and Jo Ann Pflug ("MASH") appears fleetingly at the outset as one of the people sending Garth on his way.

Lightweight and unmemorable stuff, yet it does show one a decent enough time, and should be interesting to see for fans of cult science-fiction.

Six out of 10.