Barry Levinson’s box-office flop ‘Toys’ predicted the future of warfare

(CNN) — Barry Levinson’s “Toys” is hard to track down today. It was supposed to be a highlight of the 1992 holiday movie season, a major-studio comedy release with a cast that included Robin Williams, Joan Cusack, LL Cool J, and a cameo from Jamie Foxx for his first film credit. But despite Levinson’s sterling prior directing record, the big names, and an acclaimed set design, audiences avoided it. It went down in film history as a notorious failure, and it’s all but unavailable on contemporary streaming platforms.

Yet lately, people have been rediscovering the film in clip form. “Toys” tells the story of a a warmongering, slightly deranged military officer named Leland Zevo who commandeers his brother’s toy factory for weapons production, starting with cartoony tanks and spyware hidden inside teddy bears, before realizing the real vanguard is in video games.

Toward the end, the movie reveals that Zevo has created a secret bunker where kids play immersive video games that are supposed to simulate war — piloting virtual attack helicopters and blowing up bridges, highways and enemy boats on pixelated battlefields while point values flash on the screen. In fact, he is preparing to deploy a new kind of child soldier, who would unwittingly send cheap remote-controlled vehicles to take out cities to rack up a new high score.

Thirty-four years later, with barrages of cheap drones defining the battlefield in Ukraine and in the Strait of Hormuz, and with the president posting pixelated videos of unarmed boats being blasted into fireballs in the Caribbean, Levinson’s vision of cheap, gamified, dissociated warfare strikes people as all too prescient. We called the filmmaker to talk about how he conceived the movie, and what he thinks of his fictional future now that it’s arrived.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I’m curious if you’re surprised at the resurgence of interest in “Toys.”

I am only because it’s very easy for many movies to just drift away and that’s the end of it. So the fact that this sort of has been popping up is fascinating to me. It’s been a long time since I made it. I always thought it was incredibly misunderstood in its time. I never thought the film was meant for the very young.

The absurdist world that we were creating contained a lot of elements that we saw coming down the road. The computers and the remote-control operations of things, and then the idea of making weapons smaller for economic reasons, as General Zevo talks about in the movie. I always thought that it was almost a fable.

I guess the initial reaction was all over the place.

Some prescient movies seem to be very misunderstood in their time. I think about Paul Verhoeven and “Starship Troopers,” where it felt like the movie was misunderstood by people who weren’t necessarily grasping the satire. I’m wondering if you categorize “Toys” as a movie that was perhaps too good at telling the future.

It happens periodically. I mean, as soon as you see the visuals of this is the factory, which is clearly not like one you’ve seen before, you know this isn’t reality.

And we included these computer elements and these small remote-control planes that can still be deadly, they still have the power to blow up and destroy things. You can see where those things could ultimately mesh. That’s why we have that scene where you see all these kids on their computers blowing up things. The way things are going now, that reality can certainly enter the picture in the near future.

That seems increasingly what military operations look like.

We are going down that lane. And I didn’t think of it as being that hard to comprehend. There’s a certain kind of great visual aspect to it all now. We’re not dealing with reality.

I’m thinking specifically of the scene when Leland Zevo (Michael Gambon) is talking to his son Patrick (LL Cool J) where he says: “Can you imagine the savings if you reduce the cost of planes from $450 million a piece down to $5,000?” That predates the emergence of these tiny drone planes that Iran and Ukraine are using.

And that applies to all military devices, you know. There are the drones and these small tanks. It’s one of the things about the linked advancement of technology and economics. Wars are going to continue, so how do we make the war more economical? It’s a cynical way to see things, but you can see it coming.

But as we continue to evolve, is everything we put in the film going to supposedly happen? I don’t think so, but a lot of those things you could see at the time would definitely be on the table. If you’re looking at a kid at a computer screen playing that game, the military application was obvious. And now, of course, that’s largely what it does look like.

Have you thought about what impacts the progression of AI and virtual reality will have? Everything looks so realistic. Does that change things?

It does, and it’s very dangerous because you start losing sense of what’s real and what’s been created.

It sort of shatters our shared sense of reality.

Yes, and that’s a really unfortunate outcome. I was — I’ll just tell you one brief thing — there was some kind of party. Someone showed me a totally AI-made video that was so realistic I didn’t realize it wasn’t a real road with a real car until he told me. He said it took him two hours to create. If you can create something that looks that credible in two hours, where are we going to be in 10 years?

If you had redone that famous scene with the kids playing war video games that are actually being trained to blow up bridges and buildings, what would be different?

It would be very similar to it, except a little bit more advanced visually. It’s still a computer screen, so they’d be hooking into whatever that is presented, and they can go ahead and chase it and blow it up and not know the why of it all. It’s just a game.

Well, you have Zevo taking over a toy factory to create weapons, and it seems like a lot of military innovation right now is trying to make toys for the military.

The continual advancement in that area is because the economics drive it forward. If you don’t have to spend the money to build a jet, you start trying to find a way to be equally as destructive at a more reasonable price.

There’s this line from Ursula K. LeGuin, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” Were you trying to predict the future with “Toys,” or was it just reflecting the absurdities of the world in 1992?

No, we weren’t trying to predict things. It seemed like this could happen in basic ways. You can see the beginnings of these things. We thought, “Well, that would be an interesting world to explore.” When you start looking at the computers and see how they’re advancing, you go, “Well, I can see how that would happen.” And what happens if you had a kid in front of that screen, and instead of it just being a game, it’s for real, but it looks like a game anyway? That’s dangerous, and we thought it was a workable idea in a in a film that doesn’t look like the world as we know it.

I think you once called it “a dark comedy in pastel colors.”

I didn’t remember that, but I like it.

I remember in Europe “Toys” was accepted much more easily than here. For some reason, I think they saw it along the lines of surrealism.

Why do you think that is?

I’ve always wondered, because we certainly have the relationship to technology and everything. But we they embraced the absurdity of it much more quickly.

Why was this intermingling of play and war interesting to you in the first place?

It’s a good question, but I don’t know that I have a good answer. Sometimes there are certain things that get into your head. So there were these video games and these small toys that you can control — even just to make them go across the room and turn around and come back. Computers are everywhere and there was also a new era of television at that time with MTV.

So there was this merger of all these things taking place. And we thought, well that this can’t be the end of it, this must be the beginning. So where does it go? Where does the remote control go? Where does the computer go?

Originally, the designs were for everything to be about toys. But as we talked about, warfare is using these various devices. They begin to adapt those technologies. We can take this remote control concept where we can have a plane fly without anyone in it. So you begin to think about all that and what direction it’s going to go.

Many of those paths lead to warfare.

Yes. Unfortunately.

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