Product Details

• Actors: George Bartenieff, Babi Floyd, Gilbert Giles, Steve Gorevan, Tom Myrick
• Directors: Michel Negroponte
• Writers: Michel Negroponte, Gabriel Morgan, George Morgan
• Producers: Michel Negroponte, Jane Weiner
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: Unrated
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Docurama
• VHS Release Date: September 25, 2001
• Run Time: 75 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B00005NKCI
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #604,099 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

In a lab on the Lower East Side, a team of scientists and engineers are designing a robot named W.I.S.O.R.; a futuristic, subterranean robo welder, able to withstand temperatures of 300 degrees and navigate through the snaking, hundred-mile long world of buried steam pipes beneath Manhattan, that will repair the rapidly decaying century-old system.

New York’s little known or understood underground steam pipes provide the necessary heat and hot water for everything from Chinese laundries and Turkish baths to the World Trade Center, and the Empire State Building. A thousand engineering hours behind schedule and way over budget, Honeybee Robotics, W.I.S.O.R.’s creators, are worried. They argue, discuss God, baseball, technology and ultimately lead us into a futuristic world originally thought impossible in this eerie, stranger-than-fiction tale set in the city beneath the city.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Watching this was like being mugged, February 2, 2008

By 

J. Marsano "Gerade aus Brooklyn" (Urban Gristle Mill) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: W.I.S.O.R.-Welding & Inspection Steam Operations Robot (DVD)

In documentary filmmaking, there's choosing a subject and telling the story of that subject, and then there's choosing a subject and telling the story you wish the subject had been telling. It's a common mistake for a politician to answer the question that she wished she'd been asked; in a filmmaker, it's just not forgivable.

Negroponte hijacks an otherwise charming premise (who doesn't like the idea of a little robots inch-worming the conduits of our city, cleaning, spraying, and welding?) and turns it into a soapbox for philosophical claptrap disguised as technological and social commentary.

This really quite terrible documentary digs itself a deep hole from the get go. Visually overproduced with jump cuts and low-fi black and white, it also brims with bizarre and unnecessary sound and voice effects. Worse yet, Negroponte plays a pretentious note by deciding to project his own fantastical dreams of semi-autonomous and "intelligent agent" robots by speaking in the voice of the technology itself! Throughout the film WISOR "comes to life" through an entirely fictive voice over that sounds like a vo-coder trapped in a rattling dustbin.

What's most embarrassing about this film is to see that Negroponte clearly never got out of his sophomore year in university. Watch this film and you'll see how far a little talent can take you.