Your Chance To Live: Technological Failures (1972)

★★★★ · Makes ya think, don't it? · dynayellow · 2003-09-09

Presents a few helpful safety tips (putting out electrical and grease fires) in the context of talking about how most people simply don't understand the technological infrastructure that helps them live their daily lives. If my car breaks, I can't fix it; if my water goes out, I don't know where I'd get a supply; if my electricity goes out, there's little I can do until someone else fixes it. An interesting counterpiece to the better-faster-more-powerful-right-now mentality. Doesn't advocate less technology, simply that people be more thoughtful about all the ways it affects us, and…

★★★ · Bloated script, but decent movie · Robot Mike · 2006-12-18

Hey, this film isn't half bad. It's got good music, and a handsome narrator (who looks like a very tired Sherlock Holmes). Our host provides us with such insightful nuggets as the following: "But when technology advances, we always find time to laugh, perhaps too hard, at pictures of machines, those products of our minds and times, making us look ridiculous... Befuddling us." But if you can forgive the bloated script, this film is all right. There are a lot of nice shots, and some good points are made besides. (We really don't understand much about most of the everyday appliances we use--much…

★★★ · Don't Put Water On a Fire · Yowp · 2025-04-14

Technology can fail, so we have to be ready to respond. Even a grease fire in a kitchen. That sums up the message in this short from the 1970s. Oh, and we learn to turn off "Tattletales" (a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Production) during a brown out. The score is pretty good. Creepy electronic music at the start and a Hammond organ at the end. Peter Thomas, who voiced all kinds of commercials for big companies, and documentaries, appears on camera in addition to narrating. The farmhouse flashback has a curious cat in the kitchen.

★★★ · Technology = Bad. · Spuzz · 2005-10-30

So this film purports, in it's all too roundabout way, that man hasn't learned anything from technology. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Interesting topic, though it does take it's sweet time to explain it, then at the end you're like, that's it? Meh.

★★★ · Well, maybe not... · uniQ · 2011-04-18

On second thought, the film isn't that bad, even if it is dated. The moral, that everyone should know how to respond to a "technological failure", is sound and some useful example are given. Overall though, the film seems to meander, as another reviewer put it, and the "pioneer days" comparison is questionable on several levels. Even then people were depended on technology that was beyond them. The kerosene shown being poured into lamps was refined in a process no farmer was likely to know or be able to replicate.

★★ · Still uninsightful and incorrect · Steve Nordby · 2003-10-24

After reading dynayellow's review, I watched this film again thinking I missed something. I did: it rips off the far superior first episode of James Burke's original "Connections" series. The film's implication that your grandparents world was without technological risk shows a lack of understanding of what technology is: the wooden cart that could break and dump 2 tons on hay on gramps, the axe that junior could accidentally chop his foot off with, and the oil lamp that might set the house on fire, ALL of those are technologies that can kill. Portraying some idyllic old-time world as without…