THE MANY VOICES OF MOVIES

Trying to pick out a pattern of thought or intention in two or more Hollywood films is almost as foolhardy as looking for deliberate designs in the sesame seeds on a roll.

Those who fear the persuasive power of the movies even in their present reduced state find it easy to detect conspiracies aimed at moving us to the Left or, more recently, to the Right or, always, toward sin.

It’s certainly never any trouble spotting films that play to the hedonist wants of an audience, although those films usually don’t have anything on their minds except low-level titillation.

It’s also true that you can usually locate a brave and lonely little film with a strong point of view. Customarily it will be struggling at the box office, and the excellent “Salvador” might be a current example.

But the largest force that shapes the nature of films, now and forever, is still the marketplace. The considerations are What has sold before and What, therefore, might sell again; What do the customers want to see and hear and, even more important, What don’t they want to see and hear.

If not in the writer’s mind, then in the financier’s, most movies proceed by a cautious, weather-sniffing radar, by which it is hoped a film will avoid colliding with any solid contrary body of opinion among the citizenry.

But confusion and contradiction abound. Military and paramilitary operations have been celebrated in “Rambo” and some successor films. This was said to reflect, or appeal to, the new conservative slant of the country.

Yet in other new and recent movies the military are the bad guys, dumb, blind and murderous. In Marshall Brickman’s new comedy, “The Manhattan Project,” which opened Friday, the soldiers are quite prepared to gun down teen-ager Christopher Collet who has built a plutonium bomb to dramatize what the government is doing in the woods outside Ithaca, N.Y.

It is a far-out premise, to say the least of it, although the implicit message that unauthorized hands could one day make a bomb is closer-in to reality. Brickman has insisted the military types are not evil, but only men doing their jobs (an ironic phrase, used ironically). Yet the lingering image is of the youth centered on the cross hairs of a sniper rifle.

Still, “The Manhattan Project,” improbabilities and all, is a far cry thematically from “Rambo.” So is “Short Circuit,” another current comedy, this one about a military robot that swallows an overload of electricity and learns to frug and chase women, imagining itself human. Just another dose of sordid social realism.

Once again the real villains are the militarists who will stop at nothing to get the robot back or destroy it. (For all its winsome charm, the robot, No. 5 to its friends, is a weapon.) Two nice youngsters, Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy, are accordingly imperilled.

There’s another switch going on here. By inference, anyway, the great science-fiction pictures of the last two decades celebrated the achievements of science. There might be bad guys and evil scientists out there someplace, but on balance it was a gee-whiz look that the guys in the labs created.

Now, in a new place on the cycle (or, in fact, an older place come into view again), the scientists are bad guys. They are latter-day Frankensteins, putting pure science to monstrous uses. That, or they are good guys being used for bad ends they haven’t thought about enough.

The friendly scientist in “The Manhattan Project” (John Lithgow) at last sees the error of his ways, and you have the feeling he will bid farewell to that plutonium refinery in Ithaca.

Equally, you have the feeling that, after all the shenanigans he’s pulled in aid of No. 5, Guttenberg has lost his Q clearance at his lab, even assuming he wants anything more to do with the military uses of robots.

On the other hand, one of the two or three biggest films of early summer is “Top Gun,” about military flying at the leading edge, so to speak, of aviation science.

As ever, you pay your money and take your choice. The point is that the movies don’t speak with one voice. They never really did, although in the 34 years of the Hays Code (1934-1968) the films from the Hollywood majors all reflected one moral vision that covered everything from swear words to justice.

It is frustrating that more movies don’t have more on their minds. But, given the power of the movies even now, it is reassuring that they speak with so many different and contradictory voices.