The British production of Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain includes an extended critique of the megalomania and anti-Communism underlying the Cold War era American computer industries. The supercomputer sequences that appear in Billion Dollar Brain were shot at facilities of the American technology conglomerate Honeywell and prominently feature a rabidly anti-Communist oil tycoon played by Ed Begley, who plans to incite revolution across Europe via a military assault on the Soviet Union. The timing and execution for the revolutions are calculated by his massive, privately financed supercomputer complex in Texas and includes the strategic release of biological viruses and military support from his private army, which he hopes will start WWIII.

There are remarkable symmetries in the human-computer interactions of Billion Dollar Brain and Colossus: The Forbin Project. In both films, a computer-synthesized voice issues orders to humans which must be followed under threat of death. The humans in these films literally function as extensions of the computer, fearfully carrying out their orders, including murder, with precision and dutifully reporting back to the computer. The sentient computers in both films succeed in dehumanizing their human agents, who are necessary only for executing orders in the world beyond their physical capabilities. The reversal of control between human and mechanical agents is a common trope of technological anxiety films, but the implacable extremes with which the supercomputers in these two films exert their influence reveals an extreme anxiety around the tyranny of technology represented by supercomputers.

Billion Dollar Brain shares a stylistic resemblance with the early James Bond films produced by Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, including a high-contrast graphical opening title sequence designed by veteran Bond title designer Maurice Binder. Outside of the technology-oriented parts of the narrative, Billion Dollar Brain is a fairly ordinary spy genre film, complete with double agents, unrequited love, personal betrayal and international intrigue.

Billion Dollar Brain also features two sequences of computer programming that are nearly unique in the history of computer films. In one protracted sequence, Karl Malden meticulously programs a series of punch cards that are automatically fed into the computer, ostensibly in order to carry out orders from the General (Begley). It turns out that Malden has been feeding misinformation to the computer, which has encouraged it to calculate an elaborate plan to invade the USSR via Latvia that is actually doomed to fail. When his sabotage is discovered, Malden escapes by reprogramming the computer facility's fire alarm system using a physical patch bay and push-pin programming diagram, a rare cinematic reminder of the days when mainframe computers were programmed through hardware configuration rather than through executable commands delivered through software.

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