I'm not even comfortable terming Fast, Cheap & Out of Control a documentary. The film doesn't try to chronicle an event or explore an issue. There is nothing, save the variety and splendor of the human spirit, that this film "documents." It would be better, perhaps, to call it a meditation. The picture works this way: interviews with four men who don't know each other are intercut with old B-movie footage, cartoons and scenes of the men engaged in their work.

Dave Hoover is a wild animal trainer and circus performer who idolizes the late action-movie and serial star Clyde Beatty (some of whose work is also included). Dave works mostly with lions and tigers but has sweeping theories about animal psychology, all formed from his extensive interaction with wild beasts. George Mendonca is a topiary gardener who uses old-fashioned pruning shears to shape hedges and trees into bears, giraffes, elephants and other creatures. Ray Mendez is an expert on the recently discovered hairless mole-rats, tiny beaver-faced mammals who organize themselves in nests that resemble insect hives. And Rodney Brooks is an M.I.T. engineer who has designed some of the world's most complicated autonomous robots.

As the picture rapidly introduces us to each of these men, we sit wrinkle-browed trying to figure out what in the world they have in common. Gradually we understand. Each of their lives is somehow connected to animals. Mendonca makes animal shapes out of plants. Hoover trains and performs with animals. Mendez studies a specific species of animal, a mammal that acts like an insect. And Brooks achieved his breakthrough in robotics by studying insect motion. Based on his understanding of insects, he designs machines to do for man what man once might have employed draft animals to do.

In addition, these four men share a reverence for the animal kingdom. Mendonca's art is always expressed in the shape of animals. Mendez could clearly spend all his waking hours watching the activities and charting the social relations of his beloved mole-rats. Brooks has discovered that the key to complicated human development lies in understanding the simplest of Earth's creatures. And Hoover passionately believes in demonstrable animal intelligence, individual personality, memory and will.

The four have other things in common as well. Each possesses an unbridled enthusiasm for his work. Nowhere are we told how much money any of these men make, and it doesn't matter. The M.I.T. engineer may make quite a lot, and the topiary gardener may make very little. But neither man would begin to measure the product of his life's endeavor by the size of his paycheck. In fact, it's obvious that measurement is of absolutely no concern to any of these men. They do what they do because they are enraptured by doing it.

The value of their efforts to the human race as a whole arguably varies. Brooks' work may produce countless advantages for us all. But Hoover is just an entertainer and one who admits wild animal acts like his probably will not last another generation. The works of a sculptor or painter can be preserved in museums for millennia, but Mendonca suspects that his topiary garden will die along with him. And Mendez's study of mole-rats might be dismissed as a mere scientific curiosity. But Brooks' work ethic stems from his boundless fascination, not from his sense of altruistic mission. And none of the others is troubled for an instant by the seeming impracticality of what he does. Too, Brooks might be the first to find unsuspected value in what the others do. Look what he learned from insects.

In the final analysis, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a rumination on evolution, from insects to mammals that act like insects to great beasts to man who can create objects that act like animals. And here it is Brooks who proposes that robots may represent the next step in the evolutionary process. Robotics scientists are very close to designing machines with levels of intelligence equal to and greater than human beings. It will not prove hard at all to produce machines that can reproduce themselves. Brooks admits that once machines with high levels of intelligence have been made operational, they may well prove alien to us in the way that we may seem alien to the "lower" creatures with whom we share the planet. And intelligent machines may well prove hardier than human beings. A variety of disasters could wipe out, as Brooks puts it, "flesh-based life." In that case, the machines we call robots may survive us and endure when we expire, may be our legacy for a future very different from our own time.