AI is such a rich topic, it can be explored from any kind of angles but this movie decided to use it only as a prop. The AI people are just stand-ins for oppressed people X. None of the AI people are really intelligent, they behave as regular humans and even have to sleep (?!), which is one of many advantages machines would have over humans. The movie decides to tell a generic story that we have seen many times before, and in a better way.
If one ignores the paper thin story and has to describe this movie in one word, it would be messy. Awkward change of tones, a weird plot structure with constant flashbacks, unclear action, an unlikeable protagonist that gets everyone killed and even the acting is all over the place.
Similar like Neil Blomkamp, the director is more interested in world-building than in gripping storytelling. All the story beats are there, all of them predictable. Every interesting sci-fi idea is discarded in favor of a trope. You got robots who are all portrayed as inherently good (and who never malfunction) and the humans who are either evil military or grateful victims who adore their robot saviors. There are no grey areas, no ambivalent characters or ideas at play. This predictive setup reminded me a lot of the AVATAR movies. Not only do you have a protagonist who infiltrates 'the resistance' and switches sides, you got the army villain who is almost identical in behaviour and personality.
The connective tissue is supposed to be the relationship between the two protagonists. If you expect them bonding slowly over the course of the 135min runtime, you should lower your expectations. Instead we get a montage in the beginning of their journey and that's pretty much all the development you'll see in that department. It's almost like the writing was a necessary evil to get from one action set piece to another.
Talking about action, it is the most lifeless I have seen in a blockbuster (since the Transformers films). If the bad guys or our good guys get into a car, they get the biggest plot armour. Cars can get shot at by hundred guns or overturn a million times, they will get out of it unharmed and unphazed, even if they didn't use a seat belt. At one point it is super easy to destroy a giant tank with a small sticky charge, but once successfully applied, no one else will be using this tactic again. The Asian country where the story takes place doesn't have military or a defense budget, because they only have useless police cars/robots at their disposal whose sole purpose is to get blown up. And can we talk about explosions and how the director doesn't know how they work. Almost everyone who gets blown up by an explosion will look pretty with some bruises on their cheek, especially the women. There's also a thing called shockwave or blast radius which are the very things that will end your life. Our protagonist gets to witness three of them in point blank range. You have a person with a superpower to switch off all electronic devices, even a whole neighborhood and military checkpoint if the script wants to, but when it comes to a satellite those superpowers will only be used for a door. Almost every action scene ends with a coincidence, deus ex machina or that someone draws a gun faster than the other. The last action set piece in particular is redundant where they send a robot after someone who can turn off electric devices. Next time maybe send a monkey with a club to do the job. Mostly you'll see a hundred laser beams flying around without hitting anything or anyone. Again the action is so uninteresting that you never feel that our heroes are in danger, unless it's a side character, well then RIP, those have zero chance of survival. And why should they? They fulfilled their task of convenient exposition talk so let's just kill them to create artificial stakes. Those parts felt so nihilistic to me and more often than not sabotaged the message of the movie. The flashbacks are another thing that tell you nothing interesting. Unfortunately they are sprinkled throughout the film to make us artificially care about the protagonist. And that's what this movie is in a nutshell, a story written by an AI with some nice visual ideas but completely devoid of a soul. And I was rooting for the movie, it is no remake, has good cinematography and has good world building (only aesthetically though) but it just felt so derivative and un-engaging on an emotional level. It's a shame.
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