Rhapsodies

The problem with having a favorite genre is sooner than later you’ve seen all of the good stuff. When the biggest rule in your weekly double feature is to only watch films you’ve never seen before, you find yourself really scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is the case with science fiction for me. To keep things interesting you have to be creative. So I found myself mixing romance with artificial intelligence. 

The first film on my list, Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) a coder for an alternate he version of Google. He wins a contest to spend a week at the home of the company’s reclusive founder, Nathan Bateman Oscar Isaac.) 

It turns out it’s not just a prize. He’s also been brought in to perform a Turing-test on Nathan’s lifelike android prototype, Ava (Alicia Vikander). Caleb is quickly smitten by the beautiful Ava and finds himself wanting to help her. Beside’s that it becomes increasingly unclear what Nathan’s motivations actually are (or Ava for that matter) and just who is being tested.

This was an interesting film, with solid performances with our two leads. I’ve seen it suggested that this film is a modern version of the Bluebeard story, and once this has been pointed out the comparisons are obvious and hard to shake off. To a certain level, I get a little tired of science fiction with sinister overtones where scientific progress is considered a bad thing but for the most part, I enjoyed how they handled the suspense. 

The next film on the list, Spike Jonze’s Her tells the story of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) a professional letter writer living in a not so distant future. Having recently divorced, he is lonely and spends most of his free time playing video games and participating in dating forums. One day he purchases a brrand new artificially intelligent operating system. The new operating system names herself Samantha(Scarlett Johansson) and she is helpful and personable. They quickly hit it off… from there, their relationship develops quickly.

This was a clever and with film with Phoenix and Johansson both giving an incredible performance (all the more impressive since Johansen is never on screen. It takes a wonderfull subtle look at a not too far away future. It’s also wonderfully sweet, especially Samantha accompanying herself on the ukelele. If I had any problem with it is I could identify with Theodore very easily, which I found quite depressing.