BEFORE: Both stars of last night's film, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, are heard but not seen in this film, so there's a good reason to follow up with this one. And this takes me right up to where I need to be to set up "Avengers: Age of Ultron", which I figured I'd catch on Sunday of opening weekend. OK, a couple of problems with that have arisen. First off, it's opening weekend of the biggest film of the year, I may not even be able to get a ticket even if my wife were willing to drive us there, which she isn't. I'd hop a subway into Manhattan by myself, but the subway line I live on is down for weekend repairs for the next three weekends, so that means I'd have to walk a great distance to another subway, and it's just not worth it for a Sunday. So after this I'll take a couple days off, and I'll be back here on Tuesday, I figure I can watch the film while the normal people are working and I have a day off. See, things (sort of) happen for a reason, and I could not have predicted when I lost one of my two jobs that this would mean I'd get to see the new Avengers film on a weekday, but that's where I find myself.
Plus, Monday is "Star Wars" day, and if I were to watch the Avengers film on Sunday, that would mean I'd watch "Guardians of the Galaxy" next on Star Wars Day, and that almost seems like heresy, because as good as GOTG may be, it's still not Star Wars. But I am going to play in a Star Wars trivia match on May 4, so perhaps I should spend Sunday brushing up on any Star Wars trivia I don't already have down. See, maybe things (sort of) happen for a reason.
THE PLOT: A lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with his newly purchased operating system that's designed to meet his every need.
AFTER: My first reaction to this film is, "Bullshit". And that's a reaction to the story, where a man falls in love with his phone's (computer's?) operating system. But I don't think a normal person would do that, because most people would know the difference between a person's voice and thought process and that of a machine. So either we're dealing with a damaged person here (put a pin in that, definite possibility) or this is some kind of metaphor, or an extension of the argument that posits that kids who play with violent video games grow up to become adults who massacre people with guns, or if we legalize gay marriage then next people will want to marry turtles or robots or household furniture. Those arguments are not necessary logical, they blow things out of proportion to make invalid points, but perhaps someone saw someone talking to Siri on their phone and said, "Hmm, what's the next logical or illogical step from there, maybe there's a good story there." (Note to self: get started on screenplay about someone who marries furniture.)
My second reaction to this film is also "Bullshit", but for a different reason, a technical reason. We don't have any tech just yet like what's seen here, though I'm sure some people are working on making A.I. that can PASS for human, they just can't make A.I. that IS human. In other words, we can make a computer that can simulate human speech and fool someone into thinking it has feelings and emotions, but it just doesn't. A computer program can not feel, tell a joke, compose music, or wish it had a body, and all that's because it doesn't have the same kind of brain, it can only think what it's programmed to think.
(Worse, the OS depicted here states that it's "evolving past its own programming", which a computer can't do unless it's programmed to do that, and then logically that would mean it's not doing that. It's kind of like asking whether God can make a rock that's so big he can't lift it, because that would mean that he's both all-powerful and not all-powerful at the same time. If he can build the rock, he can't lift it, but if he can't build the rock, that
's something else he can't do.)
I wish I could have watched this with someone who knows more about computer programming than I do. I would give that person the power to hit the pause button every time he saw something that defies logic, or represents technology that doesn't, and may never, exist.
But then my next reaction was, well, we have science-fiction movies that are set in space, and often there's a ship that has a hyperdrive, which the plot sort of requires in order to get that ship to the next star system. And we don't have hyperdrives, we may never have hyperdrives, but that doesn't stop people from writing about them. So, let's assume this film is a form of science-fiction, or perhaps a grand thought experiment. Again, this sets up a situation where the writer now needs to keep raising the stakes, to take the film to its inevitable, and perhaps completely logical, conclusion.
There are still format problems all over the place. For starters, the main character is a man who writes wonderful formal letters for other people (there's a fictional web-site that offers this service, just roll with it) but he himself seems incapable of making a connection with a human woman. So he knows what to say in most situations, but is unable to say those things himself - that's a very specific personality quirk, he's damaged in a unique way. OK, recent divorce, I get that, but still...
Maybe I've just got Ultron on the brain, but if I follow the logic here, if this guy downloaded a new OS that somehow adjusted itself to his personality, if it was able to exhibit the exact sort of personality that he'd fall in love with, that's some quality programming there. But if that happened to him, it could be happening to anyone who downloaded that software, and to me the next logical step is to have the computers seduce all of the humans, take over the planet and enslave everyone. That's not what happens in this film, which is quite disappointing. Damn, what happens is almost a letdown compared to that. (Note to self: get started on a screenplay where sexy OS systems seduce and destroy humanity).
What we get instead is a computer system that wants to feel, even wants to experience intimacy, and the solution it comes up to bring this about makes so little sense, it's like if the computer wanted to experience food, and our man shoved a cookie in its CD-ROM drive. It just wouldn't work that way, the drive wasn't built with taste buds, so all he'd be doing was ruining it with crumbs.
But let's get back to the possibility that this is a metaphor for something, which I think is the best way to go. It's not impossible that a man could fall in love with a prostitute, or a sex surrogate, or a sex robot (when they're inevitably invented). But also, how many of us, myself included, spend the majority of our days interacting with computers at work, then come home and play video-games, or perhaps a few rounds of some freemium game on the iPad, with an addiction for crushing candy that gets satisfied on the train in-between? Are you spending more time staring into screens than into the faces of your family members, and is this becoming a problem?
NITPICK POINT: As far as I can tell, they did nothing to alter the voice of the lead actress, which to me is a cheat. We also currently do not have a way to synthesize a computer voice that is this sophisticated, so what they should have done (in my opinion) was to alter Ms. Johansson's voice to make it sound more robotic somehow. Without that, it's too easy to see how Theodore falls for her, because then it's just an extension of a man falling for, say, a phone-sex operator. Right off the bat, after Samantha was introduced and said the unnecessary word "actually" three times in five minutes, I called "Bullshit" again. Remember how Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" spoke? He didn't even use contractions for the first 6 seasons of the show, and that was believable, that an android might not use the easier ways of talking. We've come a long way since HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey", but Samantha represents a quantum leap that I think represents a step too far.
As the film itself points out, you can hear the OS making breathing or sighing sounds as it "talks". And of course this is because the actress who was reading the lines needed to breathe, but a computer voice that was programmed to talk would just not be programmed to make these noises - it just wouldn't be necessary. There's an attempt to point out how this is not a mistake, because the AI would eventually learn to mimic human speech, including the breath intake, but this explanation just didn't fly with me. Pointing out the mistake does not stop it from being a mistake.
From the clips I've seen so far from "Avengers: Age of Ultron", I'll be revisiting this same N.P. in my next post. But this film has another problem - for a two-hour film, there's only about 3 minutes worth of plot. You could really cut this down to its basic elements and it would be a lot tighter - and this points out that once the relationship is established, everything else is talkie, talkie, talkie, or perhaps delay, delay, delay. If you've only got enough plot for a short film, please, just make a short film.
Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "The Master"), the voice of Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "The Island"), Amy Adams (last seen in "The Wedding Date"), Rooney Mara (last seen in "The Social Network"), Chris Pratt (last seen in "Zero Dark Thirty"), Olivia Wilde (last seen in "The Words"), the voice of Spike Jonze and the voice of Brian Cox (last seen in "25th Hour").
RATING: 4 out of 10 chatrooms
No comments:
Post a Comment