BEFORE: Back to work, I've got a screening tonight of a documentary about the pollution from microplastics and what effect that might be having on humans' bodies. You know, more end-of-the-world stuff, so that might be right in line with today's film which is set in the future, but is more about A.I. taking over the planet. I guess we all agree that human society is doomed, but we're not settled on the how or the when of it all.
Simu Liu carries over from "In Your Dreams".
THE PLOT: In a bleak future, an A.I. soldier has determined that the only way to end war is to end humanity.
AFTER: It's almost like a variation on "I Am Mother", or perhaps it's the other way around - but clearly we're all concerned about the future where the robots take over. A.I. is the big villain right now in a lot of movies, it's a sign of the times because it's already taken over in the classrooms and the social media, so it's only a matter of time before it takes control of the entire film production process, then once it can influence the hearts and minds of the people and every writer in Hollywood can't find work, from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump over to controlling the elections, rounding up the humans into camps and starting the nasty business of eliminating us all. I mean, there will be no jobs for us anyway and no TV shows or movies we like, so really, what's the point of living in that future anyway?
I kid, of course, but in every joke there is an element of truthiness. We're collectively terrified about A.I. right now, so that's going to be reflected in the movies people write and in the ones that we watch. But I think maybe we're in trouble in the future if A.I. takes over and the only possible person who can fix things and save the Earth is... Jennifer Lopez? Jesus, really? I mean, I know she was in exactly ONE action movie before (OK, two, "Out of Sight" and "The Mother", but come on, was Halle Berry not available? Sandra Bullock?) still I can't help but feel she was horribly out of place here.
There's a back-story that kind of explains her character's history with A.I., it seems that Harlan, the evil A.I. trying to destroy the Earth, was invented by her mother, and it was built into the robot body that resembled a middle-aged Asian man, and young Atlas used to play chess with it, it was kind of a robot companion mixed with a surrogate father figure for her. Kind of reading between the lines here, because this movie is terrible at telling us how people feel, we're just kind of left with what they do. Anyway Harlan convinced Atlas to connect to him via a neural interface, and this was a terrible mistake, it somehow made him evil or it gave him insight to the human condition and convinced him that humanity had a history of destructive behavior. (He learned all this from a 12-year old girl's mind? How messed up was she?). Harlan's response to finding out that humanity was basically insane (again, this based on just one interface with a pre-teen girl, so yeah, that tracks) was to control Atlas's mother's body and make her commit suicide. Then he set his sights on the rest of humanity, because he had concluded that because humanity was so self-destructive, most of it needed to be destroyed so that it could not destroy itself. Yeah, there's a flaw in that logic somewhere - but at least his plan was to allow a few humans to live and thrive, with A.I. in charge of the world, of course.
So, after leading the robot revolution/machine uprising in 2043, and humanity fighting back against Harlan, the Coalition of Nations forced him to flee into outer space. Atlas Shepherd then spent the next twenty-eight years of her life becoming an A.I. expert and military analyst, and working on defense mechanisms that would keep the Earth safe, in case Harlan ever returned. What's weird is that he didn't just leave the planet, he left the whole galaxy, and escaped to a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. Yeah, I have to call a big NITPICK POINT here, because another galaxy would be super far, far away, there's no chance any human or android could travel there within one lifetime. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.537 million light years away, so traveling there at the speed of light, which is impossible, would still take 2.537 million years. Unless Earth developed some kind of faster-than-light travel, which our science tells us is beyond impossible, he could never get there as fast as this movie suggests.
Nevertheless, 28 years later (which is a lot less than 2.5 million years) Atlas captures a hostile robot which was one of Harlan's subordinates, and learns his location and his plans to return and attack Earth. So she joins a mission to that other planet in that other galaxy and they all travel there somehow (again, impossible) only to find that Harlan set a trap for them. Drones attack the ship in orbit around the planet, the ICN Rangers try to get into their ARC mecha-suits, but most of them die either in the crash of the ship or inside the ARC suits as they descend to the planet. Atlas is forced into an ARC suit by Colonel Banks, the mission commander, and she is one of the few people to survive the crash, only the ARC mech suit is controlled by A.I., and she refuses to interface with the suit via a neural interface, only later do we find out WHY, because of her bad experience in the past, millions of people ended up dying after she interfaced with Harlan and that turned him evil somehow.
(These ARC suits are kind of like the armored things worn by Earth soldiers in the "Avatar" movie, meaning this whole film is a mash-up of "Avatar", "I Am Mother" and maybe a bit of "Pacific Rim")
Traveling across the alien landscape in the ARC suit, trying to remain below Harlan's radar, Atlas does end up bonding with the A.I. in the suit, and because she's injured and the A.I. doesn't think strategically like a human, they do need each other to survive on the alien world. Harlan is planning to steal the ship that the Rangers took to get to his planet, fix it and fill it with bombs and then send it back to blow up Earth, he just needs the security codes from either the injured Colonel Banks or from Atlas herself. So, naturally Atlas is heading straight toward his base, practically delivering him the last piece of the puzzle he needs to destroy humanity. So, umm, maybe DON'T go there and give him what he wants? Just a thought.
But by this point, Atlas trusts the A.I. in her armor enough to get over her bad break-up with Harlan, and is finally willing to interface with it. Now together they've got the thinking capacity of an A.I. unit, plus the tricky strategy of a human, and Atlas also manages to upgrade the ARC mecha-suit with parts from other destroyed ARCs, so physically they'll have a chance against Harlan's robot army. And they do manage to blow up the ship full of bombs before it can launch toward Earth, but then they've got to face Harlan in hand-to-hand combat. It's possible that one or both of them won't survive the final battle.
I kind of wish that the living human didn't have to bond with A.I. in order to destroy A.I. - like how are we supposed to distinguish the good A.I. from the bad A.I. when we don't quite understand what turned the bad A.I. bad? How do we know this won't happen again, even after the good A.I. helps destroy the bad A.I., what's to keep it from turning bad itself, a few years down the road. Look what happened to the last A.I. that interfaced with teenage J. Lo, it went completely crazy, and maybe we can understand that. But now the one that calls itself Smith has bonded with the adult J. Lo, and that's probably enough to drive Smith crazy, too. J. Lo doesn't exactly have a great track record with long relationships, just saying. Marc Anthony, Cris Judd, Ben Affleck, Alex Rodriguez and even Sean "Diddy" Combs, at some point they all decided they desperately needed to be somewhere else, and this Smith A.I. will probably come to the same conclusion.
Directed by Brad Peyton (director of "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island" and "Rampage")
Also starring Jennifer Lopez (last seen in "Angel Eyes"), Sterling K. Brown (last seen in "American Fiction"), Gregory James Cohan, Abraham Popoola (last seen in "The Marvels"), Lana Parrilla, Mark Strong (last seen in "6 Days"), Briella Guiza (last seen in "Ambulance"), Adia Smith-Eriksson, Logan Hunt, Jared Shimabukuro, Ashley J. Hicks, Paul Ganus (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Zoe Boyle (last seen in "Living"), Howland Wilson, Justin Walker White (last seen in "The Gray Man"), Michelangelo Hyeon, Gloria Cole (last seen in "Nope"), Lesley Fera, Tom Knight, Samantha Hanratty (last heard in "A Christmas Carol" (2009)), Geoffrey Hinton, Vaughn Johseph (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Supreet Bedi, Lorraine Tai (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Greg McKenzie (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), Harj Dhillon, James Millard, Omar Khan, Jessica Holmes.
RATING: 5 out of 10 chess pieces
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