M3GAN
AI is absolute dogshit. Eat your heart out, Spielberg and Kubrick, fucking amateurs.
A couple with a child, who we later discover are Jacksonville nutters who homeschool their kid, go visit her female techbro aunt in Oregon (either corporate Seattle, or pinko Portland, it’s unclear). Since they are bumpkins, they get pull a Jeremy Renner and die in a freak snowplow accident.
The little kid survives, which means female techbro (techsis?) is unwillingly a mother, even though she doesn’t even take care of her own plants. The culture shock of moving from Florida to the Pacific Northwest doesn’t matter, it’s a kid after all, the focus is on the silly childless career techsis trying to take care of a child. The establishing scene on the family home is having the kid being semi-scolded for trying to play with collectables, those aren’t toys, silly girl!
This could not have come at a worse time, since the techsis is a lead engineer in the big toy company. They have some Furby meets Tamagotchi that sells well, but they need to have a cheaper version to wreck the Chinese copycat market. The CEO is breathing down her neck, and as an ambitious career woman, she kinda abandons the kid to an iPad to go work in her home office.
Their bonding moments are just necessary setup for the finale, looks like her job is basically The Sims, instead of supply chain management and enforcing corporate policy.
Since all the techsis has is a hammer, she nails her problem: she automates her mother tasks by outsourcing them to an AI life-size Barbie she has been working on for a while, Skunk Works-style. The big presentation with the CEO goes extremely well, and the kid just loves to have someone her age to play with.
The techsis is happy for having time to her career, the kid is distracted from the fact she is now an orphan living across the country, great job everyone!
Alas, the issues have to appear before the big public reveal. There was already a freak accident in some kind of charter school PR thing, where the kid was being bullied and the AI Barbie murdered some dipshit kid for attempting to rape her. “Murdered” is the word, he walked into some SUV driving like crazy around a school, there is no legal liability anywhere. And the mother was some granola idiot pampering her psycho kid.
The AI goes rogue, kills a dog, kill the neighbouring crazy dog lady, another childless woman. She kills the techsis’s underlings and chases them home. The techsis fight her, but the kid for the coup-de-grace, a screwdriver straight through the CPU.
All this, because they had a previous conversation and the techsis swore she will lay off the careerist path and return to her God-given task of nursing children.
This is bar none the best AI-adjacent modern film, truly a visionary work of art. The budget is modest, the story not very complex, but not only is the plot about actual “AI” as it exists right now in the real world (and how “word salad” gobbledygook it is), there are hilarious little touches that seal the deal.
The human plot, on how some neurotic career-obsessed woman can be a mother, if she gets off the smartphone and engage with her child, is presented much better than I can describe. There is contempt for crazy cat ladies, career woman, the tech industry, this is truly conservative horror.
The whole AI angle has it all: corporate overlords being buffoon dickwads, the poor and huddled masses slaving away at the software coalface, working from home, the whole shebang.
There are even songs, it’s almost a musical at some point!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.