Worth a watch. Well acted and kept me guessing a good way through.
And likely worth discussing!
Any one else see it yet?
Hard to discuss without spoilers so while some discretion is nice odds are there will be spoilers. Be so informed.
I’m looking forward to this.
Probably won’t get a chance to watch until sometime next week though.
We just saw it. I really liked it. I thought it took a concept that has been visited several times in SciFi and pulled new questions and ideas out of it.
It was fairly close to horrible.
You know all along pretty much what’s going on. No real surprises anywhere. Yeah, a story like this is going to play out a certain way. Meh.
The limited cast imposed a lot of limits on stuff. So, that made it even more boring.
But the real problem was the Shatner-like dialogue. Just large, useless gaps all over the place. Pause, say something, pause, repeat ad nauseam.
So that just dragged it out far to long. This would have been a fine half hour Twilight Zone episode in 1960. A nearly two hour movie today … egad.
Too many “auteur” things thrown in. E.g., Swank and Rugaard spend some time talking. They talk about other people’s names. They don’t talk about their names. Clever, right? Not in the least.
Plus all the dumb things. E.g.,
People roam all over the complex without being detected. Astonishing hi-tech place with zip security cameras and sensors? I don’t think so. So you know that nobody is really sneaking around. Which means …
Give it one homemade shiv.
The first thing I thought when I saw the preview (haven’t yet seen the video) was that the bot’s head had a vaguely GlaDOS look to it
It would have been a nice reference to have Ellen McLean do the voice…
As to knowing which way it was going … I didn’t. I could see multiple directions that were possible and wasn’t sure which trolley track it was going to go down.
As to the dumb things … I just accept those in general as par for the the course in movies as needed for plots to work. If the plot and mood works they are easy to ignore. Easy to wave off too … A post-extinction event failsafe repopulating facility might not have been felt to have needed so much active monitoring other than in critical locations that would represent significant danger to the children.
They bother you because the plot and the mood didn’t work for you.
To me the mood and plot worked and the pauses captured the uncertainties the characters had about who was being truthful and how much to be untruthful to whom they should be. Do you trust that which is for all relationship purposes your mother, or a stranger who looks more like you?[spoiler]Especially since it turns out that both were lying to Daughter and the correct answer was neither.
The emotional bit for daughter of understanding that her Mother is a monster who does not actually care for her, that the fantasy of finding love with some cute boy in the caves is never going to happen, that her only hope for loving relationships now is being the Daughter Mother has intended her to be, taking over as “Mother” to Brothers and Sisters completing the plan as the least poor option open … it worked for me.[/spoiler]
What was going on at the end with the door?
Also I knew something weird was up early into the movie, when it mentioned that 38 years had passed since the extinction event but the daughter was only a teenager. I figured the robot had other kids and killed them off when things didn’t work out, then when the daughter found the jawbone that kind of sealed that deal
Also if the robots were evil sociopaths who tortured babies, how exactly were they trying to remake humanity? In what image? How would machines capable of such evil define a good second chance for humanity?
At the end
I think you are still left with the question about if the Mother sentience has learned to care. Was this daughter really perfect? Doubtful. No one is. The Mother also kept pushing her to remain in contact “If you need me-”, and talked about its ideal that they would raise the next generation together. If the plan was the most important thing, wouldn’t Mother have simply killed Daughter?
I also thought it was interesting that
When Mother visited Woman at the end, it taunted her a bit (why would a sentient AI without emotion do that), and it shut the door. Why would Mother care if the door was open? Of course, it also leaves the question open if Mother is simply doing a “reset” on her, and she will be used to test others.
The door to the trailer or to the facility?
As far as the spoilers … [spoiler]That’s why it was listed as days. Most of us (well me anyway) didn’t bother to do the calculation while paying attention to what was going on, I had thought that she seemed young for that many days but hadn’t realized it was 38 years. Realizing that then would indeed have given that “mothers need practice line” much more ominous foreshadowing value.
We know they killed babies and likely didn’t care if they caused pain in the process. Different than torturing. We also don’t know if that was a show put on for Stranger to see. See below.
The principle that guides the AI is greatest good for the greatest number. Given humanity on a course to destroy itself (with suffering X) as one course; the greatest good for the greatest number (it concluded) was jumping to that destruction more quickly (slightly less than X) in order to created a world in which would be happy and content than had ever been (stated by Mother explicitly).
The door to the trailer was just the way to announce the dozer was there. The door to the facility was halting off the dozers coming in and allowing Daughter to destroy Mother’s body, to take over the role, as intended.[/spoiler]
Identity of Stranger -
[spoiler]Clearly having been a child at the facility herself then placed in the caves to serve her role in Daughter’s testing.
Hinted by Mother’s line about Stranger not remembering her own mother. Proof is that she vaguely remembered seeing Johnny Carson. Should have realized that then![/spoiler]
They were trying to remake humanity with their home grown artisinal babies, not the shitty free range kind.
Um which door?
[spoiler]If you mean the door to the facility that Daughter manually locked from the inside, the beam throwing robot was slicing thru the 4 locked rods to re-open it. It did 3 and was almost done with the 4th. But again Daughter was more being tested than threatened.
If you mean the door to Woman’s container being closed by Mother, then that’s just the way the director decided to go. It makes things more ominous. No plot reason.[/spoiler]
On the “Why?” of Mother and Co. wanting humans back.
Remember the scene where Mother’s hand is damaged and Daughter replaces it? Sure, the damaged hand is later used as a plot device but note that Mother does not do this herself. The robots know in the long term that they will need the dexterity and other skills of humans to do maintenance. So raise them, train them, enslave them. For the Greater Good.
I was more thinking about the door to the facility where the rods were being cut off. I’m guessing that was a test as other people said, but I just found it confusing. If all the robots share one consciousness and the mother could’ve easily overpowered or killed daughter, or unlocked the door herself if she needed to, then I just didn’t see why they’d need to break in.
Sadly, Dseid’s theory that Hillary Swank was also a baby born in the facility is possibly true. That is sad. Maybe she was one of the first. raised as a test.
I noticed many embryos were missing. I wonder if some of them were allowed to escape and joined the caves. But then again, mother tortured Hillary Swank to find out where the caves were. So I don’t think she would’ve been in on that.
13867 days passed since the extinction event, which is about 38 years. That would roughly match up with Hillary Swank’s age.
Personally I think when mother’s hand was malfunctioning and daughter repaired it, that that was a test. Mother was more than able to repair herself I am sure, she was just testing the daughter.
I enjoyed this movie. I noticed something was up with the day count and other hints, so I figured some of it out ahead of time. But not the final answer until near the end with the statement about the corn and air.
The 38 years closely match Hillary Swank’s age so she was most likely the very first, the one we see at the beginning of the movie.
I thought it was strange that they didn’t start a male embryo at the same time as the daughter. And they could procreate the human race. I would think the daughter would have questioned this.
But then, as usual, I didn’t understand the ending.
I think Mother was waiting until she had a proper human protege before starting mass (re)production.
Yeah, the point wasn’t simply to repopulate the earth, they are the ones who killed all the humans in the first place. They wanted to recreate society with humans that were less shitty.
I find it interesting that the events leading up to the start of the movie are usually the kind of thing that the hero(es) manages to prevent. Sort of like if Ultron had won.
Not too dissimilar to Thanos really, especially his intent towards the end of End Game. They both have concluded the greater good is being served by the action.
My wife and I thought it was OK, but not as good as we were hoping. A solid “hey, pretty good” kind of movie for us. Nothing huge, though.
A great Netflix streaming type movie, though. Would be disappointed if I spent extra for it, but I already have Netflix and it was a nice bonus. Better than that ridiculous Bird Box we were all streaming a few months ago.