Afraid

 

AIA Eye

AfrAId
UK/USA 2024
Directed by Chris Weitz
Columbia/Blumhouse

Warning: Yep, some AI spoilers in here for sure.

Don’t get me started on AI. I think it’s soulless and somewhat evil and is going to be destroying as many lives as it could potentially help. I am annoyed that certain laws have not been made around the use and development of AI but, what can you do? It looks like Hollywood is also jumping on the bandwagon and using movies (at the moment) to look into this and try and hold a mirror up to society to see if anyone’s looking (while another part of Hollywood are already embracing this artificial treachery in the most disgusting manner... this needs to be stopped). And this new film, AfrAId is just one in a long legacy of movies to look at the idea of AI being a bad back alley to walk down. From films like 2001 - A Space Odyssey (which is referenced a number of times here, sometimes rather blatantly and clumsily and, sometimes not... such as a young character being named Calvin, or Cal for short... I guess we were lucky he wasn’t called Halvin, then), Westworld, Demon Seed through to more modern movies concerning themselves with the same thing, such as M3GAN (reviewed here) and Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning (reviewed here).

This new one, AfrAId was something I wanted to see, not because it was looking like it was doing anything much different to the history of AI gone wrong on screen before but mainly because it features two actors I like a lot, though I’ve not seen them in a great deal, playing the parts of the mother, Meredith and father, Curtis who make up a family unit with their teenage daughter and two younger sons. Namely Katherine Waterston and John Cho.

The plot is simple... after a set up which deliberately gets your back up, as a family decides to turn their AI helper off and are then punished for it by the very AI they are trying to shut down (and when I say punished, I mean they’re probably killed), the film follows Curtis as he has to make a new pitch for his boss to potential clients (played by Keith Carradine) in his advertising company, to market this new AI helper which is like Alexa dialled up to 11 in terms of intelligence and what seems to be self cognisance. Three representatives show up, including one played by David Dastmalchian (so you just know something bad is bound to happen) and Curtis gets the deal, as the company gets paid an obscene amount of money. But in order to figure out what he’s selling, he’s compelled (well forced really) to take the new AI system, called AIA, into his family home. And of course, at first it seems to be making the lives of the family members better even though, right off the bat, it’s doing some pretty scary things with the kids. And then, of course, things get out of control... but I don’t want to say how because there are some nice ideas within the film. So in terms of the story itself I’ll leave that there.

Now, I mentioned M3GAN earlier and, in some ways the film is a little like the last quarter of an hour of that but with a little extra going on, added into the mix. And, here’s the thing... the film is both smart and clumsy all at the same time. Which makes for a tonally uneven piece of art. 

For example, I can understand the film makers must have wanted to draw people in by giving them a scare sequence at the start of the film before going into the story proper. But, that in itself seems a little redundant considering the next ten minutes or so show the benefits of the digital world, where AIA harkens from, being slowly eroded as the film tries to make the point that technology is a pervasive and not altogether benign presence in our lives. And that would be my big criticism of the film in general... every time something subtle or clever happens, there’s usually something else coming up just before or after that’s way dumber than you might expect. It’s almost like a committee of film studio executives looked at a more palatable cut at some point and started sending notes on what they thought the lowest common denominator audiences would be better off being spoon fed with. So that’s somewhat annoying, it has to be said.

But, to counter that, the film is well acted and the concept is pushed a little further than you might expect... which is to its advantage. Granted, there are no real surprises on this one but... and this is where the spoiler comes in folks... it does have a surprisingly downbeat ending to it. And I don’t mean some little coda or something small that comes in post-credits (there are none here), I’m talking about the resolution to the story, such as it is, before the credits role. This is not exactly a feel good movie people... which is something the sci-fi thriller can get away with more bluntly than movies in other genres, for sure.

Okay, I think I’ve said all I wanted to on AfrAId... it was an entertaining slice of sci-fi/thriller cum horror and, while it sometimes feels like a retread of the aforementioned M3GAN, it certainly does do it’s own thing at crucial points and I had a really good time with it. One to watch, I think... although the threat to us all from AI is never going to be quite the same as depicted in this feature (but it will be worse and possibly quite soon), that’s for sure. Worth checking out though.

Searching

Screen Of The Crime

Searching
2018 USA Directed by Aneesh Chaganty
UK cinema release print. Pre-release preview.

Okay, so Searching is a really interesting movie with a fairly fresh (or should that be refresh) take on the old police procedural style movies where a family member helps the cops to solve a crime. And it’s really great because it gives us a fairly new kind of cinematic experience ... it’s a little like the format of Unfriended (reviewed by me here) but with a much more ‘filmish’ bent to the way in which it is shot... I’ll explain that statement in a minute but this is definitely a much more sophisticated beast than the low budget horror movie mentioned above.

The plot, as you'll know if you’ve seen the trailer, is about David Kim (played by the new Mr. Sulu himself, John Cho), a father whose teenage daughter Margot (played here by Michelle La) goes missing. As events unfold, he realises that what she has been telling him about her life for the last six months and the actual reality of that are two different things. As little revelations occur, he uses various computers and online web sites to help Detective Rosemary Vick (played by Debra Messing) in her search for his girl. And that’s the basic set up and that’s mostly about all I’m going to reveal to you about the plot, such as it is.

The film starts off with a montage of David going through files on his computer... and all you see is the computer screen as he goes through various images, messages and videos and, for the next five or ten minutes, we see Margot born and how she grows up over the years. We learn about how important David’s wife, Pamela Kim (played by Sara Sohn) is to everybody and we watch her beat cancer only for it to come back and claim her life. All this set up is great, beautifully conveyed (and emotionally scored... there’s a lot of piano here too, to reflect the fact that Margot is learning the piano throughout her life) and if the sequence had just finished after that opening, I would still be heaping praise on this movie even if it turned out to be a clunker but, as it happens, the film is quite special. Here’s why...

I don’t know how I didn’t pick up on this when I saw the trailer but, the screens don’t stop when this sequence is done. The whole of the movie is told through what people, mostly David, are seeing and doing on their computer screen. You see David a lot because he’s often on Face Time or on Skype and, as you may or may not know, the camera on the computer often leaves a live feed of you and what you’re doing when nobody is on the other end of those kinds of software applications. So quite often we can see Dave in one of the windows as he fiddles with various things on screen and this gives the audience the desired stimulus to empathise completely with his character.

But this movie is way better than that... it’s not just blandly looking at a static image of one screen or another. The director takes this footage and, just as he would with first hand footage, he will zoom or pan into certain bits of the screen and edit out what’s not required to highlight and de-emphasise desired story elements. It even, as I mentioned before, has a score playing through the film... a quite effective one by Torin Borrowdale, to add tension and drama as certain revelations happen on screen.

The director also effectively uses little rest points to signal, almost subconsciously, the end of certain sequences and the beginning of others... such as using a giant shot of a blank flashing cursor quite memorably in a couple of places to usher in the next stage of the movie. There’s a lovely sequence where something fairly familiar to PC users suddenly becomes a surreal moment due to the unfamiliarity of seeing it so big on screen and with an underscore... not going to say what it is but the way it suddenly brings rest to the film’s pacing is quite brilliant.

I also enjoyed that at, one point, the film footage switches from David’s IBM compatible PC Windows machine to his daughter’s machine, which is a proper Apple Mac, because the blocky and slightly blurry picture resolution seemed to sharpen up a little while the Apple computer was telling the relevant portions of the story. As an Apple user both at work and home for over two decades, this really worked for me.

Now, I have to say that, if this was a movie shot in a standard manner, then I would have seen the ending of this film coming way before the finish. As it was though, because of the format that has been chosen to express this, my initial lead suspect (and perpetrator in this piece) was soon pushed out of my mind as I didn’t think the writers and director would even begin trying to attempt a twist of that magnitude in this kind of style. I really didn’t expect them to be running before they’d even proven they could walk but... oh yeah... they totally go where I suspected they wouldn’t for the end game of the movie and, bearing in mind the limits of the format, they really don’t cheat, much, in the way they achieve the general unfolding of the story. In fact, there’s a brilliant scene where David has set up multiple screens recorded on his computer (not being monitored by him at that time because he has to be in the footage) and, not known to him but clear to the audience, a major break in the investigation appears to be coming in from the detective but he’s not around to answer any of her calls.

Also... and again this may be due to the nature of the format... I was completely taken in by a scene where a character is suspected of ‘doing the deed’ and then it turns out to be a red herring. Was totally invested in the film being over soon after but then... things carry on and there’s a beautiful plot revelation at the eleventh hour which I won’t elaborate on here but, in keeping with the various apps and websites used throughout the movie to track and progress the investigation, it all involves around a stock photography site. Considering my own profession as a graphic designer, I especially liked this element.

So... yeah... Searching is an old school missing person yarn with a very modern setting (computer screens) but which is expressed through that modern setting by a very traditional film-making skill set, such as the use of pans, zooms, tracking shots, time edits, establishing shots of sorts (rendered as website landing pages, etc) and an accompanying musical score which is again, composed and performed fairly traditionally to capture the emotions and tension of the story. It’s all very well done and, though I hate to think it’s going to be that influential in terms of having to sit through a hundred gazillion copycat movies of this one anytime soon, I really think that lovers of cinema and the thriller genre in particular, should go and see this one. Searching hits UK cinemas at the end of August 2018 (and US cinemas next week) and is well worth a visit. My one piece of advice would be, due to the resolution of this kind of format on a big screen, that you don’t sit too near the front... get some distance on it. Definitely go and take a look at this one, though.