2022, Steven Soderbergh (Haywire) -- download
Sitting in an airport, killing the 3+ hours before my connecting flight. Might as well watch some of the movies I brought with me, on USB, to watch in NS while on vacation, because I knew there would be down-times when I was not able to amuse myself with the dearth of anything to do in rural / semi-rural NS. While I was there for a family reunion, there could be only so many times of chatting with cousins upon cousins upon cousins while sitting around campfires on my ninth beer. Sometimes I just had to escape back into technology. Too many people drain me quickly.
Plot wise, its a very straight forward crime thriller, but isn't that what story telling is all about? If you can tell a familiar story from a new angle with just enough creativity, it all feels new? Kimi is the movie's Alexa analog, from an emerging company just about to go public. It flaunts its difference as using humans to supplement its AI interpolation of requests -- if Kimi doesn't understand something, its shunted to a human operator to research and correct. Angela (Zoë Kravitz, High Fidelity) is one such operator, an obviously VERY wealthy (can't be the operator salary, but her apartment is one of those astoundingly opulent Hollywood industrial lofts) young woman stricken with agoraphobia and anxiety, stuck inside her place after an assault and the pandemic. Stuck inside, and in her routines (one such thing that stuck with me, is how she waves her hands after putting on hand sanitizer, a sort of vertical flightless bird action), it is all interrupted when she overhears an assault happening via a Kimi recording, and has to weigh her social responsibility vs her fears. It doesn't help that the company wants to cover it up, cuz that's what Big Evil Corps do when they are about to be sold for billions.
I really enjoyed this movie. Elements of this movie still stick with me, such as the aforementioned detailed of her hand waving, but also little, creative character elements, such as the rather nerdy looking hit men or the eastern European hacker/sysadmin. Sure, these are stock & trade characters, but Soderbergh does something... extra with them. I honestly think that is the sign of a damn fine director, and I have never really pondered whether I liked Soderbergh enough to think a whole lot about his style, but that he can turn something pedestrian into something that just smacks of style and substance. That said, it could come from my lack of watching things with substance that would make me say this, when people steeped in being That Guy might just think Soderbergh was wasted on this.
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