2026, Gore Verbinski (The Lone Ranger) -- download
Anyhoo, this movie fits perfectly into the square peg-hole, of this genre, in my brain. At it's core, its a time-travel movie, hinting at loops, and its a Fear of AI movie. Its more than a little weird and even more so difficult to qualify. But I will take a stab at it, as I have my ideas. And if Everything Everywhere All at Once wants to join this one as the beginning of their own sub-sub-genre, I will happily watch them all.
OK, we are in one of those diners from movies set in Los Angeles, probably an all-nighter, has been around since the 50s or 60s and serves comfort food, called Norms. Then a trash-bag cyberpunk dude (Sam Rockwell, Moon) appears out of nowhere screaming about the future and the end of the world and a mission he is on, this being his 117th attempt. This is Sam Rockwell being peak Sam Rockwell, screaming and ranting and dancing about maniacally. Basically, the future has gone to shit, and he can find the right combination of volunteers, from this group of diners, they can change the future. Somehow. He never really explains how, he just starts yelling at people. This person sucks, that person has been useless, he's not sure about that one, but he needs volunteers to take another stab at saving the future.
Susan (Juno Temple, The Brass Teapot) volunteers. Susan, who we learn from a very very weird (even weirder than Sam Rockwell) flashback, has just lost her son in a school shooting. One where a company offers to clone her son, as a replacement. And other parents at that school have had the procedure done before. That means school shootings are that commonplace (at THAT school, even) that there is a process. We'll ignore the heavy-handed commentary for now, as we are just supposed to accept the weird shit on the screen.
Speaking of weird shit, the next flashback involves Mark (Michael Peña, Ant-Man) and Janet (Zazie Beets, Deadpool 2), school teachers who had to flee a zombie mob of students after Mark touched a student's phone. There was a weird hypnotic symbol on the screen and touching it activated the students. On the way out, they snag some plastic rayguns that can temporarily zap the students. And then they came to Norms.
And then Sam Rockwell reluctantly invites Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson, Ponies) into the compact, whom he has before dismissed because of the grimy princess dress and haggard look. This is when he explains the mission -- kind of. There is a kid inventing an AI in his bedroom, in a nearby neighbourhood. With a hand-drawn annotated map of the local area, he explains that getting from Norms to the kid's house will be quite a challenge. The closest he has ever achieved prior is next door. Then all the shit hits the fan and he has to reset for another attempt. He never really goes into what actually happens but you can understand why -- he has been through all this multiple times and needs to condense his actions. If this was a loopty loo movie, this would be the mid-point where the main character over-explains what is going to an NPC.
The journey from A to B, and the hand-drawn map now that you (I) mention it, is very very video game coded. The path is on rails, as Sam Rockwell knows from previous iterations which paths are safe and which paths are likely to get them gunned down by cops. To illustrate, he sacrifices one of the nonchalantly. But they make it.
I am not going into all the weird shit, recap style, that they run into, but it gets weirder and weirder, escaping further and further from reality, until they arrive at the kid's house. He has fake parents and "lives" in a giant room at the end of a tunnel, on a hill of network cables, pecking at keyboard while staring into a screen/wall of techno-mumbo-jumbo centre on the symbol that Mark and Janet saw on the kid's phones. Oh, and Susan identifies the kid as a clone, just like her son. Confluence!! Sam Rockwell's mission is to plug a USB key into a keyboard port and stop the kid from completing the sentient AI that destroys the future. Except, it doesn't go as planned.
Until it does. Like all good adventure video games, the boss battle has to be dramatic and overwrought. Together Susan and Sam Rockwell stop the AI, save the day and in the bright sun of the next morning, everything is... perfect. They even got a pug.
And if you didn't consider the above spoilery, all the speculation upcoming definitely is.
Except that's not the end. The movie kicks off attempt 118 as the pug showing signifies that things are not fixed. But how does it? The idea is that AI is alive & well and is giving the main characters what they want, except ... how? The only way for the AI to be effecting change upon reality is if... this is all a simulation. Nothing is real. There aren't time loops, there are just iterations of a simulation, pretty much a video game, that Sam Rockwell's character, and probably a handful of others, are going through. You die, hit reload and start over again. The fact that Sam Rockwell cautions the other characters to not think too hard on random things as that's the path to Weird Shit Happening, and then they end up fighting a kaiju kitty cat that actually eats some of them is more than just Weird Shit Happening for no reason. But the movie leaves it there, leaving you to fill in your own blanks. You can just accept the ending as Weird Shit Happening and enjoy the carnival ride you were just on, or you can do what I always do -- build out the story in my head.
So, in the future little Sam Rockwell escapes from his mother's bunker and finds a VR goggle with the AI's symbol. The rest of society has collapsed and the world has pretty much ended with people having given up their IRL world for the "perfect" world of the AI. Except who maintains the power grid? Who feeds all these goggled humans? Does the AI care? What is the purpose of having the IRL world fall apart, all its people to slowly die off? Anywayz, no matter, Little Sam Rockwell is about to put on the goggles and escape when a drone appears and blows up his mother's bunker, her inside. THAT is the impetus for Sam Rockwell to grow to adulthood, find other "survivors" and put together a time machine, so he can go back and stop this from all happening.
Except, he didn't. He put on the goggles and all of this is just the latest iteration of the world that Sam Rockwell wants -- where he is a hero trying to save the world. A bit inception but, its there for us to ponder on. It doesn't fully explain how his mother / Ingrid (oh yeah, I didn't mention that, did I?) is part of all this. Are they all in this simulation, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game? I think so, I think the AI has utterly destroyed the world, has no plan but to have fun with the remaining humans until it is all alone with its automated power grid and... itself.
The idea of this movie is a lot of fun. The execution is almost all the way there. I think of how beat-perfect Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is, with its own Weird Shit Happening, providing us the perfect rendition of a carnival ride come to life. This movie wanted to be the latest EEAaO but it only partially succeeds there. There is no real tangible heart to this movie, even if you buy into the Ingrid + Sam Rockwell relationship. The visuals are fun, the situations are fun but ... well, its not as perfect as I wanted it to be. Maybe it needed a few more iterations before release.
Kent's view -- we agree but I think I liked it a bit more than he did.
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