Automata (2014)

Sometimes, my quest to watch every Antonio Banderas movie leads me to something strange that should have worked but for all intents and purposes didn't. It wants to be Phillip K. Dick but doesn't create the kind of awe that Dick was capable of - an awe for technology making the leap between what is real and what is artificial.

Everything is said in double-speak and half said sentences in Automata. There is much talk of 'protocols' and sentience as man struggles to keep their robots from achieving consciousness - in a dying earth that is down to the last 20 million or so humans. The robots are necessary for human society to function. They just were not created to think for themselves, dream for themselves.

The reveal here is not as fun or as mind blowing as it should have been because of a disjointed story which couldn't figure out which group were the heroes and which needed to be destroyed until very late in the movie. The robots did not made such a good argument when the choice meant human destruction. This is why we have 'protocols' in the first place. No robot can hurt a human or allow him to be harmed in any fashion. That rule is even in Asimov's list of rules for robotics.

Life does end up always finding a way - even with artificial life. Life with all it's suffering and useless sacrifice does have a way of leading one to redemption. Like I said before, this movie is all over the place, which is a shame. There could have been some interesting conversations here if everything wasn't so couched in absolutes and only the most basic questions about life and death. All questions and no answers in a movie that demands answers for all the big ideas it is trying to advance.

I liked the grubby, dystopian nature of it all but the larger narrative was lost to me most of the time. I missed the point if there ever was one. Maybe it's that human babies could have a cool robot dog to protect them if people would stop losing their minds about such things.