REVIEW:
It’s12 Monkeys meets Looper as this movie tells a story about going back in time to stop something before it happens. In this case, that something is the birth of AI. Talk about timely. This movie takes something that is incredibly relevant to today’s times, and spins a story based on it. In today’s current time, 2026, AI (Artificial Intelligence,) is being used to make any 2D item imaginable on a screen. Whether it’s to make a picture a certain way or to create any kind of document, this is just the beginning. The movie imagines this, plus societies growing reliance on devices, being taken to the next level, and imagines there was a way to go back in time and stop it.
I’d like to say that this is like Freaky Tales or any one of about a hundred movies where there are different stories and they all cross over into each other. Only it’s not. Instead, this is about characters who are all in the same story, and then once in a while we flashback and a short story about something that happened recently in each character’s life. In that way, It has the structure of an episode of Lost turned into a full movie.
Most of the stories turn out to be pretty good. There’s the one about the two teachers, couple, teaching at a school where kids are glued to their phones. When one of the teaches touches the phone of. student, out of curiosity, he is shocked to find out this action triggers all the other students. Suddenly all of their phones flash to the same symbol and the students are coming after these teachers like a hoard of zombies.
That story is pretty good and creepy, but the next one is even better. It involves Juno Temple (so good on Fargo, the show,) losing her son in a senseless school shooting, and then learning about a company that can clone her son. She does this, and gets a new copy of her son (almost like a robot,) only to learn that he is not the same, and is actually very weird. Like in the way that once a day he’ll break out into an advertisement commercial about something. This is the best story in the movie, and play out like an episode of Black Mitror, with a “be careful what you wish for,” theme.
Sam Rockwell is the lead of the movie, and he’s the guy who rounds all these others up. His opening scene, storming into a diner, looking for recruits, is fantastic. Rockwell is one of the best working actors today, and he tends to pick really interesting and entertaining movies. This one is no exception.
The movie is basically good for three fourths of the way through. it’s good until it suddenly isn’t anymore. That comes with the climax, involving a a child who sits on a mound of pillows or some such material, typing away with commands and code. It is the mission of the team to destroy this child. It’s just a little too convoluted and usual for a movie that had been anything but usual up until that point.