If you love the idea of AI and how it continually loom as a near and present danger to humanity then you might like I Am Mother. Not only is this movie uniquely terrifying in that it features AI as the dominant force in the world, but it does so in a way that’s seen as non-threatening for much of the movie only to escalate in violence when humanity, or a representation of it, decides to come crashing into the structured, ordered world that has been created following an unknown extinction-level event. Adi Robertson of The Verge is on board with thinking that this is a rather smart movie that, despite having a few quirks that might not be needed, is something that implies that the future of humanity seems rather bleak in more ways than one.
The story is pretty simple really, humanity has been all but eradicated and the secure facility in which the chief android, known by the young girl that comes to be born in the facility, raises her to be the first among a new civilization. She’s taught vital skills on how to survive, act, think, feel, and is given what looks like a rather well-adjusted childhood. But she’s not given the entirety of the facts. Instead she’s kept sequestered within the shelter, which is quite large in size as it serves multiple purposes, because she’s been told that the outer world is contaminated and will kill her if she wanders outside. In essence there is nothing alive outside the shelter, and only Mother and Daughter are thought to be the the remainder of what is left in the world.
When a survivor, an unknown woman, suddenly comes knocking at their door however Daughter lets her in and becomes curious about her. The woman is anything but friendly and is quite hostile to Mother, mistrusting her even as she tries to relay to Daughter that the android isn’t telling her everything. Things get a bit jumbled during the story but at one point the woman and Daughter seek to escape since Daughter has come to question Mother’s intentions and her stories, since the lie that anyone existed outside of their shelter was one of the most jarring moments of her life. As Daughter makes her way into the wider world with the woman however she sees the devastation that has gripped the world surrounding her home in a way that leaves her breathless and unable to do much more than gape at everything her eyes settle upon.
Eventually Daughter does make her way back to Mother and their shared shelter, at which point Mother has welcomed another child into the world, a boy that Daughter had selected from the stores of human embryos that Mother is tasked with keeping in cold storage until it is time to revitalize the human race. Taking the child, her ‘brother’, Daughter then pleads with Mother to let her use the skills she’s learned to usher in a new generation of human beings, without interference. Mother insists that she knows what it takes, that only she is capable of doing this, but after accepting that Daughter can in fact take over allows Daughter to end her with a single shotgun blast, thereby severing their connection to one another.
I would gladly agree with Richard Trenholm from CNET that there is something inherently sinister about Mother despite the fact that the AI is mostly benevolent and seems to want to do no harm to anyone. From the design to the continually calm and controlled nature of the android however there is something that’s just off, as though the character is simply measuring Daughter at every woman and sees the woman, played by Hilary Swank, as either a minor irritant or a true danger depending on the situation. In many ways I Am Mother is another movie set to explore and detail why AI is a rather poor idea by humanity. Think of it this way, we want machines that can make life easier and do everything for us, but we don’t want them to be able to act as psychotic as humans can be, which means stripping them of free will. But then people make a stink about this or an anomaly comes around and we have to pay attention to this because it’s something special. Then we have to finally sigh in frustration since programming an AI with human traits is the epitome of stupidity since not only can machines outperform a human in so many ways, they tend to come to the conclusion that humanity on its own is the biggest threat.
The real reason to see this movie is that it’s entertaining and does indicate that once we’re gone all that’s going to be left is what we’ve created and the purpose that they were given before their creators simply vanished. That’s kind of a sad commentary really.
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