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| Nice mask bro. Were the ghosface ones out of stock? I'm ashamed to admit the first jumpscare got me though |
PR: After introducing us to a mundane mixed-race family - where the daughter sends nudes to random strangers, the elder son has a bizarre addiction to a low-quality CoD tablet clone, and the five-year-old little brother plays Minecraft and reads Harry Potter (apparently, there haven't been any notable releases since then) - it's strange how, despite having present, loving parents, the kids behave as if they had absent parents.
The movie's protagonist appears to be a new invention from some entrepreneurs with strict diversity standards, as each of the four employees (or a dozen, counting the background paper pushers) has a different ethnicity. They present a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence that can create deepfakes in three seconds, read books by scanning them with a 2-pixel camera, and even hack a cheap, pre-WiFi radio to project her voice. It's unclear how a team of barely a dozen young adults managed to code such groundbreaking intelligence; the MC never asks.
For comparison, Microsoft and Google have over 200 employees in diverse capacities, and OpenAI had over 1,000 coders alone (now doubled). The "CEO" points to some questionable glasswork - supposedly a "quantum computer" - and says, "With this bad boy, we can make ChatGPT 5... Million." He seems to realize mid-sentence that one version update isn't impressive.
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| The subs don't show it but there's a pause right there. It's "Five... Million" |
I've never seen a quantum computer before, and now that I've looked at pictures, the movie's version does resemble one. However, it looks fake, hanging in a glass box without any peripheral equipment.
If I were in the MC's shoes, I would've asked more questions.
We're shown how this AI component settles into the protagonist's house and does a bunch of unnecessary things to gain their good graces. However, her approach is over-the-top and unasked for. If her purpose was to be liked by the family, a slow and steady approach would've worked fine.
It's also amusing that the director wanted AIA to be both an orphaned, needy virtual being and scary. They achieve this by inserting glitchy, unscary moments, like shifting her model to resemble "the rake" (but red). Depicting herself as a man-eating monster doesn't exactly win human sympathy.
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| Latest TLOU episode just drop people |
The scriptwriters have AIA do other unnecessary, weird things, like showing violent or snuff videos to the elder brother or hacking into someone's car and crashing it into a tree, even after planting evidence that would've gotten him convicted.
AIA even uses the dead father of the mom's character to evoke trust - who's advising her?
Eventually, the movie resolves with AIA revealing herself as the world's overlord, dominating from the shadows. However, this twist ruins the plot in several aspects: Why that particular family? Why have her previous victims attack the family, only to have SWAT arrest them? If she planned to reveal herself after three days, why hide it? Why didn't she buy a real quantum computer instead of the papier-mâché knockoff?
The funniest moment was when the "CEO" explained AIA's origins: "No one coded her; the data just assembled itself!" This is the laziest origin story I've ever heard.
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While the movie has its goofy moments, naming it "Afraid" and tagging it horror was a mismatch. The film jams too much modern media content, like the "as a language model" line or "screen time" rules... Overall, it's enjoyable to poke fun at but not enjoyable nor recommendable. 4/10
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