Maria Schrader
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Maria Schrader (director of Netflix’s Unorthodox ) has drawn a touching romance from this science-fiction scenario, dotted with disarmingly dreamy moments and a line of philosophical inquiry that recalls Spike Jonze’s Her .
The concept of human-robot love has provided fertile ground for sci-fi storytelling, from Data in “Star Trek” to the disembodied voice of “Her” all the way through “Ex Machina” and “Wandavision,” because it presents an obvious paradox: No amount of engineering genius, it seems, can design the perfect mate.
Whether that’s Deckard falling for replicant Rachel in Ridley Scott’s iconic dystopian Blade Runner , John Connor’s endearing relationship with the Terminator or Theodore’s unconventional relationship with Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her .
From recent indie hits like Spike Jonze’s Her and Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina , to a history of more fantastical narratives like John Hughes’ Weird Science , films about AI always seem to posit a relationship between user and machine – the machine almost always designed to have female characteristics, to be viewed as a quite literal romantic object.
It’s nearly impossible to not think of Spike Jonze’s romantic drama Her while watching Unorthodox creator Maria Schrader’s third feature I’m Your Man .
The concept of human-robot love has provided fertile ground for sci-fi storytelling, from Data in “Star Trek” to the disembodied voice of “Her” all the way through “Ex Machina” and “Wandavision,” because it presents an obvious paradox: No amount of engineering genius, it seems, can design the perfect mate.
Such a concept has been a plot device in Hollywood for decades already, with human-like robots who can act and think like us being the subject of drama in everything from Star Trek: The Next Generation and AI: Artificial Intelligence to Alien, Blade Runner , Westworld and Ex Machina , just to name a few.
The appealingly peculiar result lands somewhere between “Ex Machina” and “Toni Erdmann” on the tonal spectrum, if you can imagine such a hybrid — yet also riffs playfully on a wealth of hoary romantic comedy tropes, including the uptight career woman with no room for a love life, and the strictly-for-practical-reasons fake relationship that blooms into something complicated.
A mix of The Stepford Wives , Ex Machina and traditional rom-coms might not sound too promising, but this is a sweet, funny, clever film.
The human-robot romance has served some interesting turnover in films like “Her” and “Ex Machina.”
Shades of everything from Blade Runner to Her to Ex Machina color the proceedings, albeit with a welcome female perspective both in front of and behind the camera that provides the material a much-needed charge.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced I'm Your Man (2021)
Characters
Character-wise, Tom brings to mind Steven Spielberg’s A.I. , in that he is essentially a combination of that film’s two lead machines: Gigolo Joe, made primarily for pleasure and desire, and David, a robot innocent assigned to love a specific person, and subsequently undergoing an existential crisis.
Humans falling in love with hard drives isn’t exactly new, from the shaggy hipster melancholy of Her (2013) to the insidious misogynistic desires of The Stepford Wives (1975) we’ve seen plenty interpretations of how men fantasize about a relationship with mechanical facades.
It feels we’ve seen this before, and we have, most recently in Spike Jonze’s Her , in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his digital personal assistant, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and in Blade Runner 2049 , where Ryan Gosling (who’s also a replicant, ironically), falls for a hologram in the form of Ana de Armas.