Friday 19 January 2018

Singularity (2017)



Humans invent an AI to solve the world's problems.  As is typical for SF media, the AI determines that humans are the problem, and initiates a global cleansing to solve it.

97 years later, humanity is almost wiped out.  There are only a few scattered enclaves and wandering bands left, but among those hope continues through the legend of Aurora: a city somewhere in the north, that the machine army cannot find.

The story from here revolves around Calia, a hard-bitten female survivor who will become disappointingly less and less effective as the film progresses, and a robotic infiltrator named Andrew, whose task - unknown to him - is to find Aurora.  I'm not spoiling anything by revealing Andrew's true nature, because the film tells us what he is in his very first scene.

If you're guessing that the unknowing robot bad guy is going to fall in love with the human woman and turn against his machine masters, then you're probably as familiar with SF genre tropes as I am.

So there are a trio of big problems with this film.  The first is that it doesn't trust the on-screen events to organically tell the story, instead overdosing us with narration and exposition-heavy dialogue.  The second is that, while it does have an explanation for how it is that the machines can't find Aurora, that explanation is extremely implausible in the context of the film's established setting.  Finally, there's the fact that the ending of the film is clearly more about setting up a potential sequel (or maybe a TV series - it feels a bit like a double-length pilot episode) than it is about actually having a satisfying conclusion to this film.

A recommendation to film-makers: focus on creating a good movie first, not on establishing a possible franchise.  If your film is good, people will ask you for the franchise.

Singularity fails to be at all singular in any way, really.  If you must watch a humans vs machine infiltrators film, and for some reason you're burned out on The Terminator, then can I suggest Cyborg Conquest / Chrome Angels?  It's also not very good, but at least it's fun.

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