Mazur (Melody, Mel -- visiting faculty) and I thought we might have the Bagdad to ourselves, not a comment on the popularity of the movie, but on the feasibility of making a multi-hour commitment starting at 3:15 in the middle of the day. We could, and some others joined us.
I'm not dissing the film, but rather showing off my budding film savvy, in saying this was viewable as a mashup of other famous flicks in the same genre. That's not really saying anything as what makes science fiction a genre in the first place is its a namespace of shared tropes (motifs, plot elements), often drawing heavily from military experience. This film is about a geopolitical scenario, one I found pretty fun and original.
The collective west was at first in love with the AI layer, a source of compliant labor, to the level of trusted caretaker, only to see itself betrayed, with AI turning on humanity and proving itself soulless, to be dealt with accordingly. The west sees AI machines as literally that: machines. However, New Asia has taken a different track and still sees AGI robots as sentient, to the point of being equals. Asians are still blending with AI whereas the Americans are in an existential war to the death with AI.
As viewers, we're challenged to figure out where we come down. We're in the same space as the movie Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg, taking over for Stanley Kubrick. That's the first movie I'd finger as an influence (the circus scene especially), but then also Ex Machina and all the films arguing for AGI achieving humanity, in the sense of sentience and self awareness. WestWorld. Usually it's "the West" that's head over heels for its electronic monsters, wanting to bestow the breath of life into them. In this movie, the West is disillusioned. AI says it wasn't responsible for nuking LA (spoiler alert but you find out how the Americans see it in the opening credits, so not much of one).
Another trope (Melody picked up on this one): the sacred messiah child, perhaps with (or definitely with) superpowers. We get the demon child on the flip side, which is how the Americans would see her (the hybrid).
Most of what struck me were the atmospherics, as the two table top scifi books I've been gazing at the most (pictured above), emanate precisely this aura of fluorescent lit giant cities in the fog, technology blended with nature, at the same scales.
The flavor of Avatar and Avatar 2 was likewise present, both in the atmospherics and in casting Americans as the insensitives, the invasive monoculture, coming to seem more bot-like in contrast to our protagonist, at one time undercover against AI, but becoming instead a bridge figure (another trope).
Tellingly, it took me, a viewer, a little time to determine what side this NOMAD might be on. Was that an AI asset or "one of ours"? The movie answers this question, but I felt drawn in by a sense of ambiguity. Who was fighting whom and why? That tends to gel, not be readily apparent at first glance, even in real life.
Science fiction is known for its open-minded acceptance of permutations. Lesser minds will decry this film in anti-American and yet it is quintessentially American in its continuity with the morphing culture, part Asian from the get go.
What "American" means is a function of context, which some will call "climate". Getting locked into just one way of thinking (imprisonment within the dream) is a way of losing one's freedoms.
Sometimes we need to snap out of it (whatever the dream) and films such as this one, already conversant with the collective unconscious, may prove catalyzing in that regard. I gratefully accept it into the canon and recommend seeing it.
