This is the new age of artificial intelligence, with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard providing therapy, directions, hallucinated legal documents and all sort of worry among governments and even A.I.’s own creators, including Elon Musk.
So this Memorial Day weekend, the first with Large Language Model A.I. available to the masses, it’s a good time to revisit an A.I. movie that got the impending creepiness right. (A.I. is on theme for this particular holiday, too — the technology is nowhere more dominant than in the military, with its self-guided missiles, data warfare, and drone attacks.)
The Netflix sci-fi thriller movie I Am Mother is directed and written by men (Grant Sputore and Michael Lloyd Green) but it’s an all-female cast. The plot: “In the wake of humanity’s extinction, a teenage girl (Clara Rugaard) is raised by a robot who is designed to repopulate the earth.”
As seen in the creepy trailer below, the robot (voiced by Rose Byrne, Bridesmaids, X-Men, Peter Rabbit) raises the girl in a spacecraft in total isolation. The robot calls the girl ‘Daughter’ and the girl has been trained to call the robot ‘Mother.’
The mother/daughter bond is tested when their spacecraft is invaded by another female human (two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank) who disabuses the daughter of the false information her ‘Mother’ fed her about the outside world.
The maternal human instincts flexed in space will remind movie buffs of Sigourney Weaver in Alien, and Byrne’s calm robotic voice will trigger memories of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s cult classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Not bad Memorial Day choices there either.)
Fans have been wanting a sequel and a prequel of I Am Mother. As one replied: “I want to see how the machines and AI caused the extinction of humans.”
I Am Mother is available on Netflix.
