Like Blade Runner, Automata is oppressively grim. What it does more of than Blade Runner though is to give its characters visible lives: families, desires, things worth fighting for. Though it does not allow them any facial expressions beyond the hard grimace and the slightly less-hard grimace.
The movie takes place on a future Earth where the human population is relegated to a couple of cities and is on the brink of collapse. Sometime in the recent past robots were invented to build the technology people thought would save them from annihilation. They failed however and now work to keep the cracks in the edifice of life-sustaining technologies from spreading.
The robots operate with two integral directives: allow no harm to a living creature and no robot can self-repair. This second one prevents robots from evolving and surpassing humans. The robots in this movie are thoroughly mechanical. They are made of exposed wires and rods, jointed gears and blinking lights. With the exception of the central robot character, presented as the link between the human investigating aberrant behavior among robots and the self-aware robot referred to as “The Clock Maker.”
This one is given a woman’s face and is in fact working as a pleasure robot when we meet it. Another instance of femininity being the easy and immediate touchstone for the “threatening other.” Automota does a good job of building a world where technology has moved both forward and backward because of environmental and cultural catastrophe. It builds credible environments of grimy looking tech in an advanced future context.
Where it falters is in its devotion to the most thunderously obvious of action clichés:
-sweeping camera views of grimfaced gun-wielding dudes who unironically deliver clever tough-guy lines before opening fire,
-a character sitting in the middle of the desert covered by a cloak as though hiding a great revelation before standing and letting the cloak blow away revealing something completely predictable.
For every interesting idea, like the conclave of liberated robots inventing their ideal prototype of a future A.I. and coming up with something that looks part turtle and part cockroach (why would it look human after all? Humans are going extinct. It’s a unique perspective on A.I. that the next step in evolution would not resemble a primate) there are five groaningly clumsy action sequences that could have fallen loose from any fourth-rate action film and that have nothing to do with the motivations of this story.
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