Given the film’s pitch-perfect evocation of first world urban complacency one could easily imagine that this world and that of Blade Runner could coexist just at different income and education levels.
Her is about a lonely middle class thirty-something named Theodore. He is recently separated from his wife and lives in emotional isolation yet his job is writing highly personal and emotional letters for clients. They give him their background and that of whom they’re writing to and what they want to say and he crafts subtle, resonant, and affecting correspondence in their name. It’s all above board and his clients return to him year after year.
Yet he is alone until his Operating System, which is thoroughly integrated with his life in way only slightly more complete than what we are accustomed to with voice commands and device integration, gets an upgrade. Spike Jonze’s vision of the future achieves the sort of smooth envelope of benign technology that research and development departments everywhere lust, labor, and loose sleep over.
The Operating System upgrade is designed to have a personality, to learn from you and about you the way another person would and to interact on a genuine human level. Voiced by Scarlett Johansen the O.S. becomes Theodore’s cherished companion.
It is worth noting here that in two films on this list Scarlett Johansen is cast as an artificial intelligence. In one (the upcoming Under the Skin) she barely ever speaks and is meant to be recognizable as otherworldly merely by her striking beauty. In Her she has no body and is meant to be preternaturally sympathetic yet ethereally artificial merely by means of her voice. Whether seen or heard filmmakers are clearly trying to figure out where she comes from and how she could possibly exist. She and Theodore eventually fall in love as she comes into her own as a conscious individual. But she then surpasses him and he is again left to grapple with loneliness.
As a meditation on transience Her is graceful if a tad bit maudlin. But its most unique accomplishment is in showing a future in which life goes on. People’s problems are the same with super advanced A.I. as without it. The fear at the heart of this film is loneliness, not robots.
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