In a post-apocalyptic 1990s, Michelle is wilting under the neglectful care of her foster father while brooding over the death of her family, including her genius younger brother. It almost seems like magic when a robotic representation of her brother's favorite cartoon character shows up at her door claiming to be an avatar for her long-lost brother. Her adventure to find him will take her deep into the quarantine zone for the defeated robots and see her teaming up with an ex-soldier and a slew of discarded machines. What starts as a journey to bring her family back ends up taking her to the heart of the conflict that tore her world apart to begin with.
This is a very busy movie, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons. This just a movie that wants to impart a lot. There is, for example, heavy discussion on using robots as a stand-in for historically marginalized groups. I'll have to leave that metaphor for someone else to unpack.
What stood out to most to this reviewer was how many moments you feel like this movie easily could have been an animated flick, even though the choice to drag all that cartoonery into live-action feels deliberate. Most other outings, I'd be quick to blame it all on the animation stigma, but the connection doesn't feel incidental here.
It should be noted that the movie more or less tells us that these robots basically broke out of Disneyland. (This film literally becomes an AU fanfic of Walt Disney.) This is supposed to account for their Saturday Morning design of the machines and also springboard the film's discussion on nostalgia in the wake of war and devastation. Hence, our central robot is literally a cartoon character--a vestige of childhood willed into 3-dimensions during a time of distress in the life of our protagonist.
This vibe is obviously very motivated, and you do get used to the aesthetics of it all after a while. Even in the apocalypse, humanity will always be drawn to reassuring images of childhood, a theorem that has been proven many times over in the world offscreen. And this winds up being the most interesting thing about the movie, no doubt the thing that made the vested parties want to sign up for the project, such that they were willing to overlook the screenplay's gaps.
I ought to start by conceding that the film designs a fun puzzle, and parts of it work really well. Michelle has to decipher her brother's message using only pantomime and the limited use of pre-recorded catch phrases. And there is surprisingly satisfying bit of set-up and pay-off that has something to do with a Big Mouth Billy Bass. No, really. Those motion-activated singing fish robots actually serve a point.
The human logic, on the other hand, takes a few leaps. The entire human race is racist against robots, and Michelle gets over her fear of this lemonhead machine very quickly, setting down her knife before she has any reason to believe that it isn't going to do exactly what her society says robots do. (This is the part where I make a timely comment about how the movie about AI feels like it was written by AI lolz.)
Michelle's only clue to finding her brother is "a doctor with glasses." You watch this and think, "Well, gee. I wonder how this slim jumping-off point is going to reveal their untapped problem-solving skills." It doesn't. It mostly reveals how lucky it was that some of the robots were willing to tuck away letters by Ke Huy Quan's doctor once the plot started running out of natural growing room. It's death by a thousand contrivances.
Meanwhile, the plotline of finding out what happened to Millie Bobby Brown's brother at some point acquires a sort of "saving the world" degree of grandiosity without consciously deciding to. All the other players--whose own motivations are way more vague--just kinda meander into the story until we decide it's time to go shut down the bad guys.
Moreover, the film often thinks its nonverbal cues and cinematic shorthand are more polished than they actually are. Pivotal explanations wind up feeling off-the-shelf and are served before you have time to read the nutrition label. After a while, this almost starts to feel deliberate. Like the Russos were hoping if they carted you along fast enough, you wouldn't notice the wheels coming undone. All around, the screenplay is like the midterm paper you were so determined to get right that you spent all the time on drafting--and left no time to proofread before sliding it in just before the midnight deadline.
Having graduated from both of his major franchises, Pratt is very much in his element as the developmentally arrested man child. This is the rare chance to see him billed second, and seeing how relaxed he seems here, you get the idea that there's unironically a future for him as a favorite supporting character--a Legolas or Gimli in a world of Aragorns. Brown meanwhile is like a persistently flickering candle every moment she's onscreen, and you can't help but key in close to her just to catch her glow.
There is also voice work a-plenty from the likes of Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, and Alan Tudyk. It's to everyone's credit that I didn't recognize the celebrities behind the voices until I watched the credits roll, and this is fresh off finishing the third season of Resident Alien.
You can't help but be a little disappointed in those last twenty minutes when you have to accept that this whole machine doesn't work as well as you wanted it to. The movie falters when it realizes it needs to provide "a point" at the end, and you start to wonder whether it ever bothered to prove the thesis it's presenting, or whether it was even thinking about these things at all during the last hour and forty minutes.
The Netflix machine and YouTube criticism being what they are, this movie may wind up being fated for the junkyard, but if so, it's still in better company than any either of those parties will want to admit.
--The Professor
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