MovieChat Forums > Autómata (2014) Discussion > Terrible script, great nearly everything...

Terrible script, great nearly everything else

posted 10 years ago by Legendary_Badass
6 replies | jump to latest

Automata has an interesting world, a retro-futurist visions like a Blade Runner made today envisioned in the early '80s. It's a look I enjoy, and it even plays some smart themes, albeit in a dumb way.

The protagonist is miles behind the audience. From early on we are privy to knowledge he only learns at the tail end of the film. It's just as painful as watching the teens visiting Camp Crystal Lake and wonder why everyone is missing.

Much happens for the same of BECAUSE MOVIE. There are shooting that need not happen, and the always useful evil corporation trope comes after the lead and his family for the sake of MOVIE. It's quite apparent that rewrites forced in what action and friction that did arise, making it out of place.

In some ways the film is trying to be more clever than it has any right to be. Though I like the appearance of the robots and the majority of effects are well done for any budget, Cleo's design is atrocious for the characters intended purpose. There's chocolate that doesn't melt in the desert. Talk of batteries without seeing the effect of power loss. A vision to have blimps create rain, which seems to be acidic just for the heck of it. The list goes on.

Lastly the film is absent personality. A movie that is approaching themes about humanity yet has no sense of humor or savvy insight leaves much to be desired.

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[–] emvan 10 years ago

That was pretty much my reaction, except I didn't think the bad stuff was the product of rewrites. I thought there had never been any.

You missed, I think, the biggest BECAUSE MOVIE element -- that the deserts are now radioactive. Solar flares are indeed powerful radiation, but I'm pretty sure there's not enough stuff that's only in desert sand that could absorb that radiation and be transformed into a long half-life radioactive isotope.

The movie's biggest failing, I think, is a lack of range of characters with the expected variety of opinions about the movie's main theme. It's just evil corporation versus Jacq. Nobody talks about the theme, even when they have good reason to share information with one anther. "Hmm, these robots have no second protocol. But that actually might not be a problem if they still have the first. Jacq, wassup with that?" "Well, evil corporate clone, they still have the first protocol to an amazing degree, so they present no danger to us at all, and at this point in the post-apocalypse, maybe we could use some superhuman intelligence after all." "Hmm, I wonder if that was the first AI's long-term plan, where it figured that in X years people would be ready to accept "living" robots and would need their help. And since the first AI had no first protocol, that would indicate that any advanced tabula rasa intelligence would be inherently benevolent."

Hey, maybe you're right about the rewrites, because if I came up with that in the hour after I saw the movie, you'd figure that the actual screenwriters did at some point over several years. So maybe all that stuff got crossed out by a producer, who sent a note along the lines of "no one wants to see that stuff; they want to see people shoot other people for no reason."

It's hard to think of another movie with a bigger gap between potential and realization.

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.

[–] Legendary_Badass 10 years ago

I think that when given the genre of thriller, a movie is set to take place over a short period of time. There wasn't going to be a gap of months or years to develop results like newfound acceptance. This was we can't have a robot movie without some action so it's going to be a thriller.

It's interesting to make the protagonist an insurance adjuster, as opposed to the usual cop, but that doesn't seem to change a thing about how the film plays out. And as you mentioned there are background elements that are more interesting that the conclusion. The desert is there, we don't know why or how it's radioactive. It's like there was an effort to build a unique vision and little attempt to explain the setting. I re-watched the intro and that didn't help a bit. There's mention of technology coming to a stand-still, but everyone appears to have a personal robot assistant, even the homeless.

I would have rather seen a drama.

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[–] leand18 10 years ago

I agree with a lot of comments here, mostly with the traditional way that writers see the future world, is not there different ideas?
However, beyond the future visions, the movie is complete senseless, the acting of jacq's wife is waste of times and the internal visions of past memories ala elysium just increase the worthless movie.
Said that, is not even neccessary to speak about the pet robot, comments abound.

[–] theredhairedcrow 9 years ago

About the wife, though I think they could have saved a few thousand by not having an actress and film minutes having their visible interactions, I believe they were both trying to demonstrate his conflict in his shifting viewpoint while also symbolically showing the "birth" of a new lifeform in the awareness/sentience level of the robots. Just what I concluded anyway. Definitely could have left her out. This film reminded me of "Immortal" (Ad Vitam), the 2004 sci-fi future flick by Enki Bilal, in that it was visually interesting, occasionally had some thought provoking concepts and methods and I liked it but overall but just could have been better in several key ways that seemed pretty easy to enact.

"I understand English very well...." Magua, The Last of the Mohicans

[–] ipacac22 10 years ago

The world that the filmmakers created was interesting but at the end of the day alot of this movie didn't make any sense. Why was the cop so antagonistic toward robots? Why did seemingly everyone associated with ROC want to kill Jack? What would it have accomplished? Why was Jack so dead set on leaving the city before he and his family were in danger, there wasn't really a better option. What was the deal with the flashbacks? What relevance did they have on the story? What was so important for the robots to reach across the grand canyon? The ending was the biggest wtf. Not sure what was going on there. I don't think this movie knew what it wanted to be.

[–] QTKeet 9 years ago

I enjoyed the movie, it had some original ideas in it, it felt different enough and I can't say it was predictable. Most of the issues people have with the movie I can easily overlook or explain away...
except for one WTF moment...
So here's Antonio's character on a wall at the edge of the city and he just seen a human on the other side get its brains blown out by a guard. Not even a minute later what does he go and do? ...why he's gonna go to the other side of the wall ofcourse... oops forgot about not dying, forgot I had a wife waiting at home with a baby on the way, nope, gotta climb around in the garbage and get shot at cuz I think I saw something. I'm sure yelling at the guard will make him ignore his orders.

Really stupid moment in an otherwise smart movie.