Last night my wife I went out to see the new Spike Jonze film, Her.
Short review – the film is pretty great and you should go see it.
Longer review – The main focus on the film, which takes place in the future, but no too far in the future, is the relationship between a man named Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) and the new operating system on his computer (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). In the world of Her, a new Operating System has just been released which included an intuitive Artificial Intelligence (AI) as its core. Theodore, who begins the film in a state of autopilot after a devastating divorce, purchases the system and begins a relationship with the program that quickly moves from friendship to love.
The film works both as a relationship story between Theodore and Samantha (the name the OS gives itself within moments of being uploaded) and as a pretty good idea of how humans and AIs may likely interact when they first meet. A lot of the concepts the movie brings up are examined positively in Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 nonfiction book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, and negatively in Sherry Turkle’s 2011 nonfiction book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (also, the idea of a computer/human relationship was examined in the 1984 film Electric Dreams, but not quite as seriously as this – also the AI was created in that film by spilling Champagne across a computer, rather than through design). All in all the movie is about people and relationships, and in the end, that’s really the most important stuff to focus on.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Movie Review: Her
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