I enjoy the resurgence of 80s nostalgia in movies so Netflix recommended The Machine to me. After seeing Ex Machina, I moved The Machine up in my queue. Unfortunately The Machine is one of those movies whose plot is based on a premise that none of the characters has ever seen a movie or has common sense because if the characters did, The Machine would not continue past five minutes.
The Machine is set in a time where there is an intellectual cold war with China. (Side note: is that racist? It feels racist.) British and American scientists are experimenting in a secret underground facility with brain-damaged vets and implanting the vets with devices to repair that damage. They are also trying to make artificial intelligence, a sentient machine, to presumably replace human beings in war.
The Machine has some promising themes and elements and explores different definitions of what makes someone sentient or human. Ultimately The Machine relies on the audience suspending disbelief that there is a world where people are simultaneously so smart that they can create all this technology, but so stupid that they ignore that the side effect of this technology, homicidal tendencies.
If you are a Caity Lotz fan (she stars in Arrow and DC Legends of Tomorrow) or really like Blade Runner/Terminator ripoffs, then The Machine is worth your time because the last fifteen minutes are terrific when every body starts fighting and showing what they can really do. Otherwise skip The Machine and just watch Blade Runner, Ex Machina and The Terminator in one night.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
The Machine features three levels of sentient beings: human beings with no cybernetic implants, former vets with implants or mechanical limbs, i.e. cyborgs, who lose their voice, but have a mechanical noise way of communicating with each other which most of the human scientists never figure out, and the titular character, The Machine. The human beings feel threatened by the other two groups and are concerned that they are making humanity obsolete, but not enough to actually stop experimenting. The first vet with an implant actually kills a scientist. The implanted people have cool weird eyes and are clearly preparing for an uprising.
The Machine is a world where there is constant threat of murder, but people don’t lock their car doors and walk down lonely roads. One scientist, played by Caity Lotz, is hired to create The Machine, and explicitly says don’t use my face to the other scientist, but is totally cool with using her brain as a blueprint for The Machine. Really? Also even though she is supposed to be a scientist, she is treated more like a model for The Machine. When she gets arrested on her first day on the job and sees shady crap going down, she doesn’t immediately quit and hightail it out of there, but sticks around and inevitably gets killed. She is the only female scientist underground because the other one got killed. This is why there are not enough female scientists, Larry Summers. Guess whose face gets used for The Machine?
When The Machine finally exists, the humans terrorize it in its first five minutes of life because that is a good idea. The human beings see her as a tool, a hot woman, a child substitute, an assassin, but not as an independent person. They see The Machine as something to be used. No wonder they made The Machine female. The nicest person in The Machine is The Machine. She likes to dance, listen to music and actually has a moral code. The human beings have no similar hobbies, want her to just obey orders and kill until they don’t because she decides to kill them. Seriously don’t make a machine that can kill if you don’t want to get killed by it.
The Machine is set in a world where it is always night until the final scene after the uprising when unsurprisingly the sun comes up and The Machine and her tablet daughter can enjoy being outside while the only surviving human being is irrelevant and exiled at the side lines.
I really wanted to like The Machine, but it required too much suspension of disbelief for me to enjoy anything but the last fifteen minutes when the cyborgs, The Machine and one lone human scientist decide to scream “I am Spartacus.”