HER [2013]

DATING DATA



2013, USA
Spike Jonze
9 // 10



Will a true Artificial Intelligence be capable of burning a toast? Does Stephen Hawking really need to be afraid of Skynet? Will you stop judging my crush on Cortana now? There's only one way to find out!

Oooh, I love me some Spike Jonze, me, I do. I've not seen EVERYTHING from his extensive filmography, to be honest, but never mind. He's a good 'un and Her is here to prove it. Not the first AI film out there, not the last, but definitely one of the best.

Out of the iconic ones, we obviously have WarGames, Terminator, 2001..., maybe I, Robot (subjective addition, but I really like it), Alien even, and capo di tutti capi, Blade Runner. All of those seem to share one, well exploited motif - The Threat. On the other hand we have the AI and Bicentennial Man, films which concentrate on much different aspects, but in doing so, fail to achieve the impact and, let's say it, artistic prolificacy. Glowing red eyes sell better, I guess.

Which leads us to the very problem. That glowing red eye actually DOES sell better and I don't just mean it in net profit terms. The threat needs less to get to the viewer's/reader's imagination. The threat plays on fears and instincts and they are, by default, so high strung it really doesn't take much plucking to make them resonate like Mike Oldfield's door bell. So, to put it simply, it all requires far less effort from the creator, because the desirable end result simply boils down to making the viewer/reader deposit uncontrollable amount of brown matter down the drawers. Even if speaking only metaphorically, of course. Blade Runner and 2001 might have gone far further than that dropping their intellectual anchors several hundred fathoms deeper than the others, but still... whether it's Roy asking Dr Chew 'questions' or HAL telling Dave which actions will not be allowed, the nappy needs changing. Because the machines are smarter than us and THEREFORE will kill us. We've seen that trope so many times, we don't even question it. The vampires bite necks, zombies eat brains and the only outcome of AI outsmarting us is robocalypse.

It is known.

Except, that it isn't. AI and Bicentennial Man may not be brilliant films, but they do try to show us robots trying to just get on with their... well, lives, I suppose. To some extent so does I, Robot. And now, of course, so does Her. In a very, very smart way indeed. Every good science fiction starts with knowing how things work today and then, with that knowledge trying to build a different world (be it other or ours in the future) where other things will work using the same principals. You may get the details wrong but the end result has every chance to be coherent, logical and highly plausible and while I'm not saying that Her is by any means perfect, at least all the basics have been covered impeccably. First, this being a future that is not too far ahead, Jonze exercises commendable restrain from digging deep into the Props Horn of Plenty. It's predominantly the world we know around us today with just a little bit of cleaver extrapolation here and there. One of them being the evolution of the computer operating system and how we're going to cope with it. And when I say 'a little bit of extrapolation' I actually mean 'hardly any'. For the future is here and now even if not all of us had the chance to notice it yet. I'm about to get a teensy-weensy technical, but bear with me.

My guess is, that things really, really kicked off in this direction in 2009 at E3 conference, when Microsoft revealed their Kinect for Xbox 360 for the first time. Let us heave a quick look:

Yes, I know. We were promised some incredible games that would make use of this technology, but they never managed to materialise. Well, never mind. I was quite seriously mindblown that day but not for the reasons Peter Molyneux was trying to convince us all about. I actually couldn't see much use for that technology in games, but what I did think about, was just how cool would it be to make Milo (or whoever else you'd like to customise for yourself) an operating system interface. Instead of double-clicking on ancient icons, you could just say to the interactive person (or creature?) on your screen: 'Check my emails, please'.

Then, for a year or so, nothing happened until Apple introduced Siri, the personal assistant as a feature of their iOS mobile operating system for iPhones. The hype started and we were all awaiting Google's response which arrived in the shape of Google Now, less of a gimmicky PA, more of an omni-organiser. Everybody happily forgot about Microsoft at this point since a) time smoothed the ripples from the splash Project Natal caused all the way back in 2009, and b) with a minimal market share Microsoft has on the smartphone market, who cares about them anyway?

Well, I do. Because Microsoft did respond with something that in many ways makes both Siri and Google Now look like steam engines. First, the name. Some absolute genius decided that Microsoft's personal assistant should be called Cortana. Cortana is not a random name. Cortana is the most recognisable Artificial Intelligence in the history of video games and because of that for millions of people around the world comes with a backstory and a personality even before they'd lift Microsoft's smartphone from the table. And why go on and on about it in an unrelated film review? Because before the end of this month Microsoft is rumoured to announce that Cortana will be built into not just an operating system of a niche, insignificant smartphone. She's making a jump into the next version of the 'proper' Windows, the operating system that runs on your (well 9 out of 10 of you) computer. Which basically means that Spike Jonze is Jules Verne.
It is a common misconception that Jules Verne pre-dated the invention of a submarine, but even if we ignore all the earlier designs and attempts, the first submarine to sink a ship was an H. L. Hunley, used by the Confederates during the American Civil War in 1864. The Nautilus appears for the first time in the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870. Similarly, Samantha in Her is not a fantasy, a random guess, a wild prediction of an unknown future. Is just as real today, to us, as H. L. Hunley was real and contemporary to Verne in 1860s. Cortana might have not been Jonze's inspiration (he actually mentions a brief chat with Cleverbot as a main culprit), but she's clearly an indication that the predictions he's made when he wrote the script were pretty much as solid as Nautilus turned out to be. It will not be long until we actually are interacting with our computers not unlike Theodore Twombly does in the film. And speaking of inspirations, isn't it lovely how Theodore's phone resembles the iconic lens of HAL? Or is it just me?

So, is it a technology geek's wet dream then? Well, of course it isn't. It's a film that makes me think about titles like Gattaca, Robot & Frank, One Hour Photo even. Her reduces the setts, the props to bare minimum pushing the whole attention to the characters and the dialogue. Less is more, as with less eye candy we are given more of the emotion, intensity, immersion even. The characters are sparse, the sets and locations modern and almost clinical. And yet the whole feel of the film is deeply humanistic, psychological, introvert even. At the risk of sounding blasphemous to some I would probably say that at least 80% of the credit for that, as far as the performances are concerned, goes to Joaquin Phoenix while I find Scarlett Johansson in her purely vocal role adequate but by no means groundbreaking. I've got a feeling that many a reviewer did not actually pay that much attention merely making some mental shortcuts to Black Widow's outfit. Personally, however, I found her performance not as natural as it could be. A little bit theatrical, even forced sometimes and to be honest, I would probably much preferred to hear Carrey Mulligan voicing Samantha, as it was originally intended, but hey, we'll never know. As for Phoenix though, it's definitely the best role so far I've seen him perform, although Johnny Cash comes close second. As an actor I still find him so incredibly underrated but then again, I'm hoping it's down to the fact how smartly he chooses the roles to play and simply doesn't feel the personal need to go blockbusters and become Johnny Depp.

In all that though I still have managed to find a place for some criticism. Paradoxically the problem is both serious and insignificant at the same time. It concerns the perception of the AI in general and therefore is not just limited to Her. As far as I can tell, in all the films and books I did come across an artificial intelligence of sorts (and Samantha does make me think of Jane from Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead. A lot. Pretty much just as much as the computer game Theodore plays made me think about the mind game Ender Wiggin plays during his military training, but let's not digress too much...) there's one thing about them that seem to stem from the same assumption. That developing an intellectual being capable of abstract thought as we, humans do, must result in developing a human personality with pretty much exactly the same emotional range. My question is, why? Why would they? I do find it difficult to accept, that an intelligent, self aware being which evolved from the legacy of binary code would be prone to romancing, laughing or any desire to possess any emotions at all in the first place. Funnily enough, I guess a real AI would be pretty much like Data from Star Trek, just without the curiosity about what makes humans human. Well, without any curiosity at all, to be honest. But does it really matter? Well, like I said, the problem is quite fundamental, but I wouldn't overestimate its significance in this particular case. Rian Johnson, the director of Looper has said in a recent documentary about the history of science fiction on BBC, that the time travel in his film does not make sense (something that already has been mentioned here) because the time travel itself is a complete nonsense. However, if you don't mind that too much, it can still help you tell a good story. And, for me, Her is the same. It really doesn't matter whether the idea is hundred per cent scientifically accurate. It is plausible and that's enough. But the message, the truths and observations it conveys are well worth that little concession. Considering how good the rest of the film is, it is something I am more than happy to forget about.

And here's a little bit of trivia to finish with. After playing as the voice of AI Samantha in Her, Scarlett Johansson came back to the Marvel Universe as Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In a scene where she discovers with the Captain an old command centre with an old-fashioned computer terminal she says to the computer: 'Would you like to play a game?' which is a reference to one of the first AIs in cinema, Joshua, from WarGames from 1983. Lovely, lovely, lovely.