Reviews

One has to acknowledge the brave attempt of putting together an intelligent sci-fi thriller on a shoestring budget. The movie "Automata" boasts an international team mostly from Spanish-speaking countries, excellent atmosphere and special effects, and manages to pull off an intriguing stunt, tackling tried-and-true topoi: in a dystopian society 30 years from now, the Earth has been reduced to a wasteland where only 0.3% of the population managed to survive, blithely enclosed in their sparse, walled-up cities, clinging to the illusion of a secure "civilized" life ("Be happy with what you have"). There are robots outnumbering humans to do the menial work, from acting as drivers and butlers to welding and reinforcing the city walls, kept under control by two "protocols" built into their programs: never harm life, and never attempt to repair or upgrade themselves or a fellow automaton. The robots are leased by a company that has insurance-claim problems, once one of the protocols appears to be broken. An insurance agent (an appropriately confused, middle-aged Banderas who also co-produced the project) is required to investigate.

So far, so good. The premises are provocative: how much can humans rely on their own technology to clean up a mess they themselves had created by relying too much on technology? The robots are far from intelligent (a fail-safe device wisely introduced into the equation;) they are pitifully vulnerable clunkers, but have lightning-fast reactions when it comes to protecting human life (a feature which is conveniently lost later in the movie.) What kind of a life are humans clinging to, now that the entire planet has become a searing desert soaked occasionally in acid rain and daily doses of solar radiation? At what point do robots cross the threshold of self-awareness, of self-reliance, and of self-determination, disregarding their programs? In other words, where is the line they need to cross in order to become (gasp!) alive?

The first half of the movie is excellent: the three members of the script team have done their homework and are evidently familiar with "Blade Runner," with Asimov's laws of robotics, with Gilliam's "Brazil." They might have even read their William Blake and his musings about a godly watchmaker. However, in the second half of the movie, the numerous balls they try desperately to keep juggling around fail to stick to their appointed trajectories and logical gaps appear in the digital fabric: a female robot presumably designed for sexual pleasure that sports ridiculous fiberglass buttocks attached loosely on her metallic skeleton, and an immaculate breast-plate suggesting the shape of perfect breasts, including the coyly sketched nipples from the same material? She is the only robot endowed with human-looking eyes (in order to allow her to bat her eyelashes and blink most woman-like, no doubt) and she is the only one who appears to discover the poignant beauty of human feelings. The question where self-awareness (let alone life) begins is left dangling. In the end, the rogue robots manage to hammer together their own offspring, a creature that looks like a cross between a cockroach and a crab, made of little pulsating, metallic cubes. The only clue that the robot-in-chief offers as proof that this creature is alive is "it breathes like you do." Is that the standard used by all other robots to determine what life is, in order to protect it? Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics click together much more neatly, as all details in good science fiction should. One is left with the annoying impression that the team of co-writers rushed to end the project, having run out of ideas, money, and time, and the resulting half-baked product was deemed "good enough for the time being." They managed to throw in clever allusions to the future of health insurance and to half-intelligent mechanical serfs (equally needed, despised, and hated by their masters) who are bound to wise up on their own, at some point—and choose their own destiny, in a radioactive environment that doesn't seem to bother them at all. The team of writers can hardly be accused of banking on the audience's attention deficit disorder, once the movie got safely underway, but it is still ironic that they themselves seem to fall prey to the same syndrome. This ambitious, promising movie that manages to strike the right balance between innovation and creative use of traditional motifs still checkmates itself in the end, leaving one with a nagging feeling that one has somehow been duped. That would, of course, require a second viewing—and maybe this is what the producers eventually counted on.

Translated into 70 languages, Thor Heyerdahl's account of his 1947 expedition across the Pacific on a balsa raft has captivated the imagination of generations after generations of dreamers—and for very good reasons. "Kon Tiki" is an excellent book: evocative, inspiring, quite funny at times, but also heart-felt and informational, all outstanding qualities that will shine even more in its sequel, "Aku-Aku."

Unfortunately, the directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg pay such obvious lip service to Hollywood conventions (each character-based scene in the movie has been shot both in English, and in Norwegian in a grossly obvious attempt to cater to a wider audience). More to the point is the pathetic effort to inject a modicum of conventional drama into one of the central tenets of the book: the well-balanced micro-universe that the 7-crew members succeeded to create on their minuscule raft. The directors chose to strip all characters of their personality, except for Heyerdahl himself (Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen) whom they endow with a determination suspiciously close to religious fanaticism, and by turning Herman Watzinger's character (Anders Baasmo Christiansen) into a wuss. Aside from Watzinger's daughter who rightly complained about her father's misrepresentation, Heyerdahl himself must be turning over in his grave: The original photographs of Watzinger reveal a person much different from the doughy, lumpy, doubting sissy who manages to sneak some metal wire aboard the primitive raft (heavy-handed irony here) amongst his personal belongings, hoping to replace the failing ropes under way. In reality, Watzinger was Heyerdahl's first and foremost 'convert,' showing so much faith and enthusiasm in the project that he accompanied him all the way to the jungles of Ecuador in search of balsa trunks for the raft. The screenplay concocted by Petter Skavlan and Allan Scott (as a "consultant," the latter probably deserves a greater part of the blame) replaces this episode with a much earlier one (Heyerdahl and his wife in the Marquesas) for the evident reason and excuse to include at least one female character in the movie, lest the audience—God forbid!—should feel and resent the lack. Not altogether incidentally, the back cover of the DVD displays the happy couple romantically awash in tropical waters.

The directors' excuse for altering the facts that both the original book and the 1950 documentary are grounded in, is shameless in its implied arrogance: the book lacks any dramatic tensions, they claim, so they had to manufacture some. That is why the first half of the expedition unfurls under a sense of cheap suspense: is the raft going to drift towards "the Maelstrom of the Galapagos" (huh?!) Are the ropes going to hold the balsa trunks together? Will the captain find himself in a position to literally sink or swim, like he failed to earlier on, as a boy? A cursory review of the book will reveal a trove of opportunities for suspense that the directors blithely ignored: the raft sails so closely to the first Polynesian island that several natives are able to reach them by canoe. Knut returns to the shore with them, hoping to get more paddling help, and almost remains stranded behind, on the island. Or: the instance when the cooking gear catches fire, threatening to burn the whole hut down. Or: the underwater efforts to tighten the ropes while en route. Or: the quandary they find themselves in, upon landing, after managing to get their soaked radio going: once they establish radio contact, the ham operator half a world away refuses to believe that they are the castaways they claim to be. Or: the operation they perform on a native boy, with the help of a doctor who directs them through the Morse code, and that of the "miraculous" antibiotics that they had brought along on their primitive raft. Even Watzinger's success in manufacturing ice on the raft for film-developing purposes (his redeeming act as a refrigerators salesman) is casually brushed aside. Rather than rely on the richness of the book, the directors took the easiest way out. The result may be satisfactory, even uplifting for some viewers who expect nothing past colorful entertainment, but it does a tremendous disservice both to the book and, more importantly, to Heyerdahl's global accomplishment. And, in absence of the book that has brought under its spell millions of readers, the movie can hardly stay afloat on its own terms.