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In The Occupant, Abby (Ella Balinska) struggles across Georgian wilds
TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
Some ideas are so compelling, so intuitive, one would sooner recycle them than take them apart to explore. So, in 1950, Isaac Asimov fixed up some puzzle stories into a fiendish, Agatha Christie-in-space sci-fi novel, I, Robot, while in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey set a high bar for films about (or at least containing) artificial intelligence. There, ideas-wise, the story of robots in cinema pretty much starts to repeat on an endless loop.
This year, The Electric State spun a yarn about a robot rebellion, M3gan 2.0 showed you can’t keep a good killerbot down and Companion took the femmebot’s point of view to give us a decent adult-themed Asimov pastiche.
All three toyed with the usual notions around free will and indulged in handwringing about when to treat a machine like a person. I suspect Gerard Johnstone’s M3gan 2.0 was the most fun to work on, as 2023’s rubber-boned robot babysitter returns from the dead (well, the back-up disc) to save the world from older-sister killbot Am3lia. The screenplay is a mess, but the gags, genre call-backs and jump scares are justification enough.
Drew Hancock’s Companion, about a clueless femmebot discovering her true nature, looked like it would cut a little deeper, only to lose its nerve. Nine months after my review, all I recall is a wonderfully meat-headed cameo from Rupert Friend.
Anthony and Joe Russo’s The Electric State got a widespread panning, not least because the duo’s make-it-up-as-we-go style was so painfully ill-suited to the elegiac artwork on which their film was based. Fans of Simon Stålenhag’s illustrated novel gnashed their teeth; everyone else sat around for 2 hours waiting for something to justify the film’s sumptuous visuals. The Electric State was so outclassed by its world-building and set design, you wonder the makers didn’t build a theme park instead – it would have been a more artistically valid use of a stunning $320 million budget.
Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 promised something different: a scenario in which blue-collar spacefarer Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is reduced to robotic servitude by being reprintable. Now here was something into which the director of Parasite, Okja and Snow Piercer could sink his satirical fangs. Alas, the film never trusted its audience, and choked on its own exposition.
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Taking chances while you attract a huge audience may be a trick Stanley Kubrick et al. took to the grave
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Sci-fi filmmakers have always been capable of dreaming up compelling extraterrestrials: think Solaris, Arrival, Annihilation, Under the Skin… So 2025’s predeliction for monsters and satanic possession is less a sign of exhaustion than of the horror genre nipping in to play in its cousin’s vegetable patch.
Director Scott Derrickson’s hellish hollow men take an age to emerge from The Gorge, which weakened this intriguing part cold-war romance, part spy thriller, part Lovecraftian horror flick. When Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play elite snipers from different world powers, guarding a vast gorge in an undisclosed country, we are primed for more than 40 minutes of prologue.
Hugo Keijzer’s The Occupant was rather more successful, as Abby (Ella Balinska) struggles across remote Georgian wilds, aided by a disembodied voice that, whether human helper or alien possessor, is externalising our hero’s own guilt and grief.
We are on more solid genre territory with Ash, directed by Los Angeles musician Flying Lotus – one of those rare experiments that really is a feature-length music video, and all the more dazzling and brain-bending for it. Riya (Eiza González) wakes, amnesiac, on a space station full of bodies. Brion (Aaron Paul) arrives to help her, but is he what he seems? Is she? And why does the on-board AI warn of an unusual life form on the station? Again, familiar territory, but a welcome excursion.
It is no surprise that of the two standouts this year, neither had a particularly huge budget. Taking chances while you attract a huge audience may be a trick Stanley Kubrick et al. took to the grave.
Serpil Altin’s Once Upon a Time in the Future: 2121 is about a family deciding whether to bump off the elders to meet the “scarcity laws” of their hilariously zealous administration. Meanwhile, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End is a musical about a family deciding whether to execute an unexpected visitor – a choice they may have faced many times before.
These two, with The Occupant, give the lie to the idea that sci-fi plots must be original. Sci-fi is fiction; fiction is about people, and even in familiar plights, people are infinitely various.
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