Sonny (Elliott Crosset Hove) leaves the AI off the leash to save his child.
Foto: Port to Prince Pictures
Man and artificial intelligence have one thing in common: at the beginning they were pretty stupid. Naked, without knowledge and skills, the day consisted of surviving in absolute ignorance. In the meantime, a few million years later, we look at videos from Dackeln on the Internet, who complete an obstacle course with astonishing slowness and find it comforting because it takes the hustle and bustle out of life.
This is only the simple beginning. Nobody knows what AI can do in the future. But there are films that explore this eerily beautiful ignorance for us. One of them is “Electric Child” by Swiss director Simon Jaquetet. This film, like everyone who is actually devoting themselves to the topic, is in no way amusing, even funny or somehow ironic. It is dark, disturbing, frightening, which only shows how great the respect, yes, the fear is of what the AI will do. And this fear is probably justified. We still have it in hand.
The film has bigger than to surrender to the description of relationships, while the machines want to finish us.
What happens when we lose control, “Electric Child” deals with this. Sonny (Elliott Crosset Hove) is one of the most sought -after programmers in the planet and researches in a strictly monitored project in Zurich on an artificial intelligence that fights on a simulated island for their survival like Robinson Crusoe (only that Sonny the AI is also programming an MP on the island so that learning can be done faster).
When Sonny father, doctors diagnose little Tōru a degenerative nerve disease that hardly lets him live for a year. For Sonny and his partner Akiko (Rila Fukushima), a world collapses. Both deal differently with the trauma.
Sonny uses, and that is the catastrophe of the film, its exclusive access to the AI, to teach her what humanity has brought together in millions in millions of years. In his despair, he hopes that the naked being on the island will be ready to heal his son in a few weeks or months. The fact that he also creates a thing that is a lot more powerful than people because it understands faster, he accepts to save his son.
Meanwhile, his girlfriend escapes into the remaining time with the child, which of course fully corresponds to the cliché of the caring mother (while Sonny in his world in his world from permanent humming server rooms and screens full of more colorful numbers). In conjunction with the subject and the presentation of the film, this figure drawing seems frightening. Is it measured to expect that women have something to report in a film about computer things? Sonny only gets the edition not to bring his phone to the apartment, in the Akiko a nest of pillows and blankets for herself and her son.
The film has bigger things than to surrender to relationships with the filigree exclusion. The machine wants to finish us! Jaquemet wants to treat the very big moral-ethical questions: How much is a life worth? How do power and responsibility combine? Is man the end of evolution? But he does not manage to compress the narrative on it. Again and again the perspectives between the androgynous AI on the island (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), which can now read and speak and secretly provide Sonny with all the information available from his son, and the dramatic history of the life of little Tōru. It is difficult to find emotional access to Sonny and Akiko as a couple and as parents, which would not matter, wouldn’t have made the father a desperate supergenia main figure.
The most absurd is a scene in which the two simply leave the baby to strangers to struggle on a techno party in the forest. The urgently needed escape of the world, both of which need in this catastrophic situation, the proximity that both would have to allow to draw strength would have made any access to the characters in a less irritating picture. So both remain only one film for the more meaningful meta level; As characters, however, they are comfortable no matter what harms the film enormously when you already drive up so big and connect a family drama with the topic of AI.
“Electric Child” is aesthetically demanding, which is almost free of the subject, but does not manage to outdo the content of the images. The question of which power we want to give AI in the future to connect with a personal fate is smart and at the beginning there is still a lot into the film, which, however, continued to fiber over time. If people also have access to a high -security project, nothing to give me anything over the basement or spy on Sonny by simply filming his colleague over his shoulder with the cell phone camera, then you do not know whether that should be humor or it was a good idea to ask the KI to help with the script, as was supposed to admit after the premiere at the film festival in Locarno. Let us hope that these story parts of the computer have come up with. But what interests the AI your chatter from yesterday.
“Electric Child”, Switzerland/Germany/Netherlands 2024. Director: Simon Jaqu. With: Elliott Crosset Hove, Rila Fukushima, Sandra Guldberg Kamp. 118 min. Start: August 21.