From the machine, right into the feels

Rating: 9/10 (6 November 2019)

A movie at once a throw back and very modern.
I almost thought that we had ran out of ideas for movies of this kind, this speculative science fiction, not too hard, not too soft, balancing the right amount of technical "talking shop" and basking in the radiant glow of human creations.
Yet it is the humans who are just as much a star of the show as our machine. Not only is the freshness of the machine in how she is defined by her humanness rather than her roboticness, the organic characters give us much to chew on both in their fascinating conversations and when the plot grows thicker.
Even with the limited settings and characters, we find a strikingly atmospheric and eerie journey into a few questions about our own humanity and our attempts to simulate it that so could have just been another pretentious exploration of the "human condition" with a vendetta against the smart phone. Understand that it does have a few interesting things to say about the changing relationship of people to technology but its intelligence is that it sort of says them by not saying them. It's all there if you want to infer it but it's not necessary to get the most out of this story.
Arguable on one level a love story. A gripping and touching meeting of two people (even the word "people" is an interpretation I guess) and how it develops.
I love the comic style adventures, I really do. But it's hard not to adore this resurrection of the old school speculative science fiction.
My one real note is the machine. She walks too much like a real person. If she could have walked the teenciest bit less humanish then I would have been more sold on the illusion. But that's just an extra they missed, not really a flaw. But I noticed it.
A charming, poignant, adorable and mentally stimulating experience that haunts the mind for reasons that are hard to articulate.