The outline makes one curious but the result is kitsch

Rating: 3/10 (14 February 2014)

In a not far future, in this movie people make an intense use of social media and other ICT programs which facilitate their work and free time. Such use can be expected from the promises and growth of ICT now a day. And that growth excites and scares us. The film could raises questions about these ICT developments but though it does in a sense, it does not make this criticism as the main subject of the movie. We see a social live that has become very thin and superficial. Even with the social media, anonymous people are more contacted especially in vital areas like sex than people face to face. Computer games and other ICT involvements all come first in life. One is mainly alone in this future world. Real and relevant social contacts always loose from the ICT world one lives in. Environment is not forgotten: out of the windows of the very well designed interiors one sees a very polluted city world in a haze. The point is that the protagonist does not question this lonely artificial world governed by ICT around him. He does not struggle with it or even does not becomes a tragic victim of it. Instead he looses himself in a silly romance with a virtual person out of a computer. The movie gets unbelievable with this love affair with this programmed virtual being as one could have feelings for a cartoon figure in a movie or a beautiful girl on a billboard. It makes the man unbelievable, stupid and as unreal as his mustache. The virtual female assistant is also unbelievable not only in the sense that she is too intelligent to be technical true but more over in the sense that she develops feelings of love and seems programmed to do so. Now here we get to the kitsch of this movie. KItsch is taking away from the story the human condition that live does not make sense and we as human beings are not capable to deal with that in the end. How does one deal with life which becomes more and more regulated by computer programs which take away all life's pain and rewards of the social life of real communities? The movie shies away from that question. Making it into a romance with a machine which spies on us and regulates our behavior is kitsch, stupid kitsch.