An original exploration of the nature of love and feeling flops

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2014)

And I don't mean flops in the teraflops kind of way, either. You see, the story is that of an (overly) sensitive man, just going through a divorce with a woman he still loves. He gets a new operating system, one that is intelligent. Luckily enough it also has the sexy throaty voice of Scarlett Johansson, incredible empathy, a sense of humor and a speed of thought that is obviously orders of magnitude above that of the average human. And they fall in love.
Now, this concept alone is intriguing and its exploration worthy. However I don't feel the story did any reasonable exploring of the situation. The love is artificial not only because one of the couple is a machine, but also in its depiction. Clearly only a non technical person could have envisaged it as in the film. I wonder, what would have happened if the guy would have chosen a male voice instead of a female one? For him it was easy to fall in love with a voice, as he would imagine whatever vision of a woman he needed in order to do so. What would an AI imagine? A cool processor? (again, pun not intended)
Then there is the length. You have to stand through two full hours of Joaquin Phoenix smiling sadly and making funny jokes of his misery to get to the end, which is quite frankly, not really a punchline, but a convenient and hard to believe non technical cope out. The sounds, all piano like and soft and trying to induce some sort of romantic feeling, all they did was annoy me. The AI, immediately intrusive and assertive, didn't look like any commercial product that will ever be marketed. Check out the scene where it decides what emails are funny or not and deletes the rest, after just 5 minutes of being installed. And then there is the main character.
I can't accuse Phoenix for his acting, as for the character he portrayed it was perfect, but the character itself was pitiful and pathetic and I couldn't empathize with him at all. Hot actresses like Johansson (voice only), Olivia Wilde (just a small role) and Amy Adams (playing a software developer of all things, how hot is that? ) don't really change the fact that the script was focused almost exclusively on the lead actor, all other having episodic roles. So if you like the film or not depends almost exclusively on if you like the guy.
Bottom line: we all know the world is going to end when we invent robot girls that want to kiss us, but if you want to explore the apparently complicated situation of a human-AI relationship, you should choose a person we can relate to and an operating system that acts like one. That would have been a lot worse for dear Theodore, I guess, but still, couldn't feel anything while watching the movie except the desire for it to end sooner.