A.I. Rising (2018)

(On Cable TV, January 2020) As A.I. Rising begins and you’re settling down for a generic low-budget Science Fiction movie, the first few minutes suggest quite a different path, as a brooding man is sent on a long starship voyage to Alpha Centauri and is offered a female android companion to take care of his needs along the way. Faster than you can say, “Hey, this feels like the setup for a softcore pornographic movie,” in walks in… ex-adult film star Stoya, ready to shed clothes at the drop of a plot point. Which she does, as the film ruminates at length on notions of sentience, consent and the nature of heterosexual relationships in-between tastefully shot sex sequences. A.I. Rising far too dour and meditative to be arousing, but it’s certainly far more explicit than you’d expect from even a cable TV SF movie playing at 9 PM. Alas, while it would have been more fun as a sex romp, it’s far more interested in what it has to say about sex and relationships. Of course, this takes us in tricky territory. It’s all too easy for the screenwriter to have somewhat unusual ideas on the nature of those relationships, and to be overly glum about it all. If you’re expecting a happy ending, then you haven’t been paying attention to the constant grumblings about control and struggle. It doesn’t help that the film is more interested in pessimistic mumblings than scientific verisimilitude, and that its dialogue doesn’t quite flow. There are plenty of technical details that don’t make sense (including a tomb-like ship with far more space than required for even a lone human and his android/control.), and I suppose that there is a language fluency challenge at play given that the film comes from Serbia. (I also have issues with the supposed intelligence of the protagonist, who doesn’t seem to figure out even the most basic parameters of his situation.) Fortunately, A.I. Rising does become less explicit and more interesting in its latter half, as the protagonist gets the autonomous partner that he wants and every complication that comes with it. The film finally takes the time required to better develop its thesis about relationships and becomes better for it. Stoya’s skills as an actress are also more noticeable during that last half, as she doesn’t have to act as an android any more. It all leads to a surprisingly sweet and romantic ending somewhat at odds with the rest of the film, but welcome nonetheless. There are far too many rough edges and suspicious tangents to A.I. Rising to make it particularly good and the film does itself no favour by going for self-conscious pretentiousness, but it still ends up being a more provocative film than most of the other low-budget four-actor Science Fiction movies floating abound Cable TV channels. I would be careful in recommending it to anyone, but robo-fetishists who enjoyed Ex Machina will find that it develops many similar ideas—more roughly, but still meaningfully.