The Trouble with Being Born

I didn't know what to expect going into this. I've heard the stories about the supposed subject matter and all that but i'll watch anything remotely sci fi so there we go. We got a machine? Yes i'll watch that.

What is this movie about anyway. Nobody knows in short. It feels like 2 separate movies stitched together in a rather incoherent manner. I don't like brooding drawn out movies in expose style and this is just that.. too much pointless scenes in the dark (literally blair witch project b roll forest footage...) that serve no purpose and contribute nothing.

The first part of the movie appears to be about a man who buys/acquires somehow a machine that looks like his daughter at the age she disappeared. So the machine is there to basically fill that void but it gets a little sexual because said machine is just sex doll made to look like the kid he lost. Right. So that's the part people cry about but there nothing really shown in the movie and there are more suggestive kids shows rated PG if we have to be honest. It therefore is not a love story either.

Perhaps it is a drama about the relationship between people and machines? Well, cannot be because it totally bombs at showing the whole person vs machine interaction. It tries to use horrible narration to exemplify some struggle between the real and mechanical but I just cannot care to even bother to think of it because it is so badly executed. Star trek did more with data, alita battle angel, which is a movie about fighting did more on this topic... i robot also did a better a job. Video games like detroit become human focused on this subject matter in depth and pulled it off... This here, which is supposed to be a movie about just that sort of thing, does nothing. It fails completely to the point you are wondering what am i watching. It feels like somebody had an idea, did not know what it was but made a movie about it regardless. The cast is dull. The CGI cast is equally dull. Everything is dull. Moody, boring, non engaging, non thought provoking, flat. Just bad. I cannot think of a single memorable scene or event in 90 minutes of run time. It was so nonsensical i was hoping for maybe something stupid to happen just so i have a memory 5 minutes after the credits... but alas, no. Nothing occurs that you can take with you. If i think hard enough, perhaps i will remember that the lead in the first part liked to drink. Congratulations! You have left the viewer with a memory of a man drinking his sorrows away. So unique........

Some more footage in the dark, random walking through a forest. Time for a reboot into the second part of the story. Now we have a robot, perhaps the same one from the first part (nothing is clear here - did she run away or was it a new unit) is sent to another home to again fill the void of a missing child. This time the robot is turned into a boy. The owner doesn't want it but their relatives insist and so we have this whole moody, lethargic starring at the nothing scenes that constitute of "go away i dont like you" and the machine staring blankly in some communist era german flat scene after scene.

There is no dialogue to speak of. No feelings, no soundtrack, no nothing.

This is just bad. If you were hoping for a deep movie about machine vs human run away. If you were hoping for at least something cringe worthy to watch, not it either.

If you want blandness and confusion, perfect. Step right in and inhale the disappointment.

I really can't understand why directors shoot films with literally no lighting. If they want me to "appreciate" what they are doing then I have to see the thing in the first place. At the beginning, I gave it the benefit of the doubt as I assumed it was some kind of "pre-birth" scene from the child's perspective but that wasn't it at all and - be warned - this happens again and again throughout the film.

As for the content itself, previously I had the Kubrick/Spielberg "AI" film down as *the* most boring film I had ever seen about child robots - but this one has it beaten hands down. At one level this presents a couple of plausible scenarios as to what grieving / damaged people might do with this kind of technology once/if it becomes available and maybe I could have worked harder to look for some kind of deep and meaningful conclusions if they are indeed there, but it didn't earn that, I felt.

Not recommended.

What an absolutely dreadful movie. It is truly awful and creepy. And it made absolutely NO sense whatsoever. My biggest regret is that I watched it until the end. But that's because I kept waiting for the story to develop - only it didn't. There was this one point in the movie where I thought it was going to, but then it just took this super weird turn and basically spun this second, completely unrelated story that also made no sense. Though they were trying to connect the two with the appearance of the "father" in the second part, but that made no sense either and connected absolutely nothing. Do yourself a favor and skip this horrible movie.

Provocative but wholly unoriginal, exceptionally dull, dreary, disinteresting, and nonsensical - the effects of replicating people and the reasons for doing it are captured in far more elegant evaluations through the films of others.

Very good film. While some persons are worried or scandalized for the implied sex relations between a man and one android with the features of a little girl in the first part of the movie, what made the stronger impact on me was the unethical ability of human beings to destroy real emotion through the dehumanization of technology and, if I give human value to the android, alas! ...what a terrible "fate" the little robot in this movie has.

On the other hand, we are talking about a construct, which makes it more absurd to talk about any sexual conduct we disapprove. Here we are dealing with a human being and a robot, so I think we should find new words to define the simulacrum of the human something that they do together, which weakens moralistic derision when one realizes that one of the components is a robot.

The first story was annoying to me, because of the character of the father who has not processed that her daughter disappeared ten years ago, but the second part comes to life with the appearance of an old lady who longs for her brother who died 60 years ago. In the end, the film balances its two stories by complementing one with the other. Good script, direction and acting by all.

P. S. Elli reminded me of Edith Scob in «Les yeux sans visage».