Review: Autómata

In the exposition-heavy prologue of Autómata, we learn that it is the year 2044, solar storms have rendered the earth's surface into a radioactive desert, atmospheric disturbances have thrown civilisation into a technological regression, and that 99.7% of the human population has been decimated. The remaining 21 million live side by side with the Autómata Pilgrim 7000's, a line of primitive robots controlled by two security protocols: they cannot harm any form of life and they cannot alter themselves or any other robot. These protocols are inviolable. Which of course means that one or both of them will be mysteriously breached in Autómata.

One such anomaly lands on the lap of Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas), an insurance investigator for the ROC corporation. An automaton was shot dead by dirty cop Wallace (Dylan McDermott) after he found it self-repairing. Another automaton sets itself on fire in front of Vaucan. Both robots lacked the second protocol and had several alterations. Vaucan consults a clocksmith (Melanie Griffith) who muses, "Self-repairing implies some idea of a conscience." The humans may have cause for concern: it may have taken centuries for ape to progress into man but robots don't have the same biological limitations. Only the second protocol limits the alacrity of their advancement.

The questions posed in Autómata - what separates man from machine and the debatable necessity of humankind in a world of continued technological advancement - have long been fodder for writers such as Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? could even serve as Autómata's unofficial template. Certainly Autómata's visual look, replete with holographic advertisements projected amidst the skyscrapers, is an unabashed rip-off of Blade Runner, the film adaptation of Dick's novel, mashed up with the debris-strewn environs of District 9.

There's very little to set Autómata apart from those films or from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, which featured an 11-year-old android with the ability to love. Autómata has Cleo (voiced by Griffith), an automaton programmed to distinguish pleasure from pain, all the better to please the men paying for her services. Vaucan, separated from his pregnant wife, shares emotional intimacies and philosophical musings with her as they trek across the acrid landscape in search of the mastermind behind the alteration of the androids' brain matrices.

It's easy to dismiss Autómata, given all its derivations and more than occasional fumblings in execution. Yet there is something about it that holds your attention and lets you forgive its shortcomings. Director Gabe Ibáñez and co-screenwriters Igor Legarreta and Javier Sánchez Donate could have streamlined the first hour, which spends time focusing on Vaucan trying to convince his heavily pregnant wife (Borgen's Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) to leave the city for the shore. She's reluctant - there's no way of knowing that the quality of life is any better away from the city - and stands firm in her belief that "Life always ends up finding a way," a line that takes on added weight in the stronger and ultimately touching second half.

Autómata

Directed by: Gabe Ibáñez

Written by: Gabe Ibáñez, Igor Legaretta, Javier Sánchez Donate

Starring: Antonio Banderas, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, Dylan McDermott, Robert Forster, Melanie Griffith, Tim McInnerny, Javier Bardem