Rossumovi divoci roboti.
I found myself in a darkening theater last week, about to see a movie I’d been previously unaware of, based on a book I’d never heard of, which, as a practice, has a lot to recommend it. I’d figure out how to do it more often, maybe, the seats were comfortable, those new recliner-thingies they’re putting in, but wearing a mask for a couple-three hours is never fun, so I don’t know.
It’s not entirely true to say I knew nothing: we were there because the Kid and the Spouse and Barry, the Cartoonist, they all wanted to see the new Chris Sanders movie, and I’m adjacent enough to the fields of cartooning and animation to know that Chris Sanders co-designed an co-directed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train your Dragon, both of which I’ve quite enjoyed, but also that Harrison Ford Call of the Wild, which I haven’t seen, but yikes. —And of course I knew the title of what it was we were about to see: the Wild Robot.
And it’s a very very very pretty movie, and there are stirring and thrilling bits, and I will aver it’s the most #nodads film I can think of, recently, but nonetheless none of this happens to make it a terribly or even a rather good movie. (I should note I was in the minority among our viewing group with this particular take; Kid, Spouse, Barry all enjoyed it much more than yr. humble curmudgeon, grain of salt and all that.) —Thrilling and stirring moments happened because at this or that point in this sort of movie something thrilling or stirring is supposed to happen; convictions appear, but, lacking attention, much less courage, wander off; foundational metaphors are cracked, poorly mixed, introduced in a muddle and then abandoned, as plot or logistics require. It is, on the whole, a sumptuously gorgeous, thoroughly half-baked mess.
But here I am, thinking thoughts about it.
(As I’ve nibbled at this, it’s been pointed out to me that Film Crit Hulk went and made some cogent points, so go, read that, come back, I’ll talk about some other bits.)
So, yes: gorgeous, but that’s part of the problem. —There’s some cartoonish expressionism in the various animal-forms, especially when they start in with the talking (crossing the obscure limen from set-dressing impediment antagonist to CHARACTER); the backgrounds are rendered with flawlessly painterly art direction; but—the light, the air, the water, the weight, it all moves and shifts and changes with such unnoticeably uncanny verisimilitude that one is lulled, despite those expressionist touches. It’s quite a triumph.
And yet but also: there’s, at the start, a refreshingly clear eye toward animals, and danger, and death—the eponymous wild—things get eaten, and stay et, and what did the eating isn’t villainized, or even wrong, it just—is. Death is quotidian—
—but then there’s the swarm of raccoons that chases our protagonist, Roz, the eponymous robot, up a tree that bends, precipitously, with their combined weight, until our protagonist is able to lightly step from the bent-low tip-top of the tree, and the mass of raccoons, suddenly aware of their predicament, beg and plead as the weight shifts, lifts, lets go, the tree, suddenly unburdened, springs upright, and dozens of raccoons are flung across the island over a cliff into the crashing sea, and this is a classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery gag, right? Only, the waves crash, the stone’s weightily there, the afternoon light is perfect and the trees sway as they would (only excepting the one bent alarmingly low for the bit) and death, as we’ve noted, the wild, has a presence—all very much at odds with expressionistically classic Warner Bros. Tex Avery slapstick. Expectations and reactions must be constantly recalibrated, because mimesis and cartooning get in each other’s way, and the movie never bothers to realize it has to reconcile them.
Tonal disjunctions like this extend throughout the movie, catharses unfounded, as Hulk notes above: one of the (several) climaxes, say, hinges on the rescue of the animals on the island from an unprecedented winter storm, dragged whether they will or not to the shelter Roz had built for herself, piled cheek-by-jowl, predator with prey, a powder keg already sparked by this fight, that tussle, and Roz finds her (solar-powered) energy dangerously depleted—an unbearable tension resolved with an inspiring speech pulled from the ass of nowhere by our deuteragonist fox, Flick—a speech as cringe as Morgan Freeman’s astoundingly inadvertently hilarious “Be decent” speech from (the film version of) the Bonfire of the Vanities: the foundational basis of eat and get eaten overturned by a plea for common sense; wildness tamed, and thus, forgotten.
(I should’ve been—I was—clued in by an earlier, tossed-off joke, the opossum mother and her hilarious litter of tagalong infants, all pretending quite theatrically to die [“Meningitis takes time!” insists one], all to lampshade the importance of motherhood, or rather parenting, by pretending this role is thrust upon all of us equally, a thing to which to become inured, like the weather, never noticing, much less questioning, the labor demanded to reproduce what of ourselves is necessary for the labor. —“Here I am,” says the opossum mother, “with my seven children,” and there’s a bloodcurdling offscreen scream, “my six children,” she sighs, without missing a beat, and it’s bleak and it’s funny and it works in the moment, to be undone in the next: “I’m okay, Mom, I didn’t really die,” says the opossum kid, almost unseen—a suit’s note scribbled in the margins of the screenplay, realized as imperceptibly as possible, still managing to wreck the bit.)
And that’s not something they do to protect kids (i feel like it mostly makes kids feel weird and that feeling feelings is stupid). I think it’s something they do to protect adults.
As for #nodads, well. I mean. #nodads. —Fleeing a bear (don’t worry, they’re friends later), our protagonist robot falls, smashing a nest and its resident geese, and is left with an egg that soon enough hatches into the sole survivor, for which Roz takes responsibility: task oriented, she breaks this monstrous burden into three tidy, realizable goals: teach the gosling how to eat, how to swim, and how to fly, and inadvertently brings him up between and among what she does to set about fulfilling them. This isn’t coded as motherly, or mothering (Brightbill’s occasional modes of address notwithstanding); it’s just the work that needs to be done, when an infant is about. There’s no hint of authoritarian discipline, or patriarchal diktat, or any juvenile rebellion thereagainst. Other role models and caretakers abound among the animals on the island, all of them played by men, but not a one gets anywhere near striking distance of a father-figure: big brothers, tutors, mentors, rapscallions, nary a dad in the bunch.
But I can’t say the movie comes by its #nodads honestly: Roz, short for ROZZUM Unit 7134, is played by a woman, Lupita Nyong’o, and while there’s nothing remotely gendered or sexed about Roz’s design or presentation, femmebots are nonetheless very much a thing in the current imaginary: our AI assistants and helpful robots are coded as female far more often than not, clearly subservient, chipperly servile, selflessly available, and though Roz very much grows out of this role, the role is nonetheless there to grow out of. The movie can’t present a father-figure directly to Brightbill; it would throw Roz and that role into stark relief, and so what #nodads might be found isn’t by design; it’s at best an epiphenomenon of good intentions, a reflexive reaction to having slipped without thinking into another trope altogether (rather like the unfortunate echoes that ring in the only other roles played by women: the aforementioned opossum mother, and the slinkily manipulative third-act villain). It’s not anything the movie was trying to say; it’s what the movie didn’t realize it was saying, as it didn’t rise to the irony of stranding a soi-disant wild robot in such a domestically comedic situation.
But, that third-act villain—
The migration of the geese off the island and south, Brightbill in tow, was the first time since the opening, before the animals got verbose and the plot kicked in, that the movie took a breath and delivered some pure goshwow eyekicks. A shot of the weathered Golden Gate Bridge, deck aslosh with seawater, beautiful and wordlessly, terrifyingly implicative (that’s a 75-meter rise in sea levels): the movie cannily gives us a taste of what we hadn’t realized we’d wanted from it, in one of those moments thrilling, and stirring, but also earned. And the few-enough other hints we get, as to the state and condition of, well, us, in this world, ROZZUM robots crossing the oceans on container ships, headed for idyllic Syd Mead suburbs, the isolated and terribly compact farming outpost, that deploys a robot SWAT team to deal with an incursion of geese, the unindicated entity—Universal Dynamics? some nation-state, or city-state? an aggrieved, gunned-up farmers’ cooperative?—that sends an overpowered dropship with another robot SWAT team and the aforementioned slinky manipulator, all to fetch back a single stray ROZZUM unit: it would appear that human civilization, reeling from the ravages of a far more destructive warming of the globe than predicted, has retreated into heavily militarized enclaves, lashing out with overwhelming firepower to bigfoot the slightest hint of threat or variance. It’s not unrealistic when you put it like that, I suppose. But the movie does seem to present us with the first known example of solarpunk dystopia.
And yet, here’s the thing: all this tech? It all just, works. The various artificial intelligences, and Roz’s limitless power supply (unless the plot requires an outage), and the wingless levitation of the dropship and the villain, and the radio transponders (mostly), and the water-logged marketing decks, and, and, and I know, this isn’t what the movie is about, it’s all set-dressing and atmosphere and the occasional plot-point, it’s fine just to trust the tech as you let it enable you to tell the story you want to tell, but, but: that catastrophic sea-level rise, the isolated farm in the middle of a desert: isn’t just trusting the tech how we get to there?
Let’s face it: robots these days, in the current moment, are bartending mechanical Turks operated by untipped mixologists backstage at an Elon Musk launch party; artificial intelligence is a power-gobbling nonsense machine in some occulted service to the scammy shell games of ludicrously paper-wealthy fintech bros. They very clearly don’t just, y’know, work, not at all, and to a ruinous degree, and it’s not that every story with a robot in it has to address this fact, puncturing or at least punctuating the hubris of such tinpot Titans, but it’s nonetheless weird that a story so otherwise suffused with climate anxiety would, when it comes to the tech that’s shoving us into all this hot water, would just, y’know. Trust it?
It’s of a piece with the lashing out, sending a laser-powered SWAT team to take down a flock of geese: a default setting, unthinkingly assumed, a disjunction in the final work. So, when Roz sat herself down in a gorgeously rendered clearing to listen and observe the interactions of the animals about her, grinding away until she could learn how to talk to them, the better to sell herself and her services, all I could think of was the LLM she presumably depended on, hosted in some distant cloud-computing center, and all the power and water flowing to support it as it trained up on this vibrant new dataset. It was distracting. Exhausting, even. Dispiriting. —It’s all very pretty while it’s happening up on the screen, there. But.
As robot forces lay siege to the factory, Helena reveals she has burned the formula necessary to make new robots. The characters lament the end of humanity and defend their actions, despite the fact that their imminent deaths are a direct result of their choices. Busman is killed while attempting to negotiate a peace with the robots. The robots storm the factory and kill all the humans except for Alquist, the company’s Clerk of the Works (Head of Construction). The robots spare him because they recognize that “He works with his hands like a robot. He builds houses. He can work.”
