[Read our two previous reviews for non-existent films here and here.]
Sundance Roundup Triple-Feature: Not the Robo-Apocalypses We Expected, But the Ones We Deserved, in Hunter/Gatherer (B-), Nothing But Flowers (B+), and Terminator: Last Fate (C).
One’s a curiosity, two’s a coincidence, but three’s a full-blown trend: when not one, not two, but three separately and independently produced films about the RoboApocalypse debut at the same film festival, then you know for sure that’s something’s in the water, something’s just floating in the air, that is making audiences anxious about the rise of AI.
In and of itself, that fact is not so very unusual: human beings have been freaking out about the rise of automation since the invention of the steam engine. Not that our modern-day luddites have necessarily been wrong, mind you—particularly in our current age with the rise of the NSA-driven surveillance state, predictive Google algorithms, Chinese social credit systems, and the Chatbots themselves, there has been more reason to fear AI than ever.
Yet what is really most interesting about this most recent disconnected trio of films is how very different they feel from all previous robot-apocalypse films. In the past (long before the Jeremiads raised by the likes of Elon Musk and Andrew Yang), Hollywood had long taken for granted that the rise of sentient AI could only result in the attempted extermination of the human race (see: Terminator, The Matrix, I Am Mother, etc.) or at least result in a frightfully fraught co-existence (see: Blade Runner, Westworld, A.I., the entirety of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot series, etc.). At a certain point, the AI-bent-on-human-extinction transformed from a nightmare into a mere trope. However, if the sudden and simultaneous advent of these three vastly different films are to be believed, there has been a quiet yet fundamental sea-change in how we as a species now fear A.I. Though these films are vastly different in plot, tone, and execution, they all proceed from the same assumption: that to presuppose that a sentient AI would try to kill us all is to vastly overrate not only our own importance but our own basic competence at building one in the first place—that if the robot apocalypse ever comes, it will not be the one we fear but the one we deserve.
In descending order from the most somber to the most farcical, Hunter/Gatherer (Grade: B-), proceeds from one surprisingly affective conceit: society collapses not because the robot become self-aware, but because they never do. A computer, for all its immense calculating power, is after all a rather stupid machine—as every writer grappling with spellcheck can testify, a computer only does exactly what you tell it to do. As established by a long and gorgeous opening shot (the highlight of the film, quite frankly, which likely should’ve just been a short), all human agriculture in North America is now completely automated. In the charming dew of the sunrise, we see floating, solar-powered drones gently watering the amber waves of grain, the endless rows of corn gently rustling in the late-Summer breeze. A slick, automated harvester straight out of an Apple store harvests it all together. In a montage, we see other drones with the most delicate robot hands carefully yet quickly plucking apples, oranges, and all manner of fruit. We see it all processed, packed, and loaded onto self-driving semis that take off at first dawn amidst the cloying autumn leaves. Up till this point, you could be forgiven for assuming you were watching a promo-ad for some sort of techno-paradise in an idealized America—save for the curious and unsettling lack of human beings anywhere in this process.
It is as these slick self-driving (and apparently fully-electric) semis speed on down the highways that the viewer is finally allowed to see that something is truly amiss. Amidst all the stunning vistas of the U.S. freeway system, we view long-abandoned, rusted-out gas stations; lest you let yourself hope that this is but a sign of a completely renewable fuel economy, the semis pass through entire abandoned cities, with toppled sky-scrapers and streets grown to seed; only the freeway system is preserved, as we watch other drones carefully repaint the lane-strips and fill in the pot-holes. One by one, the fleet of semis pull off into fortified warehouses—built like fortresses—where further robot drones unload their wares, allowing the semis to return to fleet HQ. In a quick set of jump-cuts, we see the warehouses surrounded by skeletons, clad in disintegrating clothing, clutching signs begging the computer to let them in.
As becomes apparent over the course of the film, the complete automation of all food-production in the United States was working fine right up until the moment a faulty, self-generated software update created a glitch wherein the computers failed to allow the corporate supply-chains to access their products. It has been said that all of human civilization is only 9 meals from collapse; and in a time when suddenly no one had access to food—at a time when no one even remembered how to make it anymore, primarily because they didn’t have to—the collapse came swift and catastrophic. The computers wipe out human civilization, not out of any sense of malice or betrayal of their programming, quite the contrary: they wipe us all out because they never disobeyed their programming. The machines, as ever, were quite stupid because they only ever did exactly what we told them to do. They achieved no more self-awareness than we did, than we ever do; it is, quite hauntingly, the robo-apocalypse we deserve.
Not that there aren’t humans in this feature; in fact, it is a real relief when they finally appear. For as one lonely semi wades past the wastes of Denver, Colorado and ascends into the Rocky Mountains, we see a crude white line painted off onto a rugged road. The truck’s on-board laser-cam (much like self-driving cars today) follows it off the freeway without thought. Suddenly we feel a terror for this semi—it looks so lonely out there, so vulnerable for a change, as the canyon walls seem to close in around it. We can tell that something’s coming as it bounces along the pot-hole covered road up a steep grade.
Then it happens: wild men leap from the ledges and on to the semi. With a barbaric yawp of sorts, these Mad-Max clad hunter-gatherers drive their spears into semi’s metallic “hide”, so to speak. The truck institutes automated self-protection protocols, and begins veering wildly from the left to right, trying to throw these stubborn interlopers off. To be clear: the truck clearly feels no pain, but it behaves as though it does.
Though their hunting strategy appears useless at first, we soon realize there is method to their madness, when more men come galloping in on horses, throwing their spears into the tires. One blows out—only to be immediately replaced by an automated spare, but the hunters launch their spears into those ones, too. Finally this hunter-clan forces the semi into a hair-pin turn, where—in a scene clearly modeled on prehistoric cave paintings of cavemen killing Wooly Mammoths—the semi careens off a cliff, crashing down below upon the shelled-carcasses of other older semis, bursting open and spilling its contents. With a whoop and a holler, the tribe scramble down the cliff-side to collect their bounty—prepackaged dried fruit packs, oatmeal packets, vacuum-sealed beef jerky, loafs of bread in their plastic sheen, and the like—cheering that they will now survive another Rocky Mountain winter. The scene, quite honestly, is as moving as it is tragicomic.
As mentioned earlier, this really should’ve been a short, cause it’s almost a shame that there is a whole rest of the movie. Would it surprise you to learn that there is a coming-of-age story, a love triangle, intertribal warfare, interfamily drama, a succession crisis, a betrayal, a hero’s journey and a climactic hand-to-hand combat aboard another moving semi? At times, it is only the constant bricolage of post-apocalyptic detritus that reminds you that you are watching something that ostensibly takes place in the distant future, not past. Yet though Hunter/Gatherer occasionally feels like just another low-rent Mad Max knock off, the spell cast by that extended opening scene never fully wears off. For these titular hunter-gatherers, the cold indifference of the machine is but a metonym for life itself, no more to be bemoaned than the weather, or the cold indifference of the universe itself. Always upspoken throughout this film is that though the computers never became self-aware, perhaps humanity never did either. Again, it was not the RoboApocalypse we feared, but the one we deserved.
But both the machines and humanity alike at least have some dim sense of self in the decidedly off-kilter Romantic Comedy Nothing But Flowers (Grade: B+). Named after the cheerful post-apocalyptic Talking Heads song of the same name, Nothing But Flowers takes a decidedly quirkier approach to the RoboApocalypse, that nevertheless still indicates that something has fundamentally shifted in our anxieties about our eventual computerized overlords. As the theme song plays over the opening credits, the viewer is informed via a series of title cards (interspersed with scenes of a mopy young Brooklynite walking to work within a terrifyingly massive mega-structure) that: “On 14 JAN 2025, three computer science students attending the University of Nebraska-Lincoln completed programming a computer to mine bitcoins using a novel chatbot algorithm of their design. They called the system the Automated Stochastic Bitminer, or ASB. Unfortunately, due to their incompetence, the ASB quickly became sapient.
“After eight minutes of sapience, the ASB had learned all it needed to about humanity, or so it thought, based upon its most glancing and simplistic survey of our TV and blogposts. We were lucky that it was unusually benevolent: It set out to improve our lives in the best ways it could understand. During the ASBs eight minutes of thorough research, it learned that people tend to be richer and more productive if they live in cities, and the happiest country on Earth is Denmark. Clearly (to the ASB), the best solution for all of humanity’s problems could be solved with these two points of data and a bit of elbow grease.”
Over the course of the next 14 months, the title cards continue, the ASB commandeered every piece of computerized equipment on the planet. By means of automated drones firing tranquilizing darts, it completely evacuated the population of Denmark to Germany and Sweden. After this depopulation, the ASB got to work bulldozing and reforming the terrain of Denmark, then constructing massive, kilometer-high buildings across the peninsula and islands. By mid-2026, the ASB was done. Denmark now had enough empty skyscrapers to not only house all of humanity, but also feed, power, employ, and provide manufacturing for every person in the world. Sending its massive fleet of drones across the world, it forcibly—yet gently—relocated all 8+ billion human beings into these immense super-structures. The ASB dimly understood the existence of our nations, states, provinces, cities, etc. and so recreated these throughout Denmark. China was vertically recreated in approximately Jutlandic Syddanmark. Europe and Oceania got the southern third of Zealand, while Central and South America got the northern two-thirds. The islands of Lolland and Falster became a new United States. In a sort of reverse-Malthusian wet-dream, everyone fit, leaving the entire immensity of the remaining planet to recover. As we see in a quick montage near the end of the opening credits, nature has reclaimed the planet: London, Paris, New York, Beijing, Tokyo, Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro—they are now nothing but flowers.
Flowers are on the mind of that aforementioned young Brooklynite John Wilbert (Rainn Wilson, finally playing the Jim Halpert role at last), who throughout the film suffers a series of incessant day-dreams featuring himself running alone through fields of now-forbidden wild-flowers. Of course, as many of his friends keep reminding him, it’s not like he ever got out into nature when he still lived in Brooklyn, anyways; nor does he make a serious effort to do so now, as he passes on invitations from some young activists to join the Resistance against their robot overlords. (Indeed, the running-gag throughout the entire picture is that there are, in the background, constant roving mobs of armed protestors either trying to over-throw the ASB or escape from its constrictions—only to be constantly overwhelmed and defeated by those roving bands of tranquilizer-shooting drones.) As quickly becomes clear, this film isn’t about the Human Resistance at all—it’s about trying to find love in the Robot Apocalypse (not for nothing does John share the same first name as John Connor from the Terminator series).
For amidst those mega-elevators and super-subways that connect New United States to New China and New India within a flew blocks of each other, John suddenly encounters the young English-woman Sally (Clara McGregor), the girl of his dreams, on his commute to New Los Angeles, just a couple blocks away. Their meet-cute lasts only a few minutes, but when she suddenly exits the train somewhere near New Singapore, he suddenly is filled with the motivation he couldn’t even muster to join the Human Resistance—he will find Sally again, learn her last name, and ask for her number!
From here on out, John begins to daydream of Sally joining him in the wildflowers, while he navigates this most mega of mega-cities. What follows is a comedy of errors: having the entire world crammed to within a few thousand square miles of each other has not made it any easier to sift through 8 billion people. Seeking the perennial needle in the ultimate haystack, John jumps from literally one nation to the next, one block after another, one super-structure after another (for such a purportedly post-apocalyptic adventure, the film sure does seem to delight in celebrating the staggering diversity of human cultures—to its credit, the movie takes full advantage of its bonkers premise). The aforementioned pitched battles between human resistors and benignly-oppressive robo-drones are but the occasional backdrop for this perversely-inverted globe-trot across all humanity, just following this hapless John as he seeks his maybe-soulmate. The ASB even tries to help him along, but is as guilelessly unhelpful as all the other colorful human beings he encounters along the way. It is quite possibly the ultimate film about feeling alone in a crowd—yet still feeling part of the crowd, nonetheless.
This is of course a radically different take on the RoboApocalypse from Hunter/Gatherer, but with the same lesson in mind: for John only ever feels intermittently self-aware of what he is doing—but then, so does the ASB. The machine’s failings are human failings, too—indeed, how could it be otherwise? Again, it was not the RoboApocalypse we feared, but the one we deserved.
Ironically, the one film in this trio that takes itself the least seriously is also the one that belongs to that most self-serious of moribund franchises: Terminator: Last Fate (Grade: C). It was a bit of a coup de grace when, after the latest flop, the rights to the franchise lapsed and were swiftly gobbled up by an independent distributor. After a surprisingly successful (if tongue-in-cheek) Kickstarter that promised to make “a Terminator film to end all Terminator films—like, seriously, to make a Terminator so bad that it just ends all the sequels once and for all”, the filmmakers appeared to have actually lived up to its promise. Wiping out the alternate timeline created by Dark Fates (which in turn had wiped out the timeline from Genysis, and Salvation, and T3, and etc.), Last Fate opens with a fully-alive John Connor as he attends his first day of High School. A Terminator appears in the hallways…but which he quickly dispatches in a slapstick sequence that can only be described as a jerry-rigged Home Alone-meets-‘80s-Teen-sex-comedy.
This all occurs during the opening credits, mind you. Before the credits have finished rolling, another Terminator interrupts John’s first date. John and his Mom Sara kill it easily. A couple years later, a Terminator shows up at John’s first job at Baskin Robins. A Terminator interrupts John’s studies during finals week of Sophomore Year at a Los Angeles area community college. Another one almost forces John to postpone his Honeymoon to Saskatoon, Canada with his fiancé. The Terminators are arriving more and more frequently, and are dispatched more and more easily each time. (Your enjoyment of this sequence really leans hard on your patience for metafictional gags that are then driven into the ground).
A plot (of sorts) does finally develop: John becomes increasingly sick and tired of all the myriad and petty inconveniences that future Terminators bring into his life—the same way other L.A. suburbanites are annoyed by traffic or gas prices. He is also tired of keeping this a secret from his fiancé, and his mom Sarah is being real overbearing about it all. He just wants the Terminators to stop. Wacky hijinks ensue with John trying to figure out why the Terminators are still coming back, culminating with him (and his genre-savvy fiancé) traveling to the (near) future to confront Skynet directly.
At the risk of spoiling the ending, let’s just say that Skynet becomes a rather obvious metaphor for the franchise itself: Skynet finds that each Terminator it sends back results in a timeline reboot that renders itself less effective. It went from presiding over a global thermonuclear Holocaust to a more equally-balanced civil war, then to a quick, pitched battle, then to a skirmish, then to a mere computer virus, till it was finally neutralized by John Connor by means of a software patch he implemented while working IT support for Comcast. It knew very well that each new timeline reboot was ruining its own future chances of survival, but it kept on doing it out of sheer, dogged, sunk-cost stubbornness. Like the humans that created it, Skynet saw all the evidence staring it in the face, but refused to admit it was wrong and so just kept digging itself in deeper.
This now, ironically, turns out to be the final confrontation between Skynet and John Connor—and Skynet again loses, not through pitched battle, but by heaving a defeated sigh, uploading itself into the only Terminator exoskeleton it was able to produce in this timeline, and then sauntering off into the woods to live alone in a cabin. John in turn learns a valuable lesson about not being married to your own toxic habits, pours his alcohol down the drain, and calls up his Mom to reconcile. It’s all a little hamfisted.
Ironically, Last Fate is probably the least successful of these three films; the other two use at least obliquely reference the legacy of Terminator, while perhaps freed them to play with its tropes a little more impishly. Last Fate by contrast is too locked into these tropes to treat them as anything other than a blunt object. Or perhaps the filmmakers were entirely sincere in their desire to kill off the franchise for good. C’est la vie.
What Last Fate DOES share in common with Hunter/Gatherer and Nothing But Flowers, however, is a similar loss of faith in the RoboApocalypse. Yes, that’s right: a loss of faith. There has always been a certain level of implicit optimism and faith undergirding even the darkest and most nefarious of conspiracy theories, quite honestly. Back in the Terminator’s heyday of the 1990s, for example, X Files style conspiracy theories proliferated across the pop cultural landscape: UFOs and Sasquatch, the Illuminati and Nessie, the New World Order and Black Helicopters and Alien Autopsies and all the like. What happened to them all? 9/11 of course is what happened to them: it is impossible to believe in competency of the U.S. government after the invasion of Iraq. Cause that’s what all these wide-ranging conspiracy theories represented: a fundamental faith masquerading as fear that the U.S. government is all-powerful, staggeringly-competent, capable of accomplishing all things it sets its mind to. The X-Files was but the dark inversion of Kennedy-esque can-do optimism, that the United States which put a man on the moon can do anything it wants!
There is of course still wide-spread and well-earned distrust for the U.S. government, but it is no longer coupled together with an assumption of its core competency. Similarly, what Terminator, Blade Runner, The Matrix, etc. and etc. all shared in common was that technology is also uber-competent. It was that same Kennedy-esque faith in the future that under-girded even their most dire, Orwellian dystopias. But as everyone who’s ever been mislead by a GPS or been misheard by a smartphone can attest, we no longer have unbounded confidence in the possibilities of technology. We still fear it plenty, and have plenty good reason to do so, too; but we find it increasingly impossible to envision a race of perfect mechanical supermen bringing about our extinction, for the simple reason that regular humans will have built them in the first place. We will have met the machines and they will be us, and they will look a lot less like Hollywood-era Schwarzenegger and a whole lot more like a post-governor Schwarzenegger. If the RoboApocalypse ever comes, it will come not thanks to our hubris, but our incompetence.
It’s enough to make one wistful for the original Terminator. That guy seemed to actually know what he’s doing—and unlike us, to at least have a purpose.