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Useful information
Prime News delivers timely, accurate news and insights on global events, politics, business, and technology
By Chris Snellgrove | Published
The arrival of AI in the form of programs like ChatGPT and Dall-E 2 has sparked intense speculation about the role of this technology and how it can improve and alter our daily lives. It’s a debate that continues to rage in Hollywood, with many of the evil robot movies of yesteryear being replaced by new movies about new kinds of danger (like the new Mission Impossible movies that have a disembodied AI as their Big Bad). If you want a movie that wraps the anxieties of yesterday and today in a sleek, sexy vision of tomorrow, then it’s time you watch it. Subordination on Netflix.
Subordination is a film about a construction foreman whose wife’s illness forces him to buy a realistic female android to help around the house. Unfortunately, the robot develops feelings for his human master and it begins to seem like he feels the same way. However, when the robot decides to become a single-byte female and attempt to kill the man’s wife, the flesh-and-blood couple must join together in a fight for their own survival… one that could turn into a fight for the soul. of humanity. .
the cast of Subordination is intimately small and includes Italian actor Michele Morrone as the man who buys a robot to help when his wife (Madeline Zima, best known for her roles in the babysitter and Californication) gets sick. The rest of the cast includes Matilda Firth, Andrew Whipp and Jude Allen Greenstein. But the real star of the show is Megan Fox, whose experience embodying both sensuality and horror in films like Jennifer’s body helps her bring to life a sexy robot that simply can’t be contained by his own programming.
Subordination It doesn’t actually do much at the box office because it was released digitally first, although it grossed a measly $246,010 in a brief theatrical run that included places like Russia and Lithuania. On digital, the film baffled critics and currently has a 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Overall, critics complained that the film was predictable and some compared it negatively to more inventive killer AI films, such as M3GAN.
So I can hear you cranking up those keyboards now to ask the big question: why the hell am I recommending you watch a straight-to-stream video that most critics hated? On the one hand, Megan Fox is perfect as the robot who threatens to destroy this family’s life by being anything but robotic. In reality, it’s her misplaced passion that causes all of these problems in the first place, and the subtext that it’s actually her humanity that makes her so inhuman to the world is disturbing in its bleak depth.
Further, Subordination does a good job of metaphorically dramatizing the public’s different reactions to the invention of AI. The film makes it explicit that our male protagonist is concerned about how the arrival of perfectly human replicas will affect his construction work and his job in general. This doesn’t stop him from playing with his own robot, of course, and his character ultimately sums up both our fascination and fear of this new technology.
Finally, your mileage may vary, but I enjoyed the film’s clear thesis that the road to the AI apocalypse is paved with good intentions. Our main character has good reasons for purchasing a robotic assistant in the first place, and even his moment of weakness with her is expressed in terms of relieving her stress so she can support her family and employees. However, it soon becomes clear that AI is destructive no matter how well-intentioned its users are, and that’s a message that, frankly, more people could hear.
Will you find? Subordination a moving meditation on the dangers of AI, or will you turn it off to go see it? M3GAN again? You won’t know until you stream it on Netflix and decide for yourself. Afterwards, you may never look at the AI (or Megan Fox) the same way again.