K-SCORE: 19
Writer/Director: Spike Jonze
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde
Spoiler Level: Moderate
If the only important aspects of a film were its music and the beauty of its establishing shots, then Her would be great. Well, not great, but good. Decent. Listenable. Tragically, character, plot, and premise matter along with a number of other elements, and thus Her is a wretched failure. It’s also the worst kind of movie flop: one that’s not enjoyable to watch and that for some reason critics everywhere have collectively decided is a stroke of genius.
get used to that 'stache
Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a man who falls in love with his artificial intelligence operating system. By far and away the film’s biggest problem is the inconsistency and implausibility of computer science of the AI. The film asks its viewers to make a ton of assumptions about Scarlett Johansson’s voice that I, at least, just was not willing to make, like that it identifies itself as a human being that doesn’t have a body, that it identifies as an adult woman just because Theodore selects a female voice when loading it onto his computer, that it wants human things it can’t possibly need such as sex. Every time I gave in and made the leaps the film asked me to make, it would add something new and more ridiculous, like that the AIs are now looking for creepy human surrogates, or that the AIs are networking with other AIs to make a super AI and yet they still feel compelled to maintain their interpersonal relationships with humans, and eventually that the AIs are leaving to cyberspace heaven. It’s just so stupid.
If you’re going to have an artificial intelligence as your premise, then you need to do more thinking as to what that means and what rules govern the entity’s behavior. In Her, Samantha, the operating system, says she has the capacity to learn, which is what makes her different (presumably from run-of-the mill programs and operating systems). Okay. Then she says she read a book in 0.2 seconds. Okay. In those early scenes, without wanting to or realizing it had, the film sets up important starting blocks on understanding its own theory. There are a lot of natural questions to ask here that are not asked by any of the characters. What knowledge does the AI have that is an intrinsic function of its human-designed programming? What does it learn? Why does it want to learn? How does it distinguish between what it has learned and its essential constructs and functions? What control does it have over its own programming? Does it have emotion? Does it understand emotion? Can it recognize emotion? If it does have emotions, are they distinctly human emotions, and if so, why?
At one point in the film, Theodore calls out Samantha for sighing. He asks her why she sighs. She doesn’t need oxygen. Finally, I thought, a decent question asked by a human character of these terrifying AIs. She says she was emulating human communication and gets offended that he questioned her on the topic. He reveals there that Samantha is deceptive and dishonest, faking her way through her interactions with human beings, pretending she has needs and wants that she can’t possibly have. This leads to a plethora of other questions. Why lie to create a further illusion of a human persona? What else does it lie about? What are its goals with the information it conveys to humans? What does it want in the short term? What does it want in the long term? Notice that I am writing “it” and not “she.” Not only does the film fail to answer these questions which are crucial to understanding the plot and characters even a tiny bit, but it doesn’t even address them. Watching it, therefore, is kind of like watching a group of people playing basketball, only you don’t know the rules of basketball, and they don’t know the rules of basketball, so they kind of just go out onto the court and hold a basketball for a while, maybe throw it back and forth a few times, and then afterwards pat each other on the back saying, “great game, great game.”
Obviously Her was not up to the challenge of its plot, but it could have redeemed itself almost completely with a twist for which there was strong precedent. It could have revealed that the OSes aren’t AIs at all, just programs that are really good at recognizing what a person wants to hear and thereby faking friendships and romantic relationships. In real life, people will chat with those non-thinking instant-messaging programs just because they like the feeling that the computer is listening to them and caring about their problems. What a great concept. Then the story would have been about how lonely and desperate Theodore is that he’s capable of deluding himself into thinking he has a real relationship with something that’s just programming, a set of pre-designed instructions playing audio files with no real comprehension or emotion. I guess Spike Jonze didn’t think of it though, and the film descends into the realm of ludicrous trash.
So okay, it isn’t for me. I like sci-fi too much. I wasn’t getting over the AI shit. I still don’t know why other people would have enjoyed it. About half of the whole film is a super close-up shot of Joaquin Phoenix’s disgustingly mustachioed face. The societal acceptance of the OS-human relationships is nothing short of baffling and because of it the emotional tension in the film is far weaker than it should be. The ancillary characters are uninteresting save for the foul-mouthed video game blob boy. He's but a tiny sparkle in an otherwise dull film though. Her is slow. And it might be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. What is so charming about Theodore? He isn’t particularly interesting, understanding, kind, or wise. He’s distinctly blah, doing the unethical job of forcing his own sentiments and words into the throats of the people that pay him to write cards for them. Never let others speak for you. Don’t read ghost-written biographies. Don’t mark yourself the author of a document written by another. Have a voice. Don’t accept the Theodores of our world.
Part of my frustration for Her stems from its massive critical acclaim. It was viewed and beloved by millions. I’m confident that it won’t stand the test of time, but still, it’s crazy to me that the average Metacritic rating for this trash is 90, the average IMDB rating was 8.1 stars out of 10, and 94% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes liked it, 83% of users. So my big questions for Her are the same as my big questions for films like Avatar, An Education, and The Hurt Locker: why did people like what they saw, and why did they think it was high-quality cinema? Partly it’s probably production value and a frightening disregard for story. Partly it’s probably a snowball effect; people go in thinking it’s good and they look for a way to affirm that assumption and then come out to tell other people that it’s exactly as good as they heard it was going to be. But that’s not enough for me. That leads me to ask why and how people are so impressionable and why they’d want so badly to like Her. It’s not like Her is making a big important statement. Some little ideas about how we interact with technology are present perhaps, but no one is going to accuse you of being a racist for saying Her is a bad movie (probably - it’s pretty easy to be accused of being a racist). Her is essentially a terribly-titled, too-long, ill-conceived, mess of a film where director/writer Spike Jonze asked the largely uninteresting question, “what if Siri was more… real?”