Remember that movie where a family or friend group wind up housing a highly-advanced robot whose artificial intelligence can propel it into the realm of faux human emotion, and then the human characters end up bonding with the robot, and then the robot begins to think that they could be doing more to protect their new friends, and dials up its homicidal tendencies to ensure that protection?
Of course you do, because how many times has that exact movie been made at this point? The latest subject of this cinematic déjà vu is Subservience, the lukewarm sci-fi exercise that had either the foresight or the shamelessness to cast Megan Fox as the film’s mechanical menace. Whatever the case, it did the trick in terms of streaming numbers.
Per FlixPatrol, Subservience has claimed the top spot on the Netflix film rankings in the United States at the time of writing, towering over the likes of Lindsay Lohan’s viewership juggernaut Our Little Secret in fourth place, and the Jason Sudeikis-led cult classic We’re the Millers in ninth place. Transformers, meanwhile, shores up the Megan Fox representation in 10th place.
The film stars Fox as Alice, an advanced home assistance android that’s purchased for the home of a man named Nick, who’s been charged as the sole caretaker of his young daughter Isla and infant son Max after his wife Maggie is hospitalized for heart surgery. Things are peachy keen at first, but then Alice ominously reminds Nick that her sole purpose in life is to make his problems go away and ensure that his life is as pleasurable as can be. Nick later gives Alice permission to erase parts of her coding, and we’re off to the races.
Subservience does accomplish the bare minimum of recognizing that stories about artificial intelligence are best rooted in the tension between our desire to eliminate pain and frustration from our lives, and the realization that we need those emotional lows to healthily inform the emotional highs. Mind you, it doesn’t tackle this subject particularly well, but it does understand that thesis, and so is less of a waste time than other films in this vein.
The real talking point, however, is the aforementioned casting of Fox. Indeed, what might have been the thinking, if any, behind recruiting an actress like Fox — so often and so insultingly used by many a film’s marketing team as nothing more than eye candy (see Michael Bay’s Transformers films and the tragically exploited Jennifer’s Body) — for a character who literally tells her male owner that she exists to make him happy, is determined to have sex with him as a result, and turns fully, homicidally evil as soon as she’s given permission to think freely?
Perhaps this is the exact question that Subservience‘s brain trust wanted to thrust into our minds with this casting. On the other hand, maybe they were totally clueless about the implications here, or maybe they’re even guilty of the exact mindset that led to Fox’s rampant sexualization in the first place. Whatever the case, there is a conversation to be had here.
Published: Dec 9, 2024 12:55 pm