Beautifully understated and under-rated short story film compilation
with a connecting theme of robotics, with each film taking a very different
slant on the premise.
Unusually, an American film with a mostly Asian cast, this is an
imaginative, Asimovian approach to Robot stories, with the theme of
life, technology, death, etc. This is not a killer robots conquer the
world tale and it's a dammed sight more imaginative and well acted than
I Robot. The first story, ROBOT BABY tells of a couple that want to
adopt a baby. They are obliged to first of all raise a Robot baby to
test their ability to be good parents. The father copes well with the
delightfully silly looking fixed grin Humpty Dumpty egg that bleeps and
whistles like a Clanger, but the mother struggles. The sudden changes in
pitch from the child entity frighten her; she is scared of her own
infant. She drops him, and retreats from him. She is jealous when the
first word of this sophisticated Tamagotchi is dada. She then tries to
get her own parents to reprogram the child to love her more, but the
programming fails as the child exerts its own will. It runs away and she
even considers violence, but when she finds him pitifully crying as he
hides in a cupboard, she cries, and he comforts her - the bond that they
need to survive together is made.
The second
Story THE ROBOT MAKER is about SF fandom and
obsession and has no actual fantasy or SF elements at all. A man is run
over by a car and ends up in a coma on life support. His mother and
sister find some of his old toy robots which he adored as a child, but
which are now broken. The mother obsessively sets out to get the
collection repaired and replaced, finding the task increasingly
difficult in parallel to pressure to turn his machine off. She then
finds a final very rare toy in a dealer's store, but the owner won't
sell it, as it is too precious to him. She steals it, but she is too
late for her son and she sends the dealer the man's entire collection,
keeping only the final toy that she stole, for herself.
The third
story ROBOT LOVE is the most conventional. An android gets a job in a computer
IT department. He is
programmed to be nice and friendly and sociable, but the human workers are
mostly cold and indifferent to him. He works away at high speed and shows some
distress when people kiss and cuddle round him. Only one
worker, a man called Bob shows him any respect. Bob has to switch the robot off
as the workplace closes, but one night, he forgets. The robot walks the empty
corridors, but spots another android worker, a woman,
working in a similar environment on the opposite side of the street. The
next day, as people are mean to him again, he gets up, deserts his
duties and walks over the road to see the woman android, and they
immediately begin to snog and then to have sex right in front of
everyone. Bob ushers everyone out with insistence that the pair need
some privacy.
The last and
to me the best story is CLATY. Set in a future
where everyone can download their minds into a computer matrix and in
effect achieve immortality, and elderly sculptor is pressured by the
virtual reality lover who waits for him about making his downloads
before it is too late. He argues that he was not a nice man, and that he
cannot give himself a pleasure he never earned. He then goes away to die
alone, leaving nothing of himself behind. Strangely, his sacrifice is
made to seem noble and happy rather than sad. He dies with a smile on
his face. A little gem of a movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301777/
Arthur Chappell
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