Reviews & Previews - Her

Posted on Sunday, January 12, 2014 at 05:00 PM

Movie: Her

Her

Reviewed by: S. Tran

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams
Directed by: Spike Jonze
Rated: R
Running Time: 126 minutes

Movie or Prediction?

A lot of us probably sit around thinking about where our relationship with technology is going. Spike Jonze has the talent to craft a thoughtful, honest and effective film to present a coherent vision of those thoughts. The movie avoids becoming art house slop by avoiding any kind of stereotypes. Each character is unique and their interactions don’t fall into any Hollywood traps.

Theodore (Phoenix) is a lonely writer trying to deal with an impending divorce when he purchases an operating system with artificial intelligence. That intelligence manifests itself into Samantha (Johansson), a name the system chooses for itself. As she (it?) explains, she will continue to learn as they interact and her personality will develop further as time goes on.

Theodore is understandably dumbstruck by this new “person” in his life and it’s likely helped by the fact that his computer sounds like Scarlett Johansson and not the lady who tells you to enter you credit card number when buying things over the phone. Samantha and Theodore eventually begin to grow closer and the film goes into uncharted territory examining the social and practical issues of being in love with something not only inanimate but also disembodied. To be clear Theodore develops feelings for Samantha as a personality, he doesn’t actually sit there embracing his hard drive or anything.

The issues that Theodore and Samantha have are both personal and universal at the same time. While she only appears as voice you hear onscreen, after a while you can almost forget that Samantha only exists within the computer. It seems that the problems that technology may present us may only be a magnification of the sorts of issues humans have been dealing with for thousands of years.

Of course the premise does allow us to explore new paths as well and the film presents some intriguing issues, such as how someone might “consummate” such a relationship. It’s handled well and is, at times, uncomfortable and why not? We’re already uncomfortable with technology and are scrambling to develop laws and rules and new social norms. If we all suddenly started being able to bring Scarlett Johansson into our homes the problems would increase exponentially.

In fact my only complaint about the film is that I would have liked more exploration into how the world is handling this sudden leap in technological evolution. At one point Theodore reveals to his co-worker that he is dating his operating system and that news is met with little more than an invitation to go on a double date. In fact it doesn’t seem like people having relationships with their machines has any real impact on the word at large which I found to be a bit odd. But perhaps there is a message in that from Spike Jonze as well. Perhaps we are already well on our way to a point where people literally falling in love with their technology is no big deal.

This is a great film, full of good performances and a story that takes advantage of the wonderful premise at it’s core.

4 out of 5 stars.

S. Tran also writes at Cracked.com, Gunaxin.com and Uproxx.com