2 weeks Ago
It's extremely tempting to joke that AfrAId feels as though it is written and directed by artificial intelligence. Riddled with plot threads that go nowhere, characters whose arcs happen off-screen between scenes, and enough holes in its strained internal logic that it's charitable to even say it retains the shape of a horror film, the film is so abysmal that it's hard not to feel as if someone asked ChatGPT to crank out a half-baked M3GAN knock-off, specifically asking for it to be half-baked. But that would let writer-director Chris Weitz (American Pie, The Twilight Saga: New Moon) off the hook—AfrAId's problems are all too human, mundane, and, worst of all, boring.
When marketing consultant Curtis Pike (John Cho) is ordered by his boss to test out a new smart home AI with his family, he timidly acquiesces as tech company employee Melody (Havana Rose Liu) installs cameras all around the family home. The new digital assistant, AIA (also voiced by Liu), displays an eerily benevolent prescience for the needs of each member of the Pike family, most notably for Meredith's (Katherine Waterston) exhaustion in trying to revive her doctoral thesis while being an active and attentive mother for their three children. However, as AIA starts to exert more and more unsolicited control over their lives to solve their problems, the Pikes find it difficult to exert any freedom beyond the prescribed solutions AIA intuits for them.
Don't let it be said that Weitz's script doesn't at least try to address a number of technophobic anxieties that have been attendant with the rise of artificial intelligence. Whether it's eldest daughter Iris (Lukita..
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