Matt once again had me on as a guest for his DTC Connoisseur Podcast this week. It was an honor to appear on this special 200th episode and talk about Subservience. It’s a fun listen, and if you want to hear our in-depth discussion, check it out here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Nwkshc42ekeFQRBgwSMlA
Megan Fox stars in the surprisingly entertaining sci-fi flick from Millennium Films. When Maggie (Madeline Zima) is sick in the hospital, her husband Nick (Michele Morrone) needs help around the house. He does what any man would do in a situation like that: Purchase a sexy lifelike AI robot maid named Alice (Fox). Before long, Alice even takes to comforting the man of the house, if you know what I mean. Trouble brews when Maggie comes home from the hospital and Alice decides nothing is going to stand in the way of her and her new sugar daddy.
Fox is quite good in this. It would be an easy jab to say that she is perfectly cast as a sexy and emotionless human robot. However, if you look closer, she’s actually doing some interesting work here. She has no prosthetics (that I could tell) and uses her blank stare and a monotone, yet friendly voice. Her body language and mannerisms feel synthetic too. Like she’s almost human. Most of the time in these kinds of movies, the robots look too human. Fox makes you feel like she’s totally a robot, except that she’s just real enough looking that you could absentmindedly find yourself telling all your troubles to her.
Subservience is one of those movies that wind up being just a little better than they should be as the actors all commit to their roles better than you might expect. S.K. Dale directed the hell out of this thing. Whether he’s giving us a Fifty Shades of Sexbot sequence or delivering a Terminator-inspired action scene, Dale manages to breathe enough life into some of the standard cliches to make them feel fresh. I also liked the way everyone just casually accepts robots in their everyday life (the robot maid store looks just like your average IKEA) and how their banal appearance sort of even makes them look even more threatening. Dale also directed Fox in Till Death, which based on the strength of this, I just may have to check out.
Essentially, this feels like a SyFy Channel and Lifetime had a baby. Think The Wrong AI Nanny. However, it hits all the right notes and delivers what you’d want from a Megan Fox robot movie. And more.
AKA: Alice.
No comments:
Post a Comment