Starring Chloë Grace Moretz

Written and Directed by Mattson Tomlin

Hulu, available now (US); streaming on Netflix from 7th January

 

In a post-apocalyptic world rocked by a violent android uprising, a young pregnant woman and her boyfriend desperately search for safety.

I am in no way making light of the pandemic that has brought suffering and tragedy to millions around the planet, and I know all too well how lockdown restrictions have made film production tough.  I also understand that one way out of that is to come up with something requiring minimal cast numbers, for example a high concept sci-fi drama about lone survivors battling the apocalypse – which is both Covid practical and also timely, but… but… but enough with the end of the world already!!

To be fair, some of these pre-date the pandemic but in the last two years we have endured George Clooney sending us to sleep in the dreary Midnight Sky; the equally abysmal Awake (which ironically was primarily successful at sending us to sleep); Tom Hanks keeping us marginally more amused with Finch; the laughable Greenland with Gerard Butler and his strange accents; not to mention a plethora of series including The Stand, Black Summer, Into The Night and currently Station Eleven hitting our screens.

Black Summer is good. The jury’s out on Station Eleven. As for the rest of them, as Greta Thunberg might say: ‘Blah, blah, blah’.

Riz Ahmed recently promised us an alien invasion in Encounter but even that failed to deliver despite a misleading reference to Steven Spielberg’s classic in its title that should have seen it done under the trades descriptions act.

Mattson Tomlin’s Mother/Android promises a violent android uprising, but apart from a domestic robot trying to throttle someone in the first five minutes we don’t encounter any more of the supposedly deadly foe for another three quarters of an hour, and when we do one of them is wearing an apron and the other is in double denim. As android apocalypses go this one is definitely lacking in sartorial elegance. Tomlin seems to have got his androids confused with his zombies who are allowed to dress like schmucks and behave like idiots. Androids surely aspire to the basics of design elegance and cold hearted intelligence – which we get a helpful lecture about half way through the movie, just in case we’ve stumbled across this dreadful waste of 90 minutes having never encountered science fiction before.

Having said that, there is a twist which our heroine, Georgia (Chloë Grace Moretz), fails to see coming due to never having read or seen any narrative concerning androids at any point in her shallow existence. To be fair, I’m a great admirer of Ms Moretz (riveting and funny in The Miseducation of Cameron Post) who I hope has had stiff words with her agent for allowing her to sign up for this dross.

The film limps along to its nonsensical climax, bizarrely jumping over several crucial scenes, which I can only imagine couldn’t be filmed for some reason – or perhaps someone accidentally deleted the video files – and then culminates in a double amputation on Moretz’s romantic oppo which plays out like a sight gag from Airplane.

Spoiler: it isn’t supposed to.

Finally, there’s an emotional denouement doused in toe curling sentimentality which makes no sense whatsoever, and bears no logical relation to anything that has gone before.

Verdict: This is a truly terrible film. It’s been a tough few years, but please can we declare a moratorium on the apocalypse, if not for Greta’s sake but for this reviewer’s sanity?  And if the end of the world is heading our way, and no amount of blah blah blah can stop it, then please – please! – can it be more interesting than this? 1/10

Martin Jameson