Tagline:
She’ll keep you safe.
Wide Release Date:
June 7, 2019
Directed by:
Grant Sputore
Written by:
Michael Lloyd Green, Grant Sputore
Produced by:
Timothy White, Kelvin Munro
Starring:
Clara Rugaard
Rose Byrne
Hilary Swank
PREGAME THOUGHTS
I had a coworker named Bart who would recommend movies constantly, constantly, even though he knew I wasn’t much of a movie watcher. I spent ten years working with him before he moved on to another job, but the list of movies is endless and he continues to text me with recommendations. I barely remember any of them! Usually, I’d pass along the recommendations to my dad. They both had similar tastes in cerebral science fiction, and eventually Bart would start cherry picking movies my dad would like because, you know, I was a lost cause.
I Am Mother stuck with me because Bart told me to watch this one without reading a single thing about it. No reviews, no synopses, no nuthin’. My dad watched the movie and he absolutely agreed. Go in blind. And now, three years later and without an iota of prior knowledge (not even the cast), the time is ripe!
THE 500(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS
It’s some year in the future! It could be 2160. It could be 2029. Humans have gone extinct, but there is a kickass bunker full of technology equipment, food, medical supplies, and dozens of frozen human embryos! The place is overseen by a spiffy automaton named Mother (voiced by Rose Byrne), named as such because she is raising a young human through the course of the movie. The young human is aptly named Daughter (Clara Rugaard).
The very definition of a MILF, baby.
Daughter grows up with no human contact other than through endless old episodes of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Daughter spends the majority of her existence building knowledge in an impossibly broad range of fields and taking exams. She is not allowed to leave the bunker, as Mother claims the outside world is contaminated. Therefore, Daughter has never left the bunker.
Daughter’s world is rocked when she discovers a woman, aptly named Woman (Hilary Swank), crying for help outside of the airlock. After a bout of internal conflict, Daughter allows the wounded Woman to enter the bunker with a hazmat suit. Woman claims that Mother cannot be trusted. Daughter herself doesn’t know who to trust now: the robot she’s known for 15 years, or the woman she’s known for 15 minutes! A conundrum.
Trust slowly becomes earned on both sides. Woman talks about how the outside isn’t contaminated, but it’s swarming with other robots. All of the robots are dangerous, and she does mean all of. the. robots… ALL. Hint hint. Daughter helps Woman by removing the bullet from her wound and stitching her up.
Daughter and Woman bond a little bit while Woman heals, but Mother grows suspicious of their relationship and starts intervening when possible. Daughter passes another exam, and Mother allows her to pick one of the freeze-dried embryos from the cryogenic chamber so that she can have a sibling. During this touching event, she discovers three empty embryo slots. Suspicious!
As time goes on, Daughter becomes more and more wary of Mother. Their relationship becomes more tense, and complete trust is splintering. After Daughter snoops around the bunker and discovers cremated remains of a child in a crawlspace, she works with Woman to escape the bunker.
I WILL MURDER YOUR MILLION DOLLAR BABY, SWEETHEART.
Mother tries to stop them until Woman threatens to kill Daughter. Then she doesn’t stop them anymore! The outside is full of robots, but no other humans. Woman lied to Daughter, and she ain’t likin’ that! Woman has been living in a port cargo container on the beach for decades, and convincing Daughter to stay with her is unsuccessful. Daughter returns the bunker, where she confronts Mother and learns that all the robots share a single consciousness. The dead child didn’t pass the test, but Daughter did, and proved herself perfect enough to start humanity up again! Congratulations! Hahaha!
Mother says she will always be there if she needs her, then Daughter shoots her with a gun! As she enters the cryogenic room with the dozens of chambers, realization waves over her that she is now Mother.
Meanwhile, an outside robot visits Woman in her container and declares that, after all these years as a puppet, she has finished serving her purpose. Woman gets killed.
TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER
TOPIC 1 — Picking a Side
I was very much able to find myself in Daughter’s shoes throughout the movie. The back-and-forth between trying to trust Mother and trying to trust Woman was well paced and, just like Daughter, I was torn. Imagine spending the first 15 years of your life raised by a robot and completely shut out from humanity. Only knowing about other humans from fuckin’ Whoopi Goldberg on Johnny Carson. You’d be beyond naïve. This was a tough situation for her.
Ahh, the embryos look quite tasty this morning.
Movie logic, as a rule, must defy realistic timelines. You can’t have your movies be 45 hours long! Insanity! My largest hurdle with movies is suspending my disbelief on characters, say, falling in love in twelve minutes, for example. In this case, I’m able to suspend my disbelief that Daughter struggles with who to trust within a short timeframe because her situation is so utterly fucked up to begin with. Here’s a human! The first human she has ever personally met and talked to! One of her kind! And she’s saying scary things that are breaking down an entire belief system! And here’s a robot! The robot raised her from infancy! It’s the only family she knows! AND she has a very soothing Rose Byrne voice, appealing to human instinctual trustworthiness sensibilities. Ergh! Argh!
Funnily enough, there are gray areas everywhere. Woman is right to an extent, but she’s being a jerk about it. Mother is right to an extent, but she’s being a creepy genocidal psychopath about it. Who to choose? Who to choose?! Ergh! Argh!
TOPIC 2 — The Ending
There are people who spent PARAGRAPHS going over their theories about why Mother did what she did and what Woman’s role was in the story. People practically wrote WHOLE BOOKS about it. I thought it was pretty obvious! The clues were everywhere! Come on, people!
-Woman is APX01.
-The dead and cremated girl was APX02.
-Daughter is APX03.
Ah yes, my favorite part of the exam: looking at the bright, orange lighthouse.
Woman is the only person alive on the outside, in a world where Mother slaughtered all of humanity. That’s a pretty big fucking bullseye right there, nerds! APX01 failed as a human being, but Mother allowed her to stay alive to fulfill a purpose decades down the line.
APX02 failed as human being and got killed. We’re all sad about it. Let’s move on.
APX03 passed the test! And a lot of that test, apparently, was returning to Mother within seventeen minutes after attempting to defect. She also won the game by not needing Mother anymore. She was like Doomguy blowing the robot to smithereens by her BFG9000! Sort of. I’m making that up completely.
So how is Daughter going to end up single-handedly raising all of humanity from the ground up? Listen, you’re asking too many questions. Stop asking so many questions.
IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!
There are numerous similarities to Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011). Mother resembles GLaDoS in her facial appearance, voice, and facility-wide control. A young woman is trapped in a facility and forced to perform tests. Later in the film, Daughter’s jumpsuit is tied around her waist revealing a white tank top, which is almost identical to Chell’s outfit. She is also offered cake by Mother, which is a recurring theme/joke in Portal. The themes to both also appear to be “escape.”
I swear to God, if one more mouth-breathing neckbeard makes an entire movie based upon an inspiration from a video game I’m going to eat my hat. And it’s a really big hat.
While the plot for “I Am Mother” has many unique aspects, there are several noticeable similarities with the anime “Casshan.”
Even worse. Even fucking worse.
Two infants portrayed the toddler. They were Hazel Sandery and Summer Lenton.
THE Hazel Sandery and Summer Lenton?!?! That’s incredible!
Of the films in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror/thriller genre that ‘Hilary Swank’ has appeared in previously, website SYFY Wire declared, “as far as genre cred goes, she’s appeared in ‘The Gift’ (2000), ‘Insomnia’ (2002), and as Kimberly in the ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (1992) movie”.
Yes, ‘Hilary Swank’ has quite the resume. The IMDb trivia for this movie sucks. I’m moving on.
Just to let you know, I’m not very good at this surgery thing. The number of wristwatches I’ve lost in patients is staggering.
IS IT WORTH A WATCH?
Yes. If you like your sci-fi to be more cerebral than action-packed, then this is the movie for you! The little bits and pieces they throw in as the movie progresses are easy to miss if you’re not paying close attention, but I’m grateful that they don’t hit you over the head with any of it. It ends up being rather thought-provoking. Clara Rugaard does an excellent job carrying the film. Hilary Swank still has it going on, even after she bit off her own tongue to try to bleed to death! Good for her.
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