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In a remote Japanese forest where Japan’s finest snow blankets everything, George (Theo James) embarks on a lonesome task of revamping an abandoned base. It is a brutal concrete palace, unwelcoming both on the inside and the out – like an abandoned spaceship launched onto a foreign planet. Upon returning from a quick run, George converses with the two robots that he created for companionship before checking in with his dreary boss, Simone (Rhona Mitra). Away from work, George finds solace in talking to his deceased wife, Julie (Stacy Martin), through a ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ looking monolith called ‘The Archive’ A device that allows deceased souls to converse to the living for limited hours. Time is running out before she will plunge into eternal silence and in his spare time, George works on his third prototype that can encase her personality, giving him a fighting chance at resurrection. This instantly brings forth suspicion from the company behind The Archive who don’t seem thrilled at George’s data breach to sculpt his version of Frankenstein’s monster, alongside jealousy from the other robots.
Gavin Rothery’s “Archive” is a rather complex sci-fi thriller with many plot twist and cliches, making it rather difficult for an untrained individual to analyze.
In its attempts to create conflict, it relies on sexist clichés that are deeply damaging to the story. Then, they wrap it up with the last couple of minutes, and it is those last couple of minutes that shifted my view. The issue every individual vested in watching the film has to deal with is whether they are able to endure the film’s male fantasy aspect for that final few minutes.
As they say, The first Rothery, who is known to work without previously set boundaries of art department, was influenced by numerous science fiction movies while designing the melancholic look of ‘Archive.’ These influences range from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Blade Runner’ in the way American characters are placed in a Japanese restaurant and big light up ads blend. Also, some the ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Metropolis’ robot designs are tossed into the narrative mélange of ‘Ex Machina’ meets ‘Solaris,’ while the themes of those last two films are indeed present.
George is akin to a deranged scientist attempting to bring the dead back to life with technology as his resources. Until he finally achieved his vision of grandeur for a companion, he tried multiple prototypes just as an example, ‘Ex Machina’ This unbearable sense of sorrow combined with the dreadful ghostly visits from his better half and the overall feeling of alienation in the film is reminiscent of the Russian masterwork called ‘Solaris’
At this place, things start to become quite a bit peculiar. For the most part, George lives in solitude, aside from his wife’s robotic prototypes popping up here and there. As a result of my first attempt, I was left with a clumsy, oversized toddler that cannot articulate words. The second one resembles the ASIMO robot, refusing to cooperate like a stubborn child while I try to construct a more realistic version. This new version is small, thin, and attractive to put it in the most conventional terms. Of course, there is a particular instance where George remarks that the reason he was convinced to believe that the third prototype was capable of carrying his wife being was due to her brains. It surely adds to the level of peculiarity within the story. Why would a writer choose to leave out such an important prototype while trying to build the primary one?
Other disconcerting gaps include the fact that an actor has to deliver the line, ‘I’m a Risk Assessor. I assess risks,’ in a very serious tone.
There is also the matter where George wraps up all of them as sisters and attempts to rally them together to get back Jules. Each woman possess some varying elements of his wife, so I suppose that makes them sister wives. Quite odd. And when the second prototype goes HAL 9000 levels of jealousy and decides to self-sabotage the whole experiment? Boring. It has nothing to do with how apparently this Archive process was performed without her consent or what it might mean to override a sentient feeling robot with dreams of its own (“Hello, Blade Runner”) with another entity. It’s more because she is jealous and insecure, ready to obliterate her competition even if the competition is related to her in some strange way. It is also, because some women need to destroy for the sake of love, right to the point of self-destruction.
In some shocking way, Rothery managed to leave me dumbfounded after transforming everything within the last few minutes of the show.
Together with cinematographer Laurie Rose, Rothery captures an impressively bleak and lonely aesthetic without completely leeching all the colors from the screen. Rather, the red, yellow, and white lights of the facility along with extensive art and production designs achieve the ambition illusions that this film purports. There is even a cool, if somewhat disturbing, montage of George bringing the robot to life that is very well done. As the movie’s central character, James plays the stoic present-day version of George with unrivalled commitment. This requires him to undergo flashback memories to happier times spent with his character’s wife, which mostly serves as a necessary a bit device. It gives him the emotional backstory his tight-lipped character won’t speak of and it showcases just how much he has lost and how he will stop at nothing to bring her back, even if it means becoming Frankenstein’s jealous monster.
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