
Being in a relationship Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan) is a struggle, to say the least. The once glowing embers of affection between them has faded away due to the struggles of the post apocalyptic world set in the near future. It’s the year 2065 and Earth has been devastated beyond repair, forcing humans to seek refuge in space. However, a merger between the government and private companies in the hope to colonize space will only come into fruition after a new army is formed. Junior gets a visit from a complete stranger named Terrance (Aaron Pierre) who seemingly appears out of nowhere and tries to persuade him to join the forces while making it clear that Hen isn’t needed. The two face doubts about both their future and the state of their a relationship due to the fact that they are busy trying to enjoy what little time they have left. Terrance does offer them a glimmer of hope though: once junior leaves for space, he will leave a clone version of himself behind on Earth to assist Hen.
“Foe” has allusions to the golden age of science fiction when the realm of electronics and humanity started to intertwine. This topic of AI technology surpassing reality is a constant theme explored in every sci-fi novel since Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Trying to show the emotion of being human in artificially programmed beings is not novel. In Dick’s novel adaptation of “Blade Runner” and the boy forsaken by his mother in “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” provides an excellent example of this idea.
However, ‘Foe’ goes wrong by being overly dramatic and lacking originality. The film was a cringe fest and rehashed common plots which left me wondering what else it could have achieved.
Garth Davis (‘Lion’) directed ‘Foe’ as well as co-wrote the script with Iain Reid, the person who wrote the original material. He must have lost himself in the translation between the paper and the screen. The sheer obviousness of the ‘signs’ had me baffled. Didn’t the director think his audience was smart enough to figure things out? The opening of the movie felt more like a narration of a story that has already happened. I assumed the world in the movie which was full of human like robots was the reason easy answers were preferred over suspense but then the first few minutes of the movie confirmed that guess. Taking the element of suspense away later ruined the charm of the story for me.
Things get tackled deeper than the surface. While Mescal and Ronan pour every effort onto and into this film, it almost feels like there’s too much effort put it. Firing the camera aimlessly on their distressed faces does not add nuance, it only added scope to the scenes around it, so I am guessing Davis did not get that. Those close up shots paired with the lines “You are going hell. This is unforgivable!” make us wonder why we aren’t able to find a good laugh. Ronan literally pulls her face back as if she’s fighting gravity, just so she can smile. But, this is an attempt that gets her nowhere Davis doesn’t cut. He doesn’t even allow her to let out the desperate screams that her character needs to release. It doesn’t help that pain riddles her smile; She looks like the joker had a bad day. Why would you want to plunge into madness? We should be wanting to save our selves from it. This is supposed to be a sad scene, not a descent into madness, but its emotions are mishandled to the point of a punchline.
When a partner in the relationship closest to someone stops loving them, there is no other way to phrase this, but “Foe” makes the entire subjects feels uninterested.
Much of the film feels strange, like the uncomfortable relationships such as the violent interplay of Junior’s needing to dominate Hen, or the awkward interplay of races where Junior, a white man, is filled with rage towards Terrance, a Black man working in the government/private space company, and what Junior seems to think is Terrance needing Hen, who is a white woman. While the cinematographer Matyas Erdely transforms the Australian landscape into the futuristic Midwest, Davis is trying to turn two Irish actors into Americans, but that doesn’t sound right either. They have to be in one of the world’s harshest uninhabited regions, but she works in a large diner and he works at a chicken factory that is always busy? The justification for the government selecting Junior for the project is even more opaque, and if they are capable of making a carbon copy of his marriage, why not just send the copy to space? But, “Foe” certainly does not come out unscathed from these questions.
Not a single sweaty close up of drenching covers with the film’s hot stars juxtaposed against their tussling sheets can bring semblance to life in this paradoxically still movie.
We are made to view Mescal and Ronan absolutely struggling to sell us on their roles, only to later witness their characters treat their avatars in a fashion befitting Frankenstein’s Monster, forcing them to bear trauma in front of spectators. The unabashed seriousness of the lines, “We never dreamed it would experience love,” shows us, in very blunt terms, how this promising script was turned into a huge waste. The imagery of landscapes filled with pink, and Ronan on a very old tree clad in a satin dress is more fitting to advertise indolence than a story. As AI and climate change progress in interest and importance, many more sci-fi movies are likely to revisit this topic with the same question: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” But their interpretation of us, will hopefully be more creative than that of “Foe.”
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