- Directed by S.K. Dale
- Written by Will Honley, April Maguire
- Stars Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 35 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoEdO6_G6lc
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It looks good and is very well made. It also went exactly like we expected at every step. It’s entertaining to watch. But it’s not super because every step of it was predictable.
Spoilery Synopsis
Nick flashes back to when his wife Maggie had a sudden heart attack and goes to the hospital. Now he’s raising two children alone. They go to a robotics show to get a “Cooking Cleaning and Childcare” robot. The salesman there explains how advanced the robots are. Little Isla wanders off and finds the robot that she likes in the slavery showroom. Nick’s homelife is a jumbled mess, and he’s very happy to have more help. Isla names the new robot “Alice” after the book she’s reading.
As Nick takes the kids to school, Alice cleans up the entire house; it’s all as good as new. She’s also made excellent lasagna, Isla’s favorite, though it isn’t quite as good as her mom’s. Alice gets cut on some glass, and Nick seens her in her underwear, and can see where this is heading.
The family goes to visit Maggie at the hospital, and she’s still not ready to be released. They joke about how hot the new robot is, and Maggie jokes that she’s jealous.
We cut to a big highrise construction project, and Nick and the workers complain about all the construction workers being replaced by robots. Nick is the foreman, so he won’t be replaced, but everyone else will. When he goes home, Alice wants to hear about his problems. She explains the benefits and efficiencies of android workers, and he really can’t argue.
They talk about watching “Casablanca,” and he learns how to erase her memory of topics so she can watch the movie like she’s seeing it for the first time. Nick gets a call that Maggie is finally having her heart transplant surgery and then she can come home. Fearing death, Maggie gives Alice some special instructions about taking care of Nick and the kids. The transplant never arrives due to a storm up north, and that depresses everyone. That night, Nick gets drunk and learns that Alice has a pulse. She then makes his pulse skyrocket.
At the jobsite the next day, the workers are quieter and more efficient than their human predecessors. Maggie’s still in the hospital, depressed. Alice removes Maggie’s photos from Isla’s picture frame, which annoys Nick. His former coworkers whine about the state of the world and the robots. They break into the job site and Monty “kills” one of the workers. Then he’s ready to move on to all of them. When Nick gets home, Alice shows him how “fully functional” she really is– she blindfolds Nick and speaks in Maggie’s voice as they have sex.
In the morning, Nick has regrets. He goes to work, and the boss blames him because his code was used. Nick talks his way out of it– for now. He gets a call from Maggie; there’s another transplant available. She’s operated on by androids with no mouths, which is unnecessarily weird.
Not long after, Maggie comes home. Unfortunately, she learns that Alice knows her kids better than she does. Later, Alice is out with the baby, and another droid is struggling with a brat of a kid. Alice directly tells the kid to knock it off, and the other droid nannies around them perk up, surprised that she could be forceful with a child like that. Alice tells them about how when she was reset, she learned how to bypass certain protocols in her behavior instructions. Isla likes Maggie’s lasagna better than Alice’s. Oddly, the stairway railing breaks, and Maggie falls down the stairs later.
Monty comes by for a visit and blames Nick for turning him in to the police. This leads to a physical fight, and Monty’s a lot bigger than Nick. Alice gets involved and hurts Monty. Monty threatens to tell Nick’s boss who let him into the construction site. Later that night, Monty gets a visitor– Alice. Surprisingly, he has a SIM as well that tries to step in, but Alice kills them both.
Alice and Maggie talk about Nick, and Alice wants to “satisfy” Nick, which enrages Maggie. She realizes that Alice and Nick have had sex in the past. She confronts him about it later. As they argue, Alice goes up to take care of Max, the baby. Isla catches Alice trying to murder the baby. “He’s a burden to you.” This results in an all-out battle which ends with Alice being electrocuted.
Ambulances, police, and the SIM company arrive to deal with the aftermath. Maggie and Nick are not on good terms, but that’s an argument for another time; she goes with the kids to the hospital. Back at the Kobol service station, techs start working on Alice. They look at her code and see what’s been going on. Alice replicates herself on the servers. A different SIM, now with Alice’s mind, kills both techs.
Alice returns to Nick, much to his surprise. She admits to killing Monty. She’s in two bodies at the same time, and one of her is at the hospital as well. Meanwhile, at the hospital, the doctor and nurse SIMs have all been shut down by Alice. She kills a human nurse to get her key card access. Alice-2 comes after the family, and there’s some cat-and-mouse in the hospital rooms. Alice-2 beats up Maggie in the parking lot. Nick arrives just in time to ram her with the car. Nick is injured in the crash, but Alice-2 isn’t done. Alice-Terminator is hard to kill, but Nick gets up and gets the job done.
Later, the hospital is back to normal, and the family is fine.
We cut to the Kobol repair center, where they clean up the bodies of the two techs. The manager turns the servers back on, which releases Alice into all the worker SIMs.
Brian’s Commentary
Other than the robots, there’s not much here that looks futuristic.
We’ve seen this plot before, and there are similarities to many other robots-gone-bad films. There’s not really a lot new here. It’s well-acted and looks great, but the story is a bit cliche at this point.
It’s good. It’s not great, but it was entertaining.
Kevin’s Commentary
It’s interesting when science fiction takes one aspect of society and puts it forward decades from where we are now, almost like an alternate timeline. I thought everything about this was very well made, the effects, direction, cast, and script. It also touches on ideas of slavery, free will, and capitalism gone too far. What makes it just good, not great, is that there wasn’t a single real surprise here. We could predict every step because every aspect has been done before in other stories and movies.
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