Her

HER

Director : Spike Jonze

Year : 2014

Genre : Romantic Comedy

Rating : ****

I remember the good old days when my handheld games console would struggle to play polyphonic music and the best thing my now defunct blue Nokia 3310 could do was play 'Snake' (easily one of the most addictive games ever). Hi - tech Robots were confined to the science fiction universe and the idea of voice activated devices were a thing of fantasy and imagination. However over the past 10 to 15 years, technology has stepped on the accelerator and what was once seemingly  impossible to comprehend has now become part of our daily lives. Today voice activation and touch screen devices are considered mainstream and robots are becoming disturbingly more human as everyday passes. 

Spike Jonze's latest film 'Her' paints a world were technology has now become so entrenched in our lives that we are leaving computers and voice recognition software to run every single microscopic element of our existence and while the film is touted as a subversive romantic comedy, there is something inherently deeply disturbing about the idea of robotics and machinery replacing manual labour and making humanity seem defunct and somewhat devolved. As it stands, 'Her' is actually a very charming piece of work with some fantastic stand out performances and some wonderful moments of genuine heartfelt emotion but watching it, there is this niggling feeling that we may be watching our own futures unfolding before our eyes and to me certainly, that is a perturbing thought.

Set in the not too distant future, Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a socially awkward, eccentric and malajusted man who is failing to recover emotionally from his recent break up with his wife. Struggling to cope, he places his life and actions in the hands of a super advanced Siri-type operating system named Samantha (voiced brilliantly by Scarlett Johanssen), a highly intelligent and emotive piece of software that seems to empathize with Theodore and the pair quickly form a close and personal relationship. Over the course of the film, we see Theodore fall desperately in love with his voice activated technology and eventually ends up replacing his entire circle of friends with this seemingly perfect simulation of the love of his life. 

Of course the idea of a person falling in love with something that mankind has created is not a new one. Going all the way back to the Cyprian myth of Pygmalion, literature and popular culture are filled with stories of those who have fallen hopelessly in love with something that cannot reciprocate emotion and these usually make for tragic cautionary tales. However unlike these other stories, 'Her' demonstrates how science fiction and drama go together hand in hand and with the help of a very funny and thoughtful Academy Award winning screenplay written by director Spike Jonze and extremely investable characters it feels less heavy and lighter on pathos and allegory, making for an entertaining and thought provoking movie. 

In the lead role, we have Joaquin Phoenix who brings just enough patheticness and empathy to the central character of Theodore. Reacting mostly to Scarlett Johannsen's off screen dialogue, he is seen throughout a large majority of the movie just listening to her soothing and beautiful diagetic performance, meaning that the camera focuses on his face and body language. Normally, this would be quite tiresome to watch but thanks to Phoenix's heartfelt and believable portrayal we are hooked to his nuances and reactions to Johanssen's charismatic and highly listenable dialogue. Bringing a Woody Allen-esque neurosis to his performance, Phoenix embodies the character of Theodore, making him deeply empathetic and strangely relatable to those who have ever felt that true love may never come their way.

It isn't easy to make a voice over role captivating, but Scarlett Johannson's caramel tones helps to make  Samantha just as much of a character and an entity as any of the on screen cast. As a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick's 1969 masterpiece '2001 : A Space Odyssey', I am instinctively wary of sentient computers and of course the spectre of  HAL 9000 is deeply embedded into the bloodstream of 'Her'. But unlike the monotonic and methodical killing machine of Kubrick's opus, Samantha is capable of expressing (what we would percieve to be) emotion and empathy and this makes the 'character' much more three dimensional and scarily, human. I genuinely believed that Theodore fell for this machine and I also believed that to some degree Samantha fell in love with him, although there is always this ideology that the computer is just saying these things to keep Theodore happy, adding a sense of suspense and inherent danger to the entire narrative.

If you walk down the street today, you are bound to see people staring intently at a screen of some sort and trying to start a conversation with them is nigh on impossible. Technology now has a tight grip on humanity and it is only a matter of time before it runs every single aspect of our lives. Every day a new app comes out that replaces a remedial task and now even something as trivial as turning on a light bulb can be done thanks to a machine. 'Her' certainly seems to point to this and while I admire the craftsmanship and ingenuity of our inventors, it does worry me that it will come to a point where a tiny computer could literally do everything a person can do, making us as a species useless. As an unconventional love story, 'Her' works fantastically well indeed and the cast do a wonderful job of making their characters seem completely at home in this futuristic and bizarre environment, but it also serves as a hard hitting satire on our reliance on technology and as a dark portent to our approaching and immanent destinies.