We’ve come to a mystifying juncture in human history, as the rampant onslaught of AI clogs up our news feeds and provides daily threats to all life in existence. Fun, eh? There are many who believe we’re getting close to a five-alarm extinction event if we don’t act now, turn off the big switch and leave a small group of billionaires with a few less billions in their vaults/bunkers. Contemporary anxieties about the forced integration of AI are blithely swiped away in Taika Waititi’s new feature, Klara and the Sun, in which we join a future dystopia in which World War Three has come and gone, the internet has been nixed entirely and people find solace in humanoid artificial friends.
It’s a film which places a sunny, smiley face and manic pixie façade onto the industrial output of future big tech, though in this instance, the robots that are now all the rage and are supplied through highstreet stores seem to have no branding, no provenance, and no-one is there basking in the glory of their apparently successful integration into society.
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We meet B1 model artificial friend Klara (Jenna Ortega) as a wide-eyed sale item at a run-down robot shop. She peeks through slits in the metal shutters and converses (confesses?) with the rising sun, believing it to be a God-like manifestation that will answer her various pleas. The crotchety store manager (Natasha Lyonne) knows that her entire misfit stock will soon likely be chopped up and raided for parts, but is pleasantly surprised that Klara, with her symphonic range of cutesy tics, manages to score a new owner in the form of Josie (Mia Tharia).
We’re then transported from a bustling urban hellscape that plays home to the smog-generating Cootings machines to a remote mansion that’s surrounded in all directions by swaying, heavenly cornfields. Josie is tickled by her new pal, and quickly explains to her that she has undergone the surgical process of “lifting”, which essentially amounts to having her chromosomes fiddled with so she becomes an instant genius. Yet the reason Klara has been purchased is because mother Chrissy (Amy Adams) is too busy with work to tend to her daughter – Josie’s sister Sal died suddenly, and this caused her father to walk out on the family. (There’s the vague suggestion that Chrissy had something to do with Sal’s death, but it’s never brought up again). Klara believes she is a strut brought in to help prop up this broken-down family unit, but the situation is far less simple than she is led to believe.
This potentially rich subject matter is squandered by Waititi who has a juvenile habit of undercutting any hint at profundity with a jolt of silly humour or a comic rug pull. He seems unable to take the core ideas in the text – which touch on subjects as profound as the nature of love and the importance of human relations – with the ethereal seriousness that author Kazuo Ishiguro did in his lauded 2021 novel of the same name. The result is a garbled mess of half-cocked speculative sci-fi and sentimental platitudes, with Klara’s fuzzy logic dragging us along on a circuitous journey without any satisfying destination.
The film is certainly more bearable in its more comic first half, and Waititi has fun introducing us to all the societal shifts that have taken place and his own little bits of worldbuilding. Yet when the film desperately needs to “get serious” it just falls to pieces, particularly when it comes to the Chrissy character whose bizarre motherly impulse is tantamount to psychological abuse. Throughout the film, intentions are obscure, motivations are lacking, and the human characters seem less well adjusted to operate in the world than the robots do – which is maybe the film’s crass point? Perhaps the main problem here is that there are so many little set-ups and ideas introduced in the script that are either left to dangle, or if they are revisited, it’s done so in an airy-fairy manner that never manages to justify their purpose.
Visually, the film is a mess of sparkling pastels, with the lens flare-o-meter turned up to 11 and computer glitches used liberally throughout as a visual shorthand of Klara’s gradual learning process. There’s certainly a sense that Waititi is attempting to emulate the uncanny glow of Stephen Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, yet the film itself, and the way it presents its ideas, is closer to a coffee table refit of Eighties fluff like Short Circuit.