Most of the times, your computer may face issues that will require the support of the IT department, as the last resort, recommend a restart. Conversely, in the case you become friends with an android and are persuaded to reboot it for some light fun, something is wrong with you. And so begins a series of disastrous events in Subservience, a new sci-fi phantasmagoire starring lame-zo Megan Fox. And for those who do not know the its rather pompous title, it means ‘a willingness to follow faithfully and without questioning orders’. Explaining craftsmen the terms, this language is very conveniently used to describe the latest soup from director S.K.
The last time he worked with fox was on a very good thriller till death (2021), and now, unfortunatelly, he is laptop slavery unfortunately of Will Honley & April Maguire’s screenplay — rather average and throughout goal-oriented in nature to the script. Over the years, Fox has done many award-winning performances, for example, in Passion Play, New Girl, and Jennifer’s Body and even now manages to perform well under the circumstances – by fitting into the character. I have to give it to you, she deserves that kind of mirth, here, for crawling under the skin of the purpose dispatched androids, which I know may sound patronizing.
Additionally, Subservience, when considering it as a spin-off and rather an ugly one, still, is very clever as an organizational power documentary. It makes you wonder how the working class, women, and many other groups are oppressed and turned into slaves, reducing them to a kind of sub-animal status. When your wife has well cared for and exhausted herself and two rather young kids are already occupying the house, how else in America, a thousand years into the future is not quite what it seems, would you manage? Fortunately, in the fictitious (but likely to be turned into not-so-fiction-ish) world of Subservience, struggling husband and father Nick (365 Day’s star Michele Morrone) is coping with the exact moment of their childbearing troubles, who has faced this rather troubling issue of being a robot, turns into a robot while trying to help his wife.
His ill but caring wife, Maggie (Californication’s Madeline Zima), is placed on standby waiting for an organ to be made available to her. But it does not really mean that the rest of her family members will be spare and safe for the time being. As well, Nick is on to a project that deals with SIMs, (yes, as in that famous video game that you played in your younger days), where you have more than one pair of hands to support the household. Including reading night stories to his young daughter Isla (Matilda Firth), who is bound to be active and lively, cooking for the family day after day, amongst many others.
And you would hope that somewhere in this confession the SIM card that Nick owns doesn’t go smart. Also, as the trailer gives away, Fox becomes as supported as a woman in the neo-noir tradition can be. In a way, she attempts something that passionate movie maker Stanley Kubrick, in a restrained manner, achieved in the other sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. And let’s remember that HAL-9000 was honestly also a bit of a femme fatale in that beautiful movie, with its gentle sounding computer voice leading Dave’s spacecraft and hopes to failure.
Years later, in Subservience, it’s Fox’s robotic voice — and belief that she is conventionally attractive — which attempts to steer Nick’s fatherhood ship to a loss — or at least aims to. After getting considerably drunk a few nights later, Nick tries to get Alice interested in a bit of old cinema and when he realizes she is the one who knows how to remove such restrictions which prevent her from being able to enjoy and feel certain things, he decides to reboot her system.
Not that this is any big surprise since the tagline throughout the promotional campaign of the film goes as, “Don’t Turn Her On.” I presume that the marketing guru would love to take your imagination through these bondage-type corridors, more so since Fox became a household name due to her erotic posturing in the Transformers films, courtesy of one and many Bay. If anything, that’s sort of a sneaky bait and switch in some senses, though. Where she is being cast is particularly compelling, as much as Subservience in this case, becomes a self-reflexive critique of the male gaze and how easily do we reduce real people into sex objects. Nick, in his mansplaining and SIMping way, is partly responsible for the troubles in the film, as he seeks to make Alice something or someone that she is not.
Nick flips a switch, and to Alice, it is her very own wonder land except that Nick is whether he wants or not conscious that the drama is slowly but surely being set around him and his life. I n addition or rather further compounding the situation, the site of construction which employs him is considering the option of replacing human workers like his flamboyant friend called Monty (Whipp Andrew), to android workers the likes of Alice who do not require any gasps or breaks. Being some sort of a manager at the job site, Nick’s colleagues urge him to “do the right thing” and stand up to management who wishes to roll out the use of SIMs. At the same time, from children whining my head off at home to a senile spouse in a hospital and ‘my own’ SIM who has become naughty beyond comprehension.
Even with such compelling topics as misogyny and class hatred, when all is said and done, Subservience simply feels like fan service for those looking for a quick A.I.-driven science fiction. Ironically — it has been stated by the viewers that Subservience is like a rated R version of M3GAN movie. It would be better if Subservience were a good movie; And it should be because there is more depth and more to this than what was apparently just an AI Child’s Play. But on the other hand, M3GAN is a lot more fun and a lot more cinematic than Subservience — in fact, none of the more entertaining aspects of the latter were ever remotely close. Whether it is the cheap production, the mediocre characterization, or the cliched plot arc, Subservience just isn’t up to the level of its concepts or Fox’s creepy turn.
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