Klara and the Sun review – Taika Waititi’s manic dream robot sci-fi is a sentimental mess | Movies

Taika Waititi unleashes an explosion of postmodern weirdness and ironic silliness in this film of insufferable manners and indescribable acting. It’s a slice of sentimental-futuristic, non-satirical fantasy, adapted by Waititi from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, that ends up saying nothing substantive or meaningful (or funny) about artificial intelligence, love, or heartbreak. Klara and the Sun is science fiction with a soft center, simultaneously demanding that we laugh at its (unfunny) humor and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy. With previous films like Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi showed he could do comedy. But this, unfortunately, is closer to his famous Jojo Rabbit Hitler fantasy – misjudged and self-admiring.

In the world to come, in a strange valley of the almost real, families will be able to buy “artificial friends” or AF robots for their children. In terms of overall technological plausibility, moreover, their status is not entirely clear: AF’s saleswoman (Natasha Lyonne) claims that the recent World War III wiped out the Internet. (This post-World War III world seems in pretty good shape other than that.) And these AF humanoids are also crossed by a kind of purple blood called PEC-9 which one character incidentally tells us is “highly flammable”. (Uh-oh. This is quite a design flaw.)

One such AF is teenager Klara, played by Jenna Ortega as a cute, cutesy and supremely adorable innocent: a manic dream robot – only nice – who runs on solar energy and therefore, in her adorable child-robot way, worships the sun as a god. But Klara is an older, more rudimentary AF model, seemingly less sophisticated and rugged than more recent upgrades that run on Bluetooth rather than solar power. (Is it really better?)

Regardless, his flaws are presented as analogous to the vulnerabilities of the human adolescent who wants Klara; It’s about Josie (Mia Tharia), a 14-year-old prodigy who is going to be expensively “raised” into a super IQ class thanks to a new surgery, but who is also very lonely and suffering from an unspecified illness. His uptight mother is played by Amy Adams, and grumpy housekeeper Melania – whose appearance is closest to comedy in the film – is played by Rachel House. Klara goes to live with her new family in their faraway home, in a strangely dreamlike agricultural landscape in the Midwest, from where the city can only be seen from afar, like Oz. Klara becomes certain that the sun lives in the nearby barn, where she can see it rise every morning; what a sweetly naive belief. And so on, until an unexpected ending that is as unsatisfying and contrived as everything that came before.

The idea of ​​robots or young replicators possessing real intelligence or real feelings is a difficult subject; Hirokazu Kore-eda got discouraged with the idea of ​​replacing children with robots in his recent film Sheep in the Box. Kogonada’s parable After Yang, about AI robot children, was a more interesting and compelling film. But it’s a sentimental and laborious waste.