Apocaloptimists: PROJECT HAIL MARY and THE AI DOC

Like The Martian, screenwriter Drew Goddard’s previous adaptation of an Andy Weir sci-fi novel, Project Hail Mary is a cheerful problem-solver of a space adventure. That earlier film was a gear-headed Ridley Scott picture with astronaut Matt Damon stuck on Mars. It cut between the stranded explorer and the scientists back home on parallel tracks thinking their way through complications to get him home. This newest film is also a stranded-astronaut story problem. It finds a science teacher (Ryan Gosling) waking up years from Earth, alone in a capsule as he regains his memories and finishes his mission. He’s supposed to figure out a way to make the sun immune to a space bacteria that’s causing it to burn out. He’ll do so by scooping up samples from a distant star. The movie’s parallel tracks are past and present. In the past, Gosling’s working with a team of researchers desperate to save the planet. In the present, he’s talking to himself—mostly. The halves joined by a seriousness of purpose and a cheerful optimism, a sense that if the world were to end tomorrow, the government would ask smart people to stop it today. Isn’t it pretty to think so? 

Gosling makes a fine star for such a feat, charming and self-deprecating and flustered, but ready to lock in and put his intelligence to work of all of us. He’s hugely likable here, and has great chemistry with his scene partners, both Earthbound (Sandra Hüller) and ones who are more imaginatively deployed later to help puppet scenes to a surprisingly moving climax. The movie surrounds him with convincing special effects of the kind of pop-art realism you’d expect from a movie that’s part Interstellar. It has the hard sci-fi edge with a sentimental open heart. It comes from Lord and Miller, the filmmaking team behind the joke-a-minute Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie, and who last directed 22 Jump Street twelve years ago. They’ve returned to us with their sense of humor intact, but proportioned well here as leavening to the stakes that enhance the emotions and the spectacle instead of deflating them. It actually cares. How nice to find a huge crowd-pleaser that valorizes intelligence. It watches Gosling connecting with extraterrestrial awareness with a sense of awe at mankind’s ability to solve problems with hard work and mental energy. 

It’s a stark, and welcome, contrast to those who think we can build computers to replace us. Consider those who talk endlessly at us about Artificial Intelligence. (I cringe even to use the term, a deliberately nebulous buzzword meant to obscure all manner of tech company advertising and spin.) There are those who think an emergent super-intelligence is going to bring about mankind’s abrupt extinction any day now. There are those who think it’ll hasten a dawn of a global golden age where no one will work and all disease will be cured. Those in the middle seem to think it’ll just enslave us to super-wealthy authoritarians. (Plus ça change.) A new documentary from Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell wants to serve as a level-headed primer on these issues. Its feint toward definitiveness is in its direct title: The AI Doc. Its quirky subtitle Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a signal of its whimsy. The movie’s a standard-issue talking-head doc loaded up with little stop-motion animations, showy transitions, and squiggly hand-drawn titles. And it’s wrapped around the personal story of the impending birth of Roher’s first child. He narrates and appears as an on-screen interlocutor, driven to wonder about these issues because he’s worried about bringing a baby into this uncertain future. 

He’s suitably curious. But the movie is largely credulous. Mostly confined to researchers and speculators, with a late stop at a few CEOs who hype up their products and playact concern, the movie mostly takes for granted the huge stakes, no matter the extremes expressed. It doesn’t quite understand that the pro crowd and the cons alike are merely falling into a fictional framework (call it Terminator v. Star Trek) instead of actually addressing the reality of the situation. He briefly invites on some humanities professors to poke at the bubble—let’s think about the resources, and who benefits from setting the discourse frame at peak freak out about the future that makes it, good or ill, seem inevitably world-changing. But they get shuffled off after a few soundbites. The movie reaches one of those issue doc call-your-congressperson QR-code endings. Its ambivalence ends up making the case that AI is, like so many problems of our modern day, something most people want to regulate, but financial pressures means no one will. But, sure, call a congressman about it. See how far that gets you. 

Past Lives: THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s project is taking sub-genres that have hardened into particular closed modes and pushing out the walls until we see them from fresh angles. From these unusual perspectives he keeps us somehow entranced and alienated at the same moment by the way the films, so simultaneously stiff and slippery, get away from the expected. There’s his gangster movie drilled down into intimate interior discomfort in Sexy Beast, the ghostly return of Birth refracted through haunted confusions and chilly melodrama, and the alien visitation of Under the Skin that pulses and squirms under haunted tactile exploration and bodily ambiguity. Now we have The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust movie kept entirely within the life of an Auschwitz commander and his family. We see the camp’s smokestacks, guard towers, and barbed wire just over the family’s brick fence that walls them off from the systematic murders with which they’re inextricably tied. Certainly we can load the outside edges of the frame with the weight of historical context on our own, but it’s the muffled hints of screams and shouts and gunshots on a near-constant distant background hum that really sell the horror we can’t see. He won’t let us forget. He makes the images deliberately still and ugly, the camera locked down in frames that are so transparently digital, photographed by Łukasz Żal with harsh lighting accentuating the hard-edged realism of the pixels. He makes us watch naturalistic domestic scenes, stuck with them as blood runs colder. Our only glimpse of life outside the family is shot in photonegative, fitting for a world turned upside-down.

The film frames the actors unflatteringly, with no sense of posing for a camera, in blocking that feels pseudo-documentarian. But it never once feels unplanned—the details of dust and teeth and water and snow and fog are so potent and poetically evocative of the unspoken. Glazer will occasionally let a black screen or quotidian detail linger—flowers blooming in the mud. This pushes against endurance, reminding us we’re trapped as witnesses in this historical nightmare. The spare, plunking, droning Mica Levi score further enhances that feeling of total envelopment in this ice-cold moment. Within, we see the daily struggles of family life—kids, parents, co-workers, bosses. A mother (Sandra Hüller) wants to build a nice place for her children, a garden, a birthday, a day at the lake. A father (Christian Friedel) hopes to get promoted. A sudden shift in bureaucracy threatens to transfer him away from his domestic comfort, and there the narrative logic of watching a movie might threaten to take over and cause you to root for him to figure this out and keep his family together. And yet the inescapable fact of what, exactly, his job details works to prevent that rooting interest. Such casual monstrosity, such normalized cruelty, such mechanical, technical terror, right next door: it’s all so routine. One day he dictates a letter to an architect, starting it with a tossed off “Heil Hitler, etcetera.” He speaks with his wife about their perfect family home. By night, the light of the crematorium illuminates his daughters’ bedroom. More than just an embodiment of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, this becomes a film looking down the dark corridor of history and listening to the victims’ screams echoing across time and space.