Karen Han | The Verge

Lost in Space shows a long-running problem with stories about AI

2018-04-24T14:13:06-04:00

Warning: spoilers ahead for Netflix’s Lost in Space.

In the first episode of Netflix’s new Lost in Space, Will Robinson (Maxwell Jenkins) discovers a robot (Brian Steele) and saves it from a spreading forest fire. As a result, it seems to imprint upon him, following him around and obeying him like a loyal pet. As Will is suddenly made responsible for another being’s safety, he starts to mature. The robot starts to develop, too, becoming an integral part of the Robinson family as they struggle to adjust their biases and preconceptions about artificial intelligence. And then the series abruptly dumps this plotline, and all the attendant questions about AI.

Lost in Space is one of many properties that use robots as a way of supporting and mirroring stories about human growth. The way characters choose to treat artificial intelligences is often a leading indicator of how the audience is meant to perceive them, and how their characters will develop. Will, for instance, is clearly a central protagonist, as he immediately refers to the robot as “him” instead of “it,” a person rather than an object. Everyone else takes some time to adjust. Will’s mother (Molly Parker) sees a tool; his father (Toby Stephens) sees a threat; Dr. Smith (Parker Posey) sees a weapon. And all of them, including Will’s siblings, take a while to adjust to seeing the robot as a living thing rather than an object, if they manage to make the turn at all.

Lost in Space’s AI storyline should feel familiar to anyone even remotely interested in science fiction. The Iron Giant is likely the most straightforward parallel, as it also follows something of a “boy and his dog” structure. Much like Will, Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) finds a robot (Vin Diesel) and befriends it. It’s an alien entity with destructive capabilities, which immediately makes it seem dangerous to the adults in Hogarth’s life. But Hogarth knows better: the robot is capable of learning and growing, and it ultimately transcends its intended purpose and becomes a superhero. And Hogarth grows too, confronting the nature of death, just as he explained it to the Giant earlier in the film.

Lost in Space follows a similar trajectory, in that Will’s growth runs parallel to the robot’s. He tells it to be good rather than to follow its destructive impulses. He helps it put itself back together in the same way Hogarth helps the Giant. And Lost in Space’s robot briefly wins the camp’s approval after it fends off a pack of monsters, just as the Giant wins over Hogarth’s town by saving two boys from falling from a roof.

Unfortunately, where The Iron Giant contains a graceful arc, Lost in Space sputters. Finally convinced that the robot may pose a threat, Will tells it to destroy itself. So it walks off a cliff, and out of the story for a while. The reasoning behind the writers’ choice is fairly evident — it provides an opportunity for the robot to fall into the wrong hands, particularly given how it parts ways with Will — but given how many other narrative threads the writers are balancing in this initial season, it’s more of a death knell for the AI arc.

By the time the robot returns, there’s not enough time left for its arc to be resolved past, “Is it a bad robot, or isn’t it?” Its developing sentience and human traits are abandoned, resulting in an unsatisfying ending to a storyline with so much more potential. The exploration of AI is a rich narrative field, because so much about it is still a mystery. The kind of AI that populates movies and TV is still far from being developed, and humanity is only beginning to reckon with the ethics and implications of created intelligence.

Blade Runner is likely the best-known example of digging deep into the field, as well as one of the best-executed. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a professional “blade runner,” an assassin who “retires” replicants, a type of biorobotic android. Replicants aren’t considered truly living things, even though they have human emotions and ambitions. They’re even made with set life spans for the express purpose of preventing them from becoming more human. As their innate humanity becomes more and more obvious, the line between heroes and villains fluctuates. That makes it more wrenching when Deckard’s nature starts to come into question.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s 2001 animated film Metropolis treads similar territory in terms of using AI to explore how people treat each other — and those they perceive to be “other” — in the pursuit of what they want. But it hews a little closer to The Iron Giant and Lost in Space in having a firmly human protagonist. The robots of Metropolis are subject to mistreatment and discrimination, and anti-robot sentiment in the city is so strong that the robots have been relegated to the lower levels of the city. Meanwhile, vigilante groups explicitly work to worsen the robots’ existence. It’s a lot to shoulder narratively, but the story works because the focus on the relationship between the human Kenichi (Kei Kobayashi) and the robot Tima (Yuka Imoto) is so carefully cultivated and sustained, and because there’s more to it than a simple dichotomy of good and evil.

Toward the end of Lost in Space, the story’s haphazard quality suggests more of a comparison to Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie. That film treats the idea of AI with the same sense of convenience: the question that’s being addressed shifts depending on what’s easiest for the plot, rather than in service of the characters. Sometimes AI is in the story to make a point about otherness. Sometimes it’s to interrogate mortality. And sometimes it’s just for fun. There are further similarities in how Chappie and Lost in Space set up their primary robot / human relationships to resemble the dynamic between a parent and a child. Chappie manages to delve a little deeper into the idea, as the film’s ending suggests that both the eponymous sentient robot and the humans around him are still learning from each other. In Lost in Space, the balance isn’t as equal. By the time the robot is restored to the narrative, Will seems to have done the growing up he needs on his own.

Lost in Space raises some intriguing issues that are often at the core of any AI story, but the way the writers simplify the robot’s arc undermines the story. And so does the introduction of a second robot in the show’s season 1 finale. The second robot is plain evil, relentless in its attempt to destroy the Robinsons. And the simplicity with which it’s treated feels strange, given the story’s insistence that Will’s robot is sentient and can change and learn. This action-driven twist undermines everything the series has said about Will’s robot, and even about Will himself. Even the gradual shift of the other characters’ feelings toward the robot feels haphazard rather than earned. The Robinson family all come to accept the robot by the end of the season, but it seems to be for the sake of moving the plot along, rather than through any kind of organic growth.

Using AI to parallel and reflect stories about human growth is a common gambit, and it’s easy to see why: they’re literally and metaphorically human surrogates, offering a lens we use to assess how we treat anyone different from ourselves. But the plot thread needs sustained attention and commitment to work, as necessitated by the place of AI as mirrors for their human counterparts. People are more complicated than just being good or evil, and the AI that reflects them needs to be treated with the same level of care. Otherwise, the entire enterprise crumbles — or, at the risk of being glib, it gets lost in space.

On Twin Peaks, time was fluid, but there was never enough of it

2017-09-08T10:32:08-04:00

On David Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, time is fluid. The show jumps back and forth in time, repeating history while characters try to change it, and occasionally even get frozen in it. And yet, there’s never enough of it. That fundamental truth drives people’s regrets just as often as it gives them fond memories. The future is just as overwhelming as the past. There’s too much to do and too much to see. Twenty-five years after their original 1990–1991 run of the show, Lynch and Frost finally came back to television for 18 episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return. And for the audience, after decades of waiting for answers, even those 18 hours back in the Twin Peaks world wasn’t enough time to get answers, or even a sense of closure.

Seventeen-year-old homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is the series’s most obvious, central proof of the vagaries of time. The 1990 Twin Peaks series opens with the discovery of her body; her life has literally been cut short. But even though the image of her, “dead, wrapped in plastic,” gave birth to an entire genre of mysteries built on the bodies of dead girls, Laura Palmer can’t entirely be counted among their number. Twin Peaks, both the original series and the 2017 revival, belongs to her. She isn’t a means to some other character’s end. When her murder is solved, that isn’t the end of her presence on the show. Lynch followed the original series with the 1992 movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and focused almost entirely on Laura, even though her father Leland (Ray Wise) was apprehended as her killer halfway through the original show’s second season. And when Twin Peaks: The Return picks up the story, it finds the characters trying to bring Laura back home — to buy her a little more time.

Even the other inhabitants of Twin Peaks, who’re running on a more linear timeline, are fighting to make the most of their time, especially when it comes to their families. Since the end of the show’s ‘90s run, Andy Brennan and Lucy Moran (Harry Goaz and Kimmy Robertson) have gotten married and had a son (Michael Cera), but their time with him is limited. They’re competing with his love of the road. In their one reunion with him in The Return, he gives them permission to convert his childhood room into a study. He’s not coming back home to roost; he’s making it clear that they’re out of time with him.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook). Over the past 25 years, he’s grown from teenage delinquent to deputy in the Sheriff’s department. Part of his story in the original series hinged on his contentious relationship with his father, military man Garland Briggs (Don S. Davis). Garland predicted Bobby’s future in a remarkably tender scene in the original series — also the last scene between them — but he didn’t live to see it come true. Still, as old cases are re-opened in Twin Peaks, Bobby uses his memories of his lost father to play his part in figuring out what’s going on.

Twin Peaks: The Return is obsessed with these kinds of changes — characters who’ve lost loved ones or seen their youthful ambitions run out — but it also reminds the audience that time is passing on a literal, real-world level. The intervening decades left the specter of the inevitable hanging over the show. The cast has visibly aged, and some have died, or otherwise became unavailable for Lynch’s grand reunion. Phillip Jeffries (played by David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me) has become a giant teakettle. Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean), a key character in the original series, has been replaced by Robert Forster, playing Harry’s brother Frank. Albert Rosenfeld and Log Lady Margaret Lanterman both appear in the show, but the actors who played them (Miguel Ferrer and Catherine Coulson) died shortly after filming. Their scenes take on a special poignancy in a show that has always balanced love with loss. Coulson’s scenes in particular read as a farewell. “I’m dying,” she tells Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse). “My log is turning gold.” “Good night, Margaret,” he says, in turn. And then, after hanging up the phone, “Goodbye, Margaret.”

This grief — the sudden loss of time, and the resulting uncertainty of how to move into the future — informs the entirety of both runs of Twin Peaks. The bulk of the 1990 pilot episode is devoted to the way Laura’s death tears the town apart, and that pain is just as keen in the new series, in spite of the decades that have passed. Angelo Badalamenti’s “Laura’s Theme” first played when Laura’s body was discovered in the 1990 pilot; in The Return, it plays again when Bobby sees Laura’s portrait in the Sheriff’s station. Even a quarter-century later, he can’t help but weep when he sees her. Time hasn’t dulled his grief.

That déjà vu is one of many scenes that touch upon the cyclical nature of time. Time isn’t always so linear, nor necessarily passing on the same plane for everyone on the show. Lynch shows the grown-up Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) dancing again as she did in the original series, but the music that moves her, once so emblematic of her youth (“Isn’t it too dreamy?” she said, in the third episode of the original series), isn’t a dream anymore. It’s a nightmare. Her dancing is cut short, giving way to an undefined, sterile white haze. History may try to repeat itself, but the passage of time can’t be stopped.

This is most obvious in The Return’s finale, in which Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) literally goes back in time in an effort to prevent Laura Palmer’s murder from happening in the first place. He finds her just before the final events of Fire Walk With Me, and when she asks where they’re going, he simply tells her, “home.” But they never arrive. He loses his grip on her hand, and when he finds her again, she’s apparently no longer Laura Palmer. Her name is Carrie Page, and Twin Peaks and the people in it mean nothing to her. The more he tries to change what’s already happened, the darker the episode becomes. The series’s final moments aren’t redemptive. Laura Palmer can’t be saved.

In spite of the loops Cooper tries to draw to save Laura, to restore the life that was stolen from her, time is a line rather than a circle. It seems to repeat itself, but these are echoes rather than repetitions. There are no do-overs. The show’s cyclical nature, from the repeating musical cues to scenes that have been replicated nearly shot for shot, suggests the fluidity of time, but doesn’t contradict its steady march. If anything, history will only repeat itself. The loops have already been closed. Audrey will never be that carefree young girl again; Bobby will never be able to share his new life with his father; Dale Cooper will never be able to rescue Laura Palmer. There’s just never enough time.

Netflix’s Little Evil puts a new comic spin on the evil-kid trope

2017-09-02T14:00:01-04:00

Parenthood can be a nightmare, and horror movies frequently play on that trope. There’s an entire subgenre of creepy-child films, from The Bad Seed to The Omen to The Babadook, and they all tap into the creeping anxiety that comes with having children. Netflix’s Little Evil is the latest to join the ranks. On paper, it’s fairly rote — as disturbing supernatural phenomena pile up, Gary (Adam Scott) begins to suspect his new stepson Lucas (Owen Atlas) may be the Antichrist. Luckily, writer-director Eli Craig has a few tricks planned to break up the usual pattern.

Like Craig’s last feature, the genre treat Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Little Evil is a satire rather than a straightforward horror film. In telling the story of a man essentially struggling with the Devil for custody, it hits every predictable trope: disconcerting string music, creaking floorboards, a cult led by Clancy Brown, a creepy-cornfield sequence, even a psychiatrist named “Dr. Farrow,” in an obvious nod to Rosemary’s Baby. Then Craig lampoons them all. Gary’s first clue that something is wrong comes from his wedding videographer (Tyler Labine), who tells him that the officiating priest wasn’t speaking in Latin, but in tongues. Played backward, the footage reveals that the priest was binding Gary to protect the child at all costs. It’s creepy, yes, but it’s also essentially what he’s signing up for in the first place: as Lucas’ new father, it’s his job to take care of the boy. And the movie’s dream team of characters brought together by their struggle against the same kind of evil is a stepdad support group. Near the beginning of the film, when Gary tries to describe Lucas and trails off, one of the other stepdads (Donald Faison) helpfully supplies, “He’s evil incarnate?” He doesn’t know how right he is.

Craig mostly manages to avoid coming across as too pleased with his own cleverness. A lot of the responsibility for the film’s success rests on Adam Scott, who proved his dramatic chops earlier in 2017 with Big Little Lies. Here, he manages to nail the turn from disbelief to contemplating filicide without making it too overtly goofy, which is imperative, given that Lucas and his mother Samantha (Evangeline Lilly) function more as props for the story than full characters. That said, genre parodies like this don’t work unless at least one of the characters is fully committed to the horror side of the horror/comedy ratio, and as the little evil himself, Atlas embodies every Damien-shaped fear filmgoers have ever had without making it seem like too much of a stretch when he turns on his puppy eyes. Lilly also does good work as the movie’s requisite straight man. When Lucas tells a teacher “Go to hell,” and she pours lye on herself and leaps from the window, Samantha steadfastly considers that a sign of the teacher’s fragility, not anything supernatural about Lucas.

At the other end of the spectrum is Bridget Everett as Al, Gary’s work friend and fellow member of the stepdad club. Where Samantha provides domestic horror, Al provides domestic comedy. She’s going through the same (relative) trials as Gary as she tries to get along with her stepson. It’s just that her Antichrist is a little less literal.

Horror-comedies don’t work unless at least one character believes in the comedy, and one in the horror

Everett’s role is one of the freshest things about the movie. Gary expresses a little surprise at Al calling herself a stepfather at the beginning of Little Evil, but Craig’s script forgoes any of the other gendered jokes that seem to be predominant in comedy films. In fact, it generally forgoes gendering Al at all. It doesn’t do anything to set her apart from the rest of the stepdads club — she wears the same khakis and fleece vests that they do, and has the same normal, domestic life with her wife. These sorts of little beats are key to setting Little Evil apart from the horror-comedy crowd. The story isn’t new, but that’s hardly objectionable when it’s told in a fresh way.

But pulling off horror-comedy well is always a remarkable feat, since the genre is a hybrid of two fundamentally opposite tones. The Evil Dead franchise is the paragon that jumped the chasm by leaning so fully into parody that it came full circle. (And the current TV series is surprisingly emotionally front-loaded without sacrificing any silliness.) Shaun of the Dead managed a similar trick, subverting zombie movie tropes with suburban hallmarks without losing sense of why zombies are scary in the first place. Little Evil pays a little tribute to that film with the kind of snappy montage that’s become a hallmark of Edgar Wright movies.

Little Evil has a little Wright-style cleverness: the movie’s big chase sequence is between Gary and a demon, but the demon isn’t some horrific monster — it’s Lucas’ beloved goat puppet, Reeroy. And when Gary has to find hallowed ground, his first thought isn’t a church — it’s a nearby water park that was supposedly blessed by the Pope. Unfortunately, unlike its predecessors, Little Evil doesn’t fully stick the landing. The humor doesn’t lean as far into camp as Evil Dead, nor are the scares as potent as in Shaun of the Dead. And the plot-motivator scenes, the ones that are just there to move the story along, are forgettable at best.

The biggest victim of these predictable story beats is the film’s conclusion, where Craig fails to completely mix horror and comedy. He ends up with two endings that devolve into platitudes like, “Things are about to get interesting!”, and they undercut the film’s fresher material. There’s also a sight gag that comes off as regressive — Gary recruits the help of a supernatural specialist played by Brad Williams, an actor with dwarfism, and one sequence rests entirely on his difficulty loading a truck, due to his height. At least the movie doesn’t linger on it long. Some of the other jokes are a little too drawn-out, as if Craig were intent on making sure the audience knows it isn’t taking itself too seriously. That insistence would be more annoying if the comedians handling it weren’t so skilled.

Still, there’s plenty to like about Little Evil, including a cameo that’s too surprising not to mention, but too good to spoil. Scott and Everett are terrific in handling material that demands seriousness and silliness by turns, and the movie does enough well that its flaws are tolerable, if not necessarily overlookable. It’s a charming way of ringing in the Halloween season.