Robots (2023)

February 29, 2024 6:23 AM

A womanizer and a gold digger trick people into relationships with illegal robot doubles. When they unwittingly use this scam on each other, their robot doubles fall in love and elope, forcing the duo to team up to hunt them down before the authorities discover their secret.

ITC notes, that it delivers "a witty satire of Donald Trump’s immigration policy and throw a pebble in Elon Musk’s garden. But after that, the satirical fervor abruptly fades away. Obviously, the creators did not set themselves ambitious goals to ridicule a political, technological, or any other important aspect. Their main task was to entertain and make the viewer laugh, and they succeeded in this task about 50/50."

Decider didn't like it much:

The way one can differentiate humans from their robot twins? The robots have glass eyes, and that’s a running gag leading to the most incidents of eye-poking in a piece of visual entertainment since The Robonic Three Stooges. And let’s face it, if I’ve gotta invoke The Robonic Three Stooges, that means we’re taking on water fast and should probably grab a flotation device — ship’s going down! Robots wants to be a zingy-smart satire balancing incisive political commentary with a mushy romantic center, but it’s too slipshod and lazy to drive home its cynical point: Dystopia is inevitable, so we might as well find respite in each other.

Talking to Collider, Shailene Woodley describes the movie as, "so obtuse and crazy and had these ridiculous modalities to it. But underneath all of the comedy, and underneath all of the insanity, was this really beautiful message of love and connecting to who we are as people."

The movie is based on the Robert Sheckley novel The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978).

posted by joannemerriam (4 comments total)

I watched this last night, and I hesitate to recommend it because it has a few very sour notes (notably a [fairly sterile] mass shooting scene and the premise of Jack Whitehall's character tricking women into having sex with him, and I wasn't quite sure where they were going with the racial elements of making the non-main-character robots look kind-of Mexican, though it did seem plausible that Tesla would design them that way), but I did end up enjoying it while recognizing its problematic elements. I just really like the two main actors. But it felt like a movie from, like, the late '90s, in terms of humour. I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts.
posted by joannemerriam at 6:29 AM on February 29

“The Robot Who Looked Like Me” is a wonderful short story. It’s also the title of a book of Sheckley stories. It isn’t a novel.
posted by PaulVario at 7:08 AM on February 29 [1 favorite]

Thanks, PaulVario. Various reviews said different things and I should have looked into it more closely.
posted by joannemerriam at 7:16 AM on February 29

It's called Robots? Really? Like we're just supposed to have forgotten that this movie was a thing? I mean, it was a big CGI movie made by the Ice Age people, starring Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry and Robin Williams! There were Burger King toys!
posted by Ursula Hitler at 10:25 PM on February 29 [1 favorite]