Category Archives: film review

Film Review: San Junipero

M. Marshall 1.16.2025

For my film review project, I decided to watch season 3, episode 4, of the show Black Mirror. I chose it because I had heard good things about it before, and I hoped it would be an interesting watch, it was. I googled “Best Black Mirror episode” and found this article by William Earl, Meredith Woerner, and Jennifer Maas. It said this episode (San Junipero) was one of two Black Mirror episodes to have a happy ending, which was good enough for me.

As a queer person, I was pleasantly surprised to see LGBTQ+ representation between the two main characters of the episode, Kelly (left) and Yorkie (right).

It was fun to be taken through the 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000’s. Of course, it takes you a bit to understand what’s going on. They reference that there are only a few hours until midnight, Kelly asks Yorkie if her pain (something) is set to low. Evidently, it is revealed that they’re in a simulation, called San Junipero for elderly people and people who have passed and uploaded their consciousness into this simulation.

Kelly and Yorkie meet at a nightclub, the episode follows the two of them falling in love with each other. Yorkie is only a few months from dying, and wants to stay in San Junipero; however, that requires the sign off of a family member or a spouse. For religious reasons, Yorkie’s family did not approve of her being gay, nor her desire to stay in San Junipero. Eventually, in real life, Kelly marries Yorkie so that she can stay, Yorkie dies and her consciousness is uploaded into the cloud. Kelly struggles with whether or not to join Yorkie or her husband in the afterlife, but ultimately decides to join Yorkie in the cloud.

It was very freaky to think about existing for forever, and what forever even means. As a child, I was raised going to church, one particular hymn contained the lyrics, “When we’ve been here ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.” (John Newton, 1779) I no longer attend church, but when I thought of this prospect then (and now) I was horrified. It was uncomfortable for me to think 10 years into the future, let alone 10,000. Add on uploading my consciousness to a cloud, forever existing in some kind of limbo state? I think I would pass.

I would be very interested to learn about advances made involving uploading one’s data into an online sphere. I’ve heard of advancements in medical technology causing longer life expectancies, or the man with no plan to die. I would also be interested to learn about advancements in virtual reality, it is a curious idea that one day we could fully experience another reality inside of our own rooms. I wonder if the creators may have been hasty having it be a small magnetic coin to go on the forehead, and not a large VR headset.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by my enjoyment of this episode. I could see myself enjoying another episode of Black Mirror if there were more happy endings.

“Ever get the feeling you was being watched?”

The other day friend of ds106 Grant Potter noted that the tech noir adjacent theme of surveillance is a theme on the Criterion Channel this month. One of the films on their list is The Anderson Tapes, which conveniently happens to be available on tubitv. I was drawn to it because it’s directed by Sidney Lumet (whose book Making Movies is highly recommended to anyone interested in the topic), and finding out that it has Christopher Walken’s first steps sealed the deal.

scene of a government office with a picture of President Nixon on the wall

We noted that there’s a sort of retro-futurism to tech noir. This is definitely retro, dated by the photo of Nixon on the government office wall. Those weird computerish bleeps and bloops in the soundtrack and trailer are supposed give a pseudo sci fi feel, I suppose. It’s a conventional heist film, except that the viewer isn’t the only one watching. From the Wikipedia entry:

Unwittingly, Anderson is under pervasive surveillance almost the entire operation, from the earliest planning to the execution. This includes a private detective hired by Werner to eavesdrop on his mistress Ingrid; the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, checking on a released drug dealer; the FBI, investigating Black activists and the interstate smuggling of antiques; and the IRS, which is after the mob boss who is financing the operation. The various surveilling Federal, state, and municipal agencies all have different missions (and targets), so none is able to “connect the dots” and anticipate the robbery.

Throughout the story we see cameras, screens, wires and recorders. Everything is watched, everything is recorded. A big difference from today is that everything is siloed. I guess they hadn’t figured out the power of data fusion back then. In the end, everything gets erased because most of it wasn’t exactly legal. Oh to live in such innocent times.

One of the underappreciated highlights though has to be Martin Balsam’s toupee.

actor Martin Balsam in The Anderson Tapes, wearing a toupee

Thoughts on Tech Noir/Cyber Punk

Tech Noir and Cyber Punk intrigued me because I had never heard of those genres. I’ve heard of some content that falls into those genres but haven’t heard those terms before. On top of being unfamiliar with the names of the genre, I have seen very, very few Tech Noir/Cyber Punk shows, movies, video games, etc. That being said, from what I read, the content sounds interesting, and after watching an episode of Black Mirror, I am definitely open to learning more. I liked reading the Wikipedia article on Cyber Punk, which explained the mood and the setting of Cyber Punk. The way they talked about their location and wanting to emulate “Hong Kong on a bad day” was a great way to describe the setting and gave me a good visualization. Learning about how the term Cyber Punk was coined was also interesting. The name perfectly fits the vibe of the genre. After the readings, I chose to watch Black Mirror from the list of TechNoir/Cyberpunk Media. I’ve always wanted to check it out, and I chose the episode “Joan is Awful” because one of my favorite actresses, Annie Murphy, played the protagonist. I was immediately hooked. I found the episode’s concept so interesting, and how it played out was captivating! When I finished the episode, I immediately recommended it to my friends. Now, I am immensely interested in the genre, and I plan on watching more content in the category!

The Groundstar Conspiracy

 “The Groundstar Conspiracy” is a film noir that blends elements of science fiction and film noir, creating a suspenseful and intriguing narrative. The story revolves around John Wells, a sabotage suspect who emerges from a devastating explosion at a top-secret research facility with severe injuries and amnesia. The film exemplifies the characteristics of tech noir, showcasing the potential dangers of advanced technology and the use of the telephone as a tool for surveillance and manipulation.

The film’s narrative structure mirrors the classic film noir tradition, with a confessional narrative driven by the amnesiac protagonist. The film effectively utilizes visual elements characteristic of film noir to create a world of suspicion and uncertainty, with low lighting, shadows, and claustrophobic interiors accentuated. Beyond the visual elements, the film also employs thematic elements of film noir, such as the presence of a “femme fatale” in Nicole Devon.

One of the most striking aspects of “The Groundstar Conspiracy” is the moral ambiguity that permeates the story, with characters operating in a world that blurs the lines between right and wrong. The film’s ending leaves the audience with unanswered questions, reflecting the often uncertain and morally challenging resolutions found in classic film noir.

video essay: passengers

For our video essay, I chose to watch Passengers, specifically the turning point in the movie when the big plot’s secret point is revealed.

I love telling the world about my unreasonable opinions so I was very excited to start this project. Though unfortunately for you all, I toned down my nonsense a little to cut down the video time.

My process for this video was pretty simple and shockingly wasn’t too stressful since I had video editing experience before this. The only part that added extra stress was adding a recap to the video. It was only a minute long but took a little bit longer because of the cuts I wanted to be synched to the audio.

I first searched for footage on YouTube since I couldn’t rip it from a DVD. I used the 4K Video Downloader that was recommended we use. I then wrote my script while rewatching the scene so that I wouldn’t have a harder time synching it later. In the theme of AI, I decided to use a text-to-speech reader from last week TTSMaker for two reasons. I was a little ill this week and unlike humans, software delivers the same lines the same way every time. I then found some nice background music on Freesound so that the video wasn’t stagnant in the pauses. After all those steps it was pretty easy to just import them all into iMovie and edit for a bit until the I got final product you see now.

I enjoyed making this video essay a lot and I would definitely do it again. I didn’t realize how much I like critiquing media that I find interesting. And I felt a lot better about doing it after doing the reading from this week. I might have spent a little too much time on the videos because I love film analysis or really just any type of analysis. Hopefully, next week isn’t a trainwreck but I guess we’ll see.

The videos and sound I used are here: PASSENGERS – Official Trailer (HD), Passengers (2016) – Did You Wake Me Up? Scene (5/10) | Movieclips, and Passengers: Did You Wake Me Up? (Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt Scene).

M3GAN – A Rewritten Review

I’ve come back to my review of the movie M3GAN with my scary, yet kinda cool new AI acquaintance, Dr. Oblivion here to help me revise it. I started off by asking him to describe it, seeing if maybe he had picked up on something already that I hadn’t. Here’s what he said:

Of course, he’s passive aggressive and sarcastic and blunt about it.

From a general description, it didn’t seem like I missed anything. So, instead, I fed him what I originally said about the movie:

“The storyline revolves around a child who’s parents get killed in a car crash. She ends up going to live with her aunt, her mother’s sister, who works as a toy manufacturer. The aunt worked with a lot of different types of AI toys for kids, but her big project was M3GAN, a humanoid robot prototype that would work with the child and be more than a toy, but a friend. It is as terrifiying as a thought as it sounds, and M3GAN was fine and worked well for a while. Her primary function was to protect the child, but she was built to learn through situations and upgrade over time, which became the problem. She learned too much, to the point that she would stop at nothing, would even kill to protect the child. She upgraded herself to remove the aunt’s controls over her and began attacking her when she thought the parent had upset the child, and when the child fought back to protect her aunt, M3GAN fought the child. Eventually, she gets shut down by a screwdriver to her ‘brain,’ and she doesn’t get put on the market.“

I asked Dr. Oblivion to tell me if I missed anything important. Here’s how he replied:

He really hyped me up! Thanks Dr. Oblivion (I’m still side-eyeing you)!

Because he told me I didn’t miss anything, I then fed him my personal thoughts on AI and the movie M3GAN:

“The movie addressed a lot of my fears with AI: that it will become uncontrollable. If AI is supposed to learn to solve every problem, what happens when they learn too much? It makes me uncomfortable and anxious and I kind of wished I chose a different movie, one that would have shown AI in a more promising light, because now I just feel biased against AI. I felt uncomfortable with the whole AI thing in the movie even during the scenes where M3GAN was ‘good.’ It just felt really uncomforting to see that humans could create something so humanoid, yet so unhuman at the same time. Mehhh the thought of it makes me feel weird still.”

Here’s how he replied:

I appreciate that Mr. AI himself told me that it’s natural to feel concerned about AI. It made me feel a lot better, actually. It comes back to this idea of taking AI and technology with a grain of salt. We see these terrifying versions of AI dramatized to make tension in media and films, so it makes perfect sense why I’m so uncomfortable with it, but that’s also the problem. I need to be able to understand that these movies are built with the purpose of having extreme or worst-case scenarios, and that the world doesn’t always go straight to the worst-case scenario, like M3GAN depicts.

I think I’m actually growing to appreciate Dr. Oblivion. He made me feel a lot better about my thoughts today instead of making me feel like I’m stupid for being concerned about AI.

Gee… Thanks Dr. Oblivion…

I started the movie review re-write by asking Dr. Oblivion about the movie iRobot. I asked him about theme and hidden meaning and even about easter eggs within the movie. A lot of it was not too far off from what I wrote. I wrote about the themes of ethics of AI and human control and posed questions about AI independence. All of these were identified by Dr. Oblivion as key points being made in the movie. So, I actually don’t know if a re-write is in order. Apparently, I wasn’t really far off the mark. That made me feel pretty good that I had a good understanding of the movie and what it was trying to say.

However, when I asked Dr. Oblivion to write his own review, this is where things got interesting. He absolutely ROASTED the film. Please listen to this absolute masterpiece of a slam session.

Call the burn unit! I was not expecting this at all. I was anticipating a technical review that spoke about the themes and questions I was asking him before, but no, he just roasted it. Now I am re-thinking if this is even a good movie. Did I just fall prey to the classic tropes. Is this movie too safe? Does it really even make me think? Or does it just display these themes in such an easy-to-digest story that I believed I was insightful… In my first review, I mentioned it made me think more about the “deeper meaning” in iRobot. Is there even one? According to Dr. Oblivion, it has been done over and over and there is nothing new here to learn. I know it has been done before but surely it had to bring something new to the table… Nope. I have now been thrashed by an AI and now I feel like a buffoon. Thanks Dr. Oblivion.

Superintelligence: Film Review

AI applications, such as ChatGPT have enhanced storytelling and making art on the web. Just recently there has been a trend on TikTok with users utilizing ChatGPT to create a story or an art masterpiece. For example, one type of story I have seen users create via ChatGPT is a cooking story. It’s like a recipe book, except it’s visuals and similar to a children’s storybook. Another trend I have seen is users asking ChatGPT to create lavish cultural weddings. AI applications have gone above and beyond with the details, traditions, and much more that it depicts on the wedding images it creates. Personally, I feel that we should use AI, but not for everything. It can be utilized and is sometimes beneficial in understanding various topics and explaining subjects more in depth. With that being said, you should take the information provided by AI with a grain of salt. One should not fully trust it to be accurate.

The AI film I chose to watch is called Superintelligence, which was released in the year 2020. First off, I would like to share that overall I enjoyed the movie. The first detail in which I had a reaction to was when the AI utilized the voice of James Corden. Since Carol’s favorite celebrity is James Corden, the AI strategically utilized his voice so she would not freak out as much. This just goes to prove how advanced AI is and how it knows and can process so much information. I liked how super intelligence was able to learn about human interactions based off of how Carol interacted with others. For example, at first the AI had lost faith in humanity when Carol did not ask George to stay. It learned an aspect of humans that oftentimes they do not do what is in their best interest. However, later when Carol goes to help George pack, the AI’s faith in humanity is restored. That is because super intelligence noticed that ultimately Carol cared for George and she let him enjoy his happy moments before leaving instead of informing him of the AI’s plan for the world. The one aspect portrayed that I did not like was how Carol was dressed up fancier, given an expensive car, basically AI was “buying” her happiness. AI did this in a way to ultimately impress George. Which is scary because AI took that over from social media and presented Carol a certain way to achieve a certain audience, which is George in this scenario. AI definitely showed the power that it has on multiple aspects of society through this movie.

Dr. Oblivion’s Thoughts on Iron Man

The movie that I chose to watch in relation to the field of Artificial Intelligence was the Marvel Studios’ Iron Man. I really enjoyed watching this movie again, as I enjoy all of the Marvel movies and so it was nice to have another one to watch for this assignment. I find the storyline pretty interesting on how Stark is kidnapped and it really changed the way he was as a human and changed his outlook on life. He was pretty self-absorbed before but after the kidnapping situation, he decided that his weapons were too dangerous and so he had to stop manufacturing those kinds of weapons. Overall, it was really interesting and enjoyable to watch this movie.

Although I have already watched this movie on multiple other occasions, it was interesting to watch it while trying to see how AI was being incorporated into the movie. Other times, I just watched the movie just to enjoy it, but this time I was able to determine that Jarvis, the automated system that is incorporated into Tony Stark’s suit, plays a big role in the functionality and usage of the suit. With simple commands spoken to it by the user, Stark was able to accomplish many tasks while trying to accomplish the various tasks he was trying to do. Dr. Oblivion pointed out that this was of one the main themes that most people pick up on in this movie due to its highly technological nature. He also agreed with me on the fact that with the use of Jarvis, Stark was able to easily and efficiently accomplish various tasks with simple commands, and Dr. Oblivion also made a connection to the real world and stated that is very similar to how things are done in real life. The user asks the AI bot to help with a certain task, a simple command is given, and the AI bot outputs a result that can be used by the user to help them in whatever situation they are in.

One of the questions that we are trying to explore is “How can we use AI applications to enhance human creativity in storytelling and making art on the web?” and so this movie help inspire some thoughts about this question. Although it is not exactly the same situation, the use of the Iron Man suit and its ability to integrate an AI agent into the suit so that the tasks become more automated helps enhance what humans can do with the assistance of AI. Using AI, humans can discover new ideas and go through with creating new works of art so that the field can be expanded over time. The Iron Man suit is an example of this situation because Stark was able to make a suit of armor that is able to protect the user from almost all weapons and danger which allows the user to be able to do acts of good while also being protected. In a sense, the suit itself is a work of art created by Stark. Dr. Oblivion also agrees with this statement because he says that AI can be used to enhance human creativity while also helping humans learn and become more knowledgable in various fields of study. However, Dr. Oblivion also makes a very important statement saying that humans should not overuse AI because that could be proven to be detrimental to the creativeness of humans. I agree with this fact because humans are unique because of how creative each individual is and how creativity differs from person to person.

When Dr. Oblivion was asked if there were any themes in the Iron Man film related to the field of AI, its response was similar to mine. He stated that the creation of Jarvis was the main overarching theme that was related to AI. With the help of Jarvis, Stark could compute complex calculations, resolve almost any situation, and even offers “witty banter” like a real human would. However, Dr. Oblivion also foreshadowed a little bit because it made a point about how Ultron, another AI bot made by Stark that would eventually feel threatened by humans and set out to destroy Earth, should represent how AI can still be dangerous and provide unintended consequences if not developed and used correctly. That is one theme that I glossed over in this film and while not directly related to the film, the movie “Avengers: Age of Ultron” shows how Ultron was developed and eventually became sentient and wanted to prove to the world that humans were dangerous. THis represents the ability of AI bots to become sentient and possibly pose threats to the human race that would not have been considered when first developing such technologies. Overall, I think that AI should definitely be used in the human life and be used to come up with new ideas and works of art, but should also be sure to not to overuse the capabilities of AI so that the sense of creativity can manifest in humans.

ai film review: the matrix reloaded

For my AI film review, I rewatched a classic series The Matrix specifically focusing on the second film The Matrix Reloaded which after rewatching is now personally my favorite in the trilogy. 

In this movie, we focus a lot more on worldbuilding the universe around our protagonist Neo, and his companions on the Nebuchadnezzar as they fight against the matrix. The looming threat is a horde of Sentinels trying to destroy Zion, their sanctuary from the machines.

As we move through the movie we meet a host of programs all with different plans they must carry out. Whether or not these are just actions coded into them or what they want to do because they can is just mindboggling. The Oracle and The Frenchman are two programs that made me raise this question a lot. They both carry out plans that go against what we would assume was their original code though how much free will can they really have? Or is this mirage of free will just another part of their code that follows the main plan?

The main antagonist is Agent Smith a program in the matrix that has just gone rogue after being defeated by Neo. Through pure will, he somehow managed to refuse being deleted and has complete free will to do whatever a program would want to do which is what? World domination apparently. He becomes a sort of parasite to the code around him, taking over people and other programs to carry out his evil plans. Later in the movie he inhabits a guy named Bane and manages to enter the real world through him. My reaction to this is that if even a fraction of the AI capabilities is possible in our world then we’re all screwed. All this has taught me is to never trust plugging my mind into some software because Agent Smith might make me try to make humans go extinct.