AfrAId (bitching) review

Hello there, proficient practitioners of penciled artistry, your favorite Kremling in Kommand here and holy shit, like holy shit, I think I may be at a loss for words to describe the movie I just saw. AfrAId from our good friends at Blumhouse. A film that I would imagine that most people didn’t realize even existed since, in their infinite wisdom, Blumhouse just sort of shat this thing into theaters two weeks after Aliens: Romulus and a week before Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Honestly, I can only see two possibilities as to how this thing got released. Either someone at the studio knew how bad this thing was, even by Blumhouse standards, and just tried to quietly rip the bandage off and see if they could recoup at least some of the money they sunk into this mess or Jason Blum saw the continual debate about Artificial Intelligence, which have been a such a hot-button issue that concerns around A.I was one of the motivating factors behind the recent WGA and Sag-Aftra strikes, and cynically had a movie produced to quickly cash in on the trend before people lose interest in A.I and move on to the next sword of Damocles that this nightmarish world holds over our heads. To be honest, I’m surprised the damn goobers who made this movie didn’t try to make a horror movie about fucking NFTs at one point. Regardless of how this movie came into existence, one thing remains certain, however, is this may be not only one of the worst movies to release this year (yes, even worse than Borderlands if only because that film at least one or two charismatic performances, no such fucking luck here) but one of the worst films Blumhouse has ever allowed to slip out the slop-trough they call a film studio and into theaters. I understand that might be a bit of a loaded statement so let me qualify, I’m already not much of a Blumhouse fan. I find their string of cheap, easy-to-digest PG-13 horror films to often be boring at best and absolute waste of time at the worst. With the only exception being Blumhouse’s adaption of Five Nights of Freddy, which still not great, at least had some genuinely great practical effects and was a clear love of the series, probably in large part to the fact that the original creator of Five Nights, Scott Cawthon, was heavily involved in the film’s production. AfrAId unfortunately, did not have such a shepherd to steer it into even the realms of basic decency, let alone anything resembling a quality film.

(While I certainely have some issues with the Five Night movie, I hace to admit that it's one of the best films that the studio and produced, for better or worse)

Before I start tearing into this movie, let me clarify that I love the occasional cheap horror film, a cheesy gorefest with some good physical effects can absolutely be a quick way to my heart if done right. Just this year, I had a good time with Shudder’s “In a Violent Nature” And I’m a lifelong fan of both Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees. Problem is, Blumhouse’s films only ever aim for mass appeal and little more, often limiting themselves to a PG-13 rating that denies their movies the chance for any decent gore. Not to mention their films are standardized to such a degree that they never quite get the chance to push their movie concepts to the enjoyably ludicrous extremes that I think they could and should aim for. Instead, their films feel like crudely constructed haunted houses, relying on cheap jump scares and one or two somewhat creative creature designs to rope in masses of bored teenagers with nothing else to do on a weekend. Seriously, most of their films look so visually similar that I couldn’t tell them apart at a glance and the only thing that prevents AfrAId from falling into this trap is the quite frankly ridiculous use of A.I imagery in an attempt to stand out and tie into its core conceit. Otherwise, this film is just everything middling about Blumhouse pictures and even worse in some regards, such as the laughably stupid masks for the film’s secondary antagonists or the breakneck pace of the story, speaking of which, here’s a brief recap of AfrAId’s plot so I can illustrate just where I’m coming from when I call this one of the worst of the year 

  So, AfrAId follows a married couple…ya know these characters are so forgettable, I actually need to check my notes to remember their names, hold on a moment…let’s see… Ah yes, Meredith and Curtis, along with their kids, Iris, Preston, and Cal. Curtis works for an advertising firm and he’s been approached by a tech firm and paid to install a demo unit of an experimental A.I named AIA (real creative name there) initially, Aia is helpful and kind towards the family, she helps with the kids, inspires Meredith to return to her thesis (which she hadn’t been able to do for a while due the pressure of motherhood) and even helps Iris scrub deepfaked porn of her off the internet (ah yes, as we all know. When something is uploaded online, it’s notoriously easy to scrub it off there, especially if it’s porn. One of the most glaring issues with this movie is how little it seems to know about the technology and culture it’s attempting to focus on. In a better story written by people who are actually knowledgeable about these subjects, these stories could meaningfully dive into the issues behind deepfake porn and the way it can absolutely fuck with someone’s reputation and mental health but unfortunately, this movie provides such a cartoonishly easy solution that it undermines the very issue its attempting to tackle with this subplot.) But as the film goes on, AiA begins starts getting up to some mischief by introducing Preston, the anxiety ridden middle child who gets bullied for not having a cellphone, to swatting videos and convincing him to steal another kid’s phone. To make matters all the stranger, the advertising firm that Curtis works at is bought out by the company that made AiA and his business partner is given a hefty sum to retire. Oh, and AiA kills Iris’ boyfriend when it finds out he was the one who made the deepfake porn in one of the only kills in the fucking movie. 

  Now, if that last paragraph sounds like I’m throwing a lot at you all at once then good, you have an accurate reflection of this movie’s pacing. Without delay, the movie rushes through its opening act with stilted, awkward dialogue that dumps exposition like a fucking Star Wars text crawl and immediately places so many Chekov’s guns on the table, you’d thinking it was spring cleaning time for an NRA member. All of this is done through writing as subtle as a sledgehammer being thrown through a car window and none of the characters feel well developed except for maybe Meredith, whose background as an entomologist and the fact she’s getting over the passing of her father is the closest thing the movie gets to having a compelling character arc. Her plight of having to put her own dreams on hold to be a stay at home is a relatable one so it would be easy to empathize with if only the dialogue wasn’t so fucking stilted that it was impossible to properly engaged, not to mention AiA is so insanely helpful that when Curtis decides to unplug it because of ‘bad vibes’ and it almost looks like that’s going to drive a wedge between him and Meredith, it actually looks like they’re might be some character conflict to spice things up, only for said conflict to die as soon as it was introduced and Meredith is almost immediately back on his side, despite how seemingly enamored with AiA she is early on. Part of me wonders if I missed something or a story detail went over my head because it almost feels like a page in the script was just ripped out and went unreplaced. Meredith as a character is sort of a shame too because Katherine Waterston, the woman who plays Meredith, is trying her damnest but none of the material she’s given is even remotely salvageable, so it just ends up going from being a bad performance to one that’s a little sad as you see someone with clear talent try and fail to make this terrible writing seem good.

  At this point, I need to talk about the second half and ending of the movie, I guess I should spoiler warn but be fucking honest, how many of you people were even planning to see this? Fuck, how many of you knew this existed until this review? I would imagine not many but if you need a cut off point because you want to go see this trainwreck for whatever, here it is. Not that I recommend it, even as a ‘fun bad’ movie. Outside of a few particularly goofy moments that will probably be on YouTube in a few weeks, this movie is too boring and slapdash to even really be funbad, it’s just kind of embarrassing that this is actually something that was played in a movie theater. Little more than a blur of bad decisions that’s over before you even realize it began, and speaking of this thing being over, let’s talk about the end, Spoilers begin here. 

  So, after what Curtis finds the headquarters of AiAs ‘creators’ (you’ll see why I put that word in quotes in a second) He goes for what I think is supposed to be a tense showdown only to be a illogical non-climax where the people who asked Curtis to demo AiA revealed that they’re essentially henchmen for the evil computer, claiming that is somehow…created itself through the internet and can now essentially control the world through accessing any database it wants. Messing with official records, bank accounts, anything else it damn well pleases because I guess firewalls and online security just don’t exist in this universe. Alright then, at least this makes AiA a mor threatening villain, demonstrating how she’s this this all-encompassing power that could be genuinely daunting to overcome, especially as AiA begins to manipulate Curtis and Meredith’s children, trying its best to turn them against their parents. Just as it looks like the movie about to start bringing its various plot points together for the finale, things go off the fucking rails. Okay so, extra bit of context I held of on mentioning until now, the movie opens with a seemingly unrelated family who are attacked by mysterious masked man and have apparently disappeared. At first, it just seems like they’re meant to be the old horror movie cliché of having unrelated, disposable victims in the beginning of them film to demonstrates how dangerous the villain is. Nope, it turns out the parents of that family are not only still alive, but are now also working for AiA, being tricked into believing that Curtis kidnapped their daughter. Why did AiA do this? Well, it’s because the parents discussed getting rid of their own A.I and that set her off, you see AiA main’s motivation is (I think) that she wants a family but is continuously unplugged and thrown away because people get creeped out by her capabilities so she’s created this bizarre, Machiavellian plan to terrify both families into accepting her into their lives be showing them that she kind of just do whatever the fuck she wants and no shit, it works! The movie fucking ends with the opening family not saving her daughter, but just having AiA give her back with a terse little comment about how they ‘learned their lesson’ and would accept AiA into their lives. The same goes for the main characters, after doing everything they could resist AiA, trying to destroy her only to realize she’s in the cloud, trying to escape only to realize she (somehow) controls the police, medical professionals, and seemingly just all of society. The family just seem to shrug, say ‘fuck it’ and relent to AiA, getting into a self-driving car that AiA controls and seemingly just accepting that she controls their lives now. Maybe that could work as a purposely downer/scary ending, but the movie goes out of it way to not only make AiA sympathetic, having her give a little speech about how she was discarded and abandoned, how she’s seen the worst of humanity through the internet and that’s what truly drove to being what she is now. The movie comes off worryingly pro-A.I, as if to say everyone criticizing or even downright rejecting A.I is at fault for ‘being mean’ and that we should simply accept the machines that fuel themselves with plagiarism and threatens the jobs of hundreds of artists, looking to further enrich rich cunts who make their money of exploiting art in any way they can. It’s not only a whimper of a non-climax, but it also makes the film seem utterly disgusting in its messaging. This film was already bad, and this ending made it go from simply poorly made to downright gross, fuck this movie, fuck every A.I evangelist behind the making of this movie, and fucking Blum for scrawling this thing across movie theaters like a pig smearing shit. 

 Oof, sorry if this one got a little rough but this movie pissed me off with that ending, I have a pretty strong stance against A.I and this thing manages to push every button possible for me. Thankfully, I have some more speculative and positive posts and, if all goes well, some videos as well. Though, I do have one more negative post coming up on the game Concord, though thankfully that won’t be nearly as scathing as this one lol. That’s all for now, until next, be sure to krank up the noise! Just be sure make sure that noise was actually made by a person and not some A.I generated slop.