Mother/Android

"Mother/Android" is a post apocalyptic science fiction film, but it manages to be quite slow and uneventful. It lacks tension and suspense. I was rather bored by it.

6.5/10 Despite the powerful ending and some of the scene that works, Mother/Android could've been in a better situation, could've been a better performance (Chloë Grace Moretz did a good job but Algee Smith didn't), and could've been a better story.

Humans play God and make androids. The androids turn on humans and try to destroy them. What began as Frankenstein is in this film a feminist fable about a pregnant mother determined to save her baby and her man from the android apocalypse.

Although the movie has some anxiety provoking moments, it doesn't sustain the tension in the way a good horror or science fiction movie needs. The pace of the first three quarters of the film devolves into a romantic soap opera at the end of the film.

Hint: Buffy has a similar plot where she fights against android/monster Adam during a season of the series. She vanquishes Adam at the end of the season with the help of her friends. The point of the season is that human connections sustain us, even when we fight monsters.

The point of this movie seems to be that human connections make us weaker and miserable, but we fight with them because we can't escape the monster.

What's the difference? Good writing. Buffy has a character arc. No one in this movie does. Even selfless acts are punished by more pain. Who wants to see that plot?

Chloe needs a new agent so that she doesn't have to make craptastic movies like this one. She is better than this.

So Chloe did this film called Shadow in the Cloud a year before this one. It features a woman with a small baby, trying to survive things that are trying to kill her in a misogynistic world while ineffectually protected by a weak man. In the end she rises to the occasion, saving her child. This film is basically the same, only seemingly on a much smaller budget and really falling flat. Instead of gremlins in a plane it's androids in a forest. Instead of manly but stupid flyboys she gets manly but stupid army guys. Similarities aside, I liked Shadow in the Cloud, yet I was completely unimpressed and bored with this film. And what the hell is that title? Couldn't they think of something better?

Bottom line: the movie feels amateurish and under budget, like a student film. The effects are few and far between, while the story is full of holes and completely uninspiring.

I don't think this movie was as bad as other reviewers said, but definitely nothing new and clearly there was a lack of thought about some things that could have been much better. I think it was saved by chloe's acting but the basic idea of human-like robots that turn against their masters and murder is unsophisticated in itself, and doesn't work as a story the way it did in the 50s- before there had been time for anyone to think it through. Reminds me of an Orson Welles movie... innovative at the time but silly today.