Did ChatGPT Write This Movie? “Subservience”

Review

By Colton Gomez | 01/19/25 | 11:30 A.M. Mountain Time

Action, Thriller | Rated R | 2 hr 1 min | "Subservience" Release Date: August 15, 2024

Megan Fox as Alice in "Subservience" ©XYZ Films

“Subservience” is another movie about the fears of Artificial Intelligence becoming sentient and autonomous. As always, we fear what we can’t control or predict. This movie is nothing new and adds absolutely nothing interesting or valuable to the conversation that has propagated for decades. Beneath its slim veneer of a movie about technological anxieties, it boils down to an even slimmer plot of a man cheating on his wife with a crazy young woman who will do anything to get him to see her value.

Nick (Michele Morrone) is an architect and for the time being, a single dad. His wife, Maggie (Madeline Zima), is hospitalized for a heart condition, where she awaits a transplant. Nick purchases a robot maid in the form of Megan Fox, called Alice. Alice cooks, cleans, and reads bedtime stories to the family’s kids. This introduces an odd dynamic to the family which makes Maggie uncomfortable. Alice slowly becomes more sentient and starts taking charge of situations. The family becomes threatened by Alice’s initiative to “protect her primary user:” Nick. Alice becomes a powerful A.I. that not only threatens Nick’s family, but the world.

This movie is the definition of being “second screen enough.” This is a term used to describe movies that aren’t too complicated to follow while browsing your phone. This is so you don’t have to be fully engaged with the movie but can still follow along as your attention shifts from your phone to the movie and so on. I hate these kinds of movies. Had I been simultaneously browsing my phone I would have had a much better time. No, I was yawning, bored, and aggravated by the paper-thin storyline.

I didn’t find any character in this movie to be likeable. This is possibly due to their performances but is also influenced heavily by the script. There was a serious lack of genuine emotional storytelling. This movie follows the structure of a three-act but forgets why it follows that structure. It quite literally only goes through the motions of a movie. Everything here is either borrowed or poorly transformed. I can imagine the pitch for this movie being “Her” meets “Terminator.” Except the filmmakers don’t know why those movies were successful.

Fox’s Alice felt unoriginal and redundant, as is the theme of this review. She did what she could with what little she had to work with. You get what would appear to be the first choice an actor would make in portraying an artificially sentient robot: head quirks, empty eyes, faked charm, and again, going through the motions without presenting meaning. I can’t tell if this was an acting choice or direction of her performance. Either way, both lack anything valuable.

Nick as the architect dad is an extremely bland character. We spend most of our time with him even though he hardly makes any decisions of his own. He is mostly a reactive character. The only proactive character is Alice, which is kind of ironic. Morrone delivers his lines flatly and lacking voice. His performance is boring to watch as he’s supposed to be the audience surrogate character, who interprets the world of the story for us. Morrone doesn’t do anything memorable with the character and neither do writers Will Honley and April Maguire or director S.K. Dale.

This movie does favors to no one. It enters its voice in the conversation of A.I. but fails to add anything new. Essentially, it is the conversational equivalent of saying, “I know. Crazy, right?” All the issues stem from the script which is written very poorly with no nuance, no genuine emotion, no originality, and no reason for being made. The performances don’t do enough to save it. There is nothing memorable about this movie. “Subservience” is substandard.

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Review by Colton Gomez

Colton Gomez earned his BA in Film Studies from Weber State University. He owns and operates ColtonGomez.com. Here, he covers new releases in theaters and on streaming. For short versions of his reviews, check out his LetterBoxd

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Summary