Archive

Archive

In a snowy forest in Japan, George (Theo James) is on a mission alone to restart an abandoned base. It’s an unfriendly concrete palace, as cold inside as it is outside like a spaceship dropped onto another planet. When he comes back from a jog, George greets the two robots he built for company and checks in with his brusque boss, Simone (Rhona Mitra).

He finds some solace away from work talking to his dead wife, Julie (Stacy Martin), through the Archive, a “2001: A Space Odyssey” looking monolith turned coffin that lets the living talk to the dead for a few more hours. She’s got just a little bit of time left before she goes quiet forever; while he waits for that moment, George works on his third prototype to house her personality so he can try to bring her back.

But that rouses the jealousy of one of the other robots and the suspicions of Archive’s makers about what exactly George thinks gives him license to jack into their mainframe. It turns out they’re not thrilled about his data breach enabling his Frankenstein monster of choice-making.

Gavin Rothery’s “Archive” is a somewhat ungainly sci-fi thriller to get into. There are many twists and cliches piled on top of each other in this plot sandwich! In trying to create conflict, it dips into sexist tropes that make its story lesser then later undoes them with its final moments those did change my perception. The question every viewer will have to ask themselves is if they can get past the movie’s male fantasy aspect for that last reveal.

Debut feature writer/director Rothery (who comes from art departments) pulls from various sci-fi movies in order to create the desolate look of “Archive.” They go all over like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or “Blade Runner” did with American characters in a Japanese restaurant and big light up ads. And some robot designs are thrown in from “Star Wars” and “Metropolis,” narrative blender of “Ex Machina” meets “Solaris.”

The latter two movie themes certainly are present: George is like a mad scientist trying to resurrect the dead through science and technology, going through many prototypes for his perfect companion like in “Ex Machina.” The tsunami of grief, ghost visitations from his wife, and the movie having such an undeniable sense of loneliness that’s all straight outta the Russian classic.

But here’s where things get weird. George is mostly alone except for the three robotic prototypes he created to house his wife’s essence. The first one left him with a lumbering gentle giant who behaves like a nonverbal toddler. The second looks like an ASIMO robot, and acts like a petulant child when he moves on to create something that looks more humanoid which of course means smaller, skinnier, and more conventionally attractive.

Yes, there is a moment when George explains that it’s this third one’s brainpower that made him realize she was meant to be the vessel for his wife’s consciousness but it seems like kind of a strange oversight not to build versions like the one you want right away? There are other script puzzlers we won’t spoil here (except for this gem said by an actor very seriously: “I’m a risk assessor”).

I evaluate dangers.

George also names them all sisters and asks them to come together to bring back Jules. Each one of them has a different percentage of his wife inside her, so I suppose they’re sister wives. Weird. And when the second prototype becomes HAL 9000 levels of jealous and tries to ruin the whole experiment? It’s cliché and boring.

It’s not because this Archive thing was done to her without her consent or what it might mean to overwrite a dreaming feeling robot (hi “Blade Runner”!) with another being. It’s more that she is jealous and insecure, willing to destroy any rival connected to her in some weird way. It’s also because some women need to break each other down or lose themselves in order to prove their love, right up until self-destruction.

But somehow Rothery flips it all on its head in the last few minutes into something that genuinely left me speechless. Rothery achieves a lonely, dreary look achieved with cinematographer Laurie Rose without sucking the color out of the screen. The red, yellow and white lights of the facility sell this ambitious film’s illusions as much as the extensive art and production designs do.

There’s even an impressive if slightly creepy montage of George building the robot from scratch. James plays George with utmost stoicism in present day as he watches these memories, so the flashback memories to happier times with his character’s wife are necessary. It gives him emotional backstory his tightlipped character won’t provide us himself and shows us just how much he has lost, and how far he will go- even creating Frankenstein’s jealous monster.

Watch Archive For Free On Gomovies.