#technology morality tale

I've been doing research on different kinds of horror film - or "thriller" films - lately, and Monolith was one which caught my eye based on the premise alone. The idea is simple, a young mother gets a very secure, high-tech car that is designed to be completely safe and totally impenetrable... but she accidentally locks her son in the car, and she has to get him out before he dies in the hot car. It's an interesting idea, because there's a lot that you can do with the high-security smart car concept, but despite how sci-fi the car is, this is a very barebones concept.

All this movie is really doing is taking a thing which can be quite scary but is easily solved - i.e. locking your kid in the car - but takes away all the solutions, forcing the character into desperation. Get someone to help? She can't, the car's in the middle of the desert. Wait for someone to help? She can't, the road is abandoned. Call for someone to find you? She can't, her phone is locked in the car. Break the window? She can't, all the windows are bulletproof. Break the door? She can't, the car's security is active & the doors are armoured. Run to get someone to help? She can't, the nearest person is too far away. This film is basically taking that simple adult fear, of locking your child in the car, and ramps it all the way up to eleven... which is why it was surprising to me that this film wasn't very scary.

The first issue is the premise itself, the child is locked in the car because the Monolith - the titular brand of the car - is designed to be safe... but, wait, it's a well-known fact that children and pets die in hot cars. There are even laws against it, so how did the car's manufacturers not realize that this was possible? You could potentially make this work if the car was an early prototype, or if the car's security had become overactive... but, this is specifically a smart car, it even has a talking artificial intelligence, and it adapts to new dangers to keep the occupants safe. One of the plot-points is that it can even tell the weight of each occupant and can estimate age based on that data. So, essentially, this is an Idiot Plot for the car's A.I. - they made this car so smart that in order for this movie to work, the car also has to be very stupid whenever the plot decides it has to be.

Another issue I had with this film is that I didn't find the main character very engaging. I honestly can't tell you if Katrina Bowden is a good actress or not. I wouldn't call her great, and don't get me wrong she is not bad at all, I enjoyed most of her earlier scenes as they were believable and characterized her as Sandra a desperate but imperfect mother. Nixon Hodges and Krew Hodges both do well portraying the four-year old son, David. They would laugh, scream, cry and even gasp desperately for breath pretty convincingly for their age. Last but not least, Katherine Kelly Lang voices Lilith, the A.I. in the car, and I felt she did a good job giving the car personality without humanity. But once the film kicks into gear, David gets locked in the car, and Lilith's speech function deactivates, so it's just us and Sandra, but the script doesn't really give Sandra much to do except be frustrated, get scared & slowly start to die. Sure, she keeps wanting to save her kid, but she doesn't really 'do' much. Once the easy solutions are thwarted, she can't just break the window, so you'd think that she'd spend most of it working out harder solutions, but once again the Monolith car itself creates an issue...

See, the car is impenetrable, but the plot of the story requires that is be penetrable (or at least offer some hope that it might be, or could be), so the writers ran into a Death Star Dilemma - they needed the conflict to be genuine, so they designed a big, scary problem; but then they needed a solution, so they needed to make the big scary problem slightly less scary and big... they needed to create a crack in the armour of the big, scary problem for the hero to exploit - and the way it's written just feels overly convenient and lazy. See, this car has "safety features" which are referenced vaguely, but never explained, so we don't know what this car can do until it does it in the film. This means that whenever a safety feature does pop up, it feels almost random. It's less a new conflict rising from the actions of the main character, and more:   "Huh, I guess the car can do that, then..." So, even though these can add conflict, there's no tension because we're not aware of these until after they happen. Sure, there's the constant tension of the kid in the car the whole time, but the problem is that this is a movie so I was 99% sure that the kid was going to survive. And when some of the problems that arise are resolved by:   "Huh, I guess the car doesn't do that, then..." It just makes me feel like the story isn't so much progressing as treading water.

You know what, I've mentioned a few issues, but do you know what the main problem of this film is? It doesn't seem to mean anything. Out of curiosity, I checked to see if I was right, and the director talks about high-minded ideals. It's about "how we lose our agency to the perils of technology"; it's about "how even parenting is being put in the hands of machines". It's interesting that he says that, because he could also SAY that the film was about anything he wants, but it doesn't change what the cameras captured. If I had to tell you what the film ultimately meant, based on the film I watched, it seems to be "geez, deserts really suck, don't they?" Nothing about mankind, machines or motherhood. Just that it sucks to be in the desert, especially when you don't have easy access to a phone. Or, maybe "don't be an early adopter of technology - especially if you’re a parent". And that really sucks, because that whole thing about parenting, and technology? Yeah, that's what I thought this film was going to be about. That's why I loved the premise... in an attempt to keep her son safe, a mother buys a car that can keep her son safe from everything - including herself.

Now, don't get me wrong - I know that I am here to review the movie I watched, not the movie it could have been. I'm a reviewer, not a script doctor [although, I probably could be a good script doctor... any takers?], so I'm not upset that this film wasn't what I wanted it to be. I'm upset that it wasn't anything else. This didn’t seem to have any meaning or allegory, but if your movie isn't allegorical, then you need to lean hard on narrative and realism and this film doesn't do that either. It takes a beautiful premise and squanders it on a middling plot, with only one or two original ideas throughout.