i am mother summary

There are worse families to come from if you’re a young talent entering the world. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. By default, Grant Sputore’s Netflix Sci-Fi film I Am Mother struggles to convey emotions on a human level, forcing the feature to rely on its concept alone. Anchored by a fantastically assured Clara Rugaard, I Am Mother is a speculative springboard for rich discussions about prosthetic nurturing and the moral cost of engineering the greater good. And a simple way to truly dwindle all numbers is to cut off the food supply. I Am Mother opens in an abandoned, non-de-script, and very clean bunker zero days after an extinction-level event wiped out humanity. And what are we to make of that final closeup of Daughter's face? That's all just a guess, of course—the way the movie sets up and pays off its last ten minutes seems an invitation to speculate and project, which is what real science fiction (as opposed to science-fiction-flavored action or horror) does best. ), Pixar fans will raise an appreciative eyebrow at the compressed opening montage, prankishly scored to a cover of "Baby Mine" from "Dumbo" and nodding to both the tearjerking opening montage of "Up" and the wordless first act of "Wall-E" (a harmonic convergence of Disney references). The latter is also set some time after an ecological catastrophe that wiped out humankind, although we get incomplete information here as to whether robots actively caused the death of civilization or just ran rampant in the aftermath. At the end of I Am Mother, Daughter discovers she isn’t the first one raised by Mother. Its program is designed to repopulate the Earth. MORE: Netflix’s I Am Mother is a beautifully acted and stylish sci-fi Mother tells Woman she has served her purpose and closes the door behind them, … Recently, other robot stories put forward by Netflix have left me wanting—Love, Death & Robots immediately comes to mind—but I Am Mother prevails. The movie also needlessly delays the arrival of the movie's second, rival "mother" figure (Hilary Swank's character), mostly fails to develop the idea of her as a plausible rival for the daughter's affections, then effectively waves away what little we were given by implying that she was an early version of Daughter and part of some kind of sinister grand plan.Â, No sooner are we out of the shelter than Daughter goes back home for some good old-fashioned matricide, and throughout the film's second half, you sometimes get the feeling that the moviemakers are using intimate, intense scenes of suspense and violence to run out the clock and make a movie that's built around just three characters feel "bigger" and more "cinematic." I Am Mother Summary : After Earth's human population is depleted, a robot named Mother begins her job of repopulating the earth with humans born from test-tube embryos. In the near future, an extinction level event rocks planet Earth, and an underground bunker is activated. I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. Although it's guaranteed to prompt cries of "I wasted two hours of my life for this? If Swank's visitor was being permitted to live the whole time because she's part of a larger cycle or plan involving the extinction and repopulation of the planet—and in fact has been left alone all these years for precisely that reason—then why was it necessary to torture her in order to learn the whereabouts of the other humans she mentioned to Daughter? | This blocky droid really does think she knows what's best for her children, even if her logic makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The groundbreaking indie sci-fi film I Am Mother debuted on Netflix this weekend, bringing a fresh take on a tired robotic trope. It's an unusually realistic assessment of the endlessly replicating cycles of abuse that have been a common thread through human history (it seems Daughter isn't the first daughter that Mother has messed up). Frustrating but engrossing, and impossible to critique in-depth without spoilers because it's driven by regular plot twists, "I Am Mother" adds another memorable creation to an already packed gallery of intelligent science fiction robots that are as complex as most humans. The young girl asks Mother why she's the only child, and Mother tells her she needs some time to learn about raising children. A robot, called Mother (voiced by Rose Byrne), initiates her program and grows a human embryo into a baby, which it then raises into childhood. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. We are shown a girl who is being raised under the care of this android. But their unique bond is threatened when an inexplicable stranger arrives with alarming news. If it weren't so concerned with flipping the plot upside-down every 15 minutes (in the manner of a Netflix series, hmmm) the movie might've evolved into an unsettling meditation on artificial intelligence, and the legitimacy of simulated or manufactured feelings. In retrospect, the entire production feels misshapen. I'll be thinking about the substance of this movie, and the dissonant and strangely melancholy notes that it leaves us with, long after the particulars of its plot have faded from my memory. Starring Clara Rugaard, Luke Hawker, Rose Byrne, and Hilary Swank, the film follows Daughter, a girl in a post-apocalyptic bunker, being raised by Mother, a robot aiding the repopulation of Earth. The most obvious example of the latter is the ending. It seems as if it is positioning itself as the opening chapter in a series of movies, and it takes care to point out that all three of its major characters are alive at the end, and in no rush to die off.Â, But is "I Am Mother" really commercial franchise material? The girl is highly skilled and is periodically tested to confirm that she’s a human worthy of the New World. If a robot is programmed to feel, and experiences a mother's positive feelings of investment and identification, as well as negative feelings like petty jealousy, rejection and rage, then who's to say that those feelings are "fake"—especially if they lead to actions as inevitably as a human's would?Â. The present poem ‘I am Becoming My Mother’ is written by a Jamaican poet, Lorna Goodison. Spoilers for I Am Mother ahead. (Alex Garland's "Ex Machina," which likewise had a small cast and was set mainly at a research facility, is a superior example of the same kind of movie, building to a peak of savagery that it absolutely earns, and tying every violent action to the psychology of its characters. Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. I Am Mother Summary : After Earth's human population is depleted, a robot named Mother begins her job of repopulating the earth with humans born from test-tube embryos. Parents Guide. It also acknowledges the relative impossibility of humans defeating a super-strong, super-intelligent robot army that they themselves created. In this entry, we discuss the ending of I Am Mother. Mother (voiced by … The robot, Mother (played physically by Luke Hawker and voiced by Rose Byrne) raises The Daughter from birth to somewhere in her teens – we learn all this through a well done, almost Pixar-like montage. The Swank character's account of robots torturing babies is more disturbing than many sequences where violence is actually shown, and it prepares us for the moment when Mother backs her against a wall and sticks a metal finger in her wound.Â, That being said, the latter is one of many moments that don't make a lot of sense once you get to the film's powerful and cryptic ending. Everything is going fine until a strange human arrives at the doorsteps of the bunker, she is The Woman (Hilary Swank). This review discusses the entire plot in detail, so you'd best bail out now if you haven't seen it, with the assurance that it's worth having an opinion on. The movie regularly complicates our feelings about Mother's menacing and controlling behavior by confirming that she truly does feel maternal emotions for Daughter. Summary: I Am Mother is a sci-fi thriller about a teenage girl (Clara Rugaard), who is the first of a new generation of humans to be raised by Mother (Rose Byrne), a robot designed to repopulate the earth after the extinction of humankind. Currently, she is teaching at the University of Michigan. Book Excerpt: A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere: The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo by Todd Melby, SXSW 2021: The Feast, Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break, Witch Hunt, SXSW 2021: Women is Losers, I'm Fine (Thanks for Asking), The End of Us, SXSW 2021: Dear Mr. Brody, The Lost Sons, The Oxy Kingpins. Synopsis I Am Mother, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival back in January, follows a lone robot in an underground bunker, giving the … It asks questions that science fiction has been posing for generations now, and that are regularly in the news in this era of increasingly sophisticated AI. If you need the I Am Mother ending explained to you, then you're not alone. In I Am Mother, humans designed the robots that are now designing the humans, and it's suggested that the failure of the human species was inevitable. Frustrating but engrossing, and impossible to critique in-depth without spoilers because it's driven by regular plot twists, "I Am Mother" adds another memorable creation to an already packed gallery of intelligent science fiction robots that are as complex as most humans. There are many moments where it seems to embrace that tendency, but just as many where it seems determined to undermine it. Fast-forward a few years, and Mother—who has the voice of Rose Byrne and whips out embryos like they’re a packet of stamps—finally managed to gestate a daughter who is … "—people tend to reject any ending where good doesn't obviously win—it's the best thing about the movie, the thing that makes it more than a smashing portfolio of production design or a collection of things that happen. Daughter’s “predecessors,” like her, were raised to … From here, I Am Mother slips nicely into the slot of sci-fi cat-vs.-mouse thriller, with each of these three taking turns being restrained, outwitted and toggling between predator and prey. Suspenseful, well-acted, and intelligent, I Am Mother is an ambitious sci-fi story that largely achieves its impressive aims. Pic credit: Netflix. I Am Mother: Synopsis (Plot Summary) One of the androids powered by that singular consciousness, referred to as Mother, is what we see through most of the film. The I Am David Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. Their fraught central relationship elevates "I Am Mother" beyond mere proficiency and makes it memorable, despite a lingering feeling that the filmmakers never quite figured out how to capitalize on their morally and philosophically rich premise, and settled instead for the superficial, cliff-hanging pleasures of "And then this happened...", The most frustrating thing about "I Am Mother" is the way it favors the unveiling of plot twists over nearly everything else, including characterization, theme, and the related pleasures of world-building. Ending Explained is a recurring series in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old. 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