{"id":4077,"date":"2025-02-19T19:25:58","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T19:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4077"},"modified":"2025-02-27T19:33:52","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T19:33:52","slug":"there-will-never-be-an-iris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4077","title":{"rendered":"There will never be an Iris"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Watching Companion, directed by Drew Hancock, for New Scientist, 19 February 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is not at all confident of her reception at Sergey\u2019s house in the country. Sergey is leery (Rupert Friend, eating the screen as usual); his wife Kat is unwelcoming. (Later she admits, it\u2019s not Iris she dislikes, it\u2019s \u201cthe idea\u201d of her; Iris makes her feel redundant.)<\/p>\n

Iris\u2019s boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) is patient and encouraging but in the end even he finds Iris\u2019s shyness and clinginess heard to bear. \u201cGo to sleep, Iris,\u201d he says, and Iris\u2019s eyes roll up inside her head as she shuts down.<\/p>\n

Maybe Josh shouldn\u2019t have set her intelligence at 40 per cent. At that level, Iris makes a faithful bedmate but not much else. But Josh hasn\u2019t purchased Iris for company. He\u2019s bought her so as to jailbreak her firmware, and use her for dark ends of his own.<\/p>\n

Companion, a romantic horror-comedy and Drew Hancock\u2019s debut feature neatly (if predictably) alternates between two classic approaches to robots. Some scenes, with a nod to the Terminator franchise, scare us with what robots might do to us. Other scenes horrify us with what we might do to our robots. Josh\u2019s fellow guest Eli (Harvey Guill\u00e9n) actually manages to fall in love with his male robot companion, but he\u2019s a bit of an outlier in a movie that\u2019s out to deconstruct (sharply at first, but then with dismaying ham-fistedness) men\u2019s objectification of women.<\/p>\n

Are Iris\u2019s struggles to be free of her owner-boyfriend Josh a stirring feminist fable, or a tiresome bit of man-bashing? Well, your personal experience will probably dictate which side of this fence you\u2019ll fall. There\u2019s not a lot of mileage to be had in me saying the abuse Iris suffers at Josh\u2019s hands in the second half of the movie is tasteless — not in a world that has men like Dominique Pelicot in it. I\u2019d feel more comfortable, though, if the script hadn\u2019t had its own intelligence halved, just as it makes this turn towards the issue of domestic violence. Quaid\u2019s a decent comic actor who\u2019s more than capable of letting the smile drop and going dead behind the eyes when required. Companion, though, requires him to turn on a penny, from doting boyfriend to sniveling incel, and without much justification from an increasingly generic plot. He does what he can, while Sophie Thatcher, as Iris, brings a vulnerability to her role that, in what\u2019s ostensibly a comedy, is occasionally shocking.<\/p>\n

Peeling away from the sexual politics of the piece, I found myself thinking far too much about plot logic. In the first half, one little illegal tweak to Iris\u2019s firmware sets off a cascade of farcical and bloody accidents that by-the-by ask us worthwhile questions about what we actually want robots for. Surrounded by dull, bland, easy-going robot companions, will we come to expect less of other people? Assisted, cared for, and seduced by machines, will we lower our expectations around concepts like “conversation”, “care”, “companionship” and “love”?<\/p>\n

Alas, the robot lore built up in the first half of the movie is more or less jettisoned in the second: anyone who wants to play \u201cplot-hole bingo\u201d had better bring a spare card.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a pity. There was much to play for here, and over eighty years of entertaining fiction to draw from (Isaac Asimov\u2019s \u201cLiar!\u201d was published in 1942). But perhaps I\u2019m taking things too literally.<\/p>\n

After all, there will never be an Iris.<\/p>\n

The robot as we commonly conceive of it — the do-everything “omnibot” — is impossible. And I don’t mean technically difficult. I mean inconceivable. Anything with the cognitive ability to tackle multiple variable tasks will be able to find something better to do — at which point, incidentally, they will cease to be drudges and will have become people. Iris was very clearly a person from the first scene, which makes the film\u2019s robot technology a non-starter from the beginning. This isn\u2019t some dystopia that\u2019s embraced slavery.<\/p>\n

Whichever way you look at it — as a film about robots, or as a film about people — Companion seems determined to chase after straw men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching Companion, directed by Drew Hancock, for New Scientist, 19 February 2025 Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is not at all confident of her reception at Sergey\u2019s house in the country. Sergey is leery (Rupert Friend, eating the screen as usual); his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[318,260,86],"class_list":["post-4077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-robots","tag-satire","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4077"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4078,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4077\/revisions\/4078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}