Curtis and Meredith (John Cho and Katherine Waterston) needed to cringe when their new digital assistant, AIA, dismissed one in all her opponents with the breezy “Alexa, that bitch?”
As an alternative, the couple and their three kids, all of whom are gifted with a combination of entitlement and store-blighted neuroses, give AIA (pronounced Aya and voiced by Havana Rose Liu) the keys to their lives. The brand new gizmo is greater than useful, you see — an AIA that sees and hears all the things, predicts after which solves everybody’s issues.
Watching each film the place AI fails (and there are a lot of), it is arduous to not assume that humanity is speeding to its doom as a result of we have been too lazy to manually activate a light-weight or choose a track. However earlier than we get to the machine age, movies like Chris Weitz’s smooth techno-thriller Concern attempt to sound the alarm.
As AIA takes management of each facet of her new family — the movie feels prefer it’s set 5 minutes into the longer term — it shortly turns into obvious that this assistant desires to be the boss. The predictability of this situation could possibly be forgiven if the movie was efficient on each degree, however it simply is not, from Cho and Waterston’s wood performances to the leap scares that would not startle Scooby-Doo.
Early on, Meredith drops a reference to HAL 9000, the malicious computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey.” This means an consciousness of the hazards forward, however does she change her conduct? After all not: Not like the AIA, these folks do not examine.
concern
Rated PG-13 for infrequent dangerous language. Period: 1 hour 25 minutes. Within the theaters.