Simulant 2023 Movie Review
The prolific and forward-thinking sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick wrote in his 1968 “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” that also inspired Blade Runner. In his work, he questioned whether androids could imagine electric sheep. In 2023, prolific but not far-sighted Canadian filmmaker April Mullen seems to be questioning whether androids can put the audience to sleep, albeit unintentionally, with her new movie Simulant . People are still undecided on Dick’s original query (maybe ChatGPT has an idea), but the answer to producer Mullen’s question is clear: Yes, androids can put audiences to sleep!
Simulant walks a dangerously thin line between inspiration and remake. Mullen and screenwriter Ryan Christopher Churchill’s android story can be described as a homage to Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and other sci-fi literature giants from a well-intentioned perspective. But it’s enough to throw thin lines on the robotic surface of the movie to see what Simulant really is. Because the movie is just a mixed pastiche of ideas about humanity, technology and “What It All Really Means” . Moreover, it is more artificial and contains less intelligence.
It’s as if the filmmakers weren’t quite clear on which character to focus on or which actor would do better internationally in Simulant, which is tangled up in three separate plots. Simulant opens its plot by focusing on our incredibly wealthy couple Evan (Robbie Amell) and Faye (Jordana Brewster) . Faye is an artist and Evan is… something… In any case, the couple lives in a future where androids called Simulant are becoming the norm, older versions are used as housekeepers, and more and more advanced models are released.
Simulants follow a modified version of Asimov’s laws of robotics. Do not harm people, obey orders and so on… But they gradually develop their own intuition. Hop, our cliché has arrived! In a much different, much more interesting movie, such a cliché might have been ignored. The problem is, the producers have no clue where to take this very original, totally different and dystopian scenario. Moreover, most of the budget seems to have been spent placing cheap-looking CGI billboards on deserted street corners.
You can see where all this is going when Evan and Faye get into a bad car accident and one of them wakes up with no idea what’s going on. What makes someone truly human? That’s a question that not only Evan and Faye are facing now, but other characters as well. We have an anti-android cop named Kessler (Sam Worthington) , who is particularly fond of disguise. There’s also a crazy tattooed hacker and Casey (Simu Liu), who is eager to incite the robot uprising. Or maybe Casey is trying to save the memory of her captive Simulant lover, played by Alicia Sanz? No, wait, Sanz is actually two characters. Twin robots! Can something like that happen?
To be honest, it’s impossible to remember all the details exactly, and considering how sloppy and patchy-packed Simulant feels, one can’t seem too eager to understand. We’ve got a weird movie with a nostalgic twist, revealing important information through newscast background noise, conveying the “idea of the future” with CD-player cars, open-air markets in barren industrial areas where people sell old computer monitors and traffic lights. Long story short, Simulant promises nothing more than a lifeless and mechanical production…
