The 2013 sci-fi film, based on a Stanislaw Lem book, predicted the rise of AI and digital scanning.
, Robin Wright plays a fictional version of herself, an aging actress whose undeniable talent has been countered her entire career by panic attacks, bad instincts, and generally being a pain to work with. Her agent, Al , brings her into a meeting with film studio “Miramount,” in which she’s offered the last acting contract she’ll ever sign.
Robin eventually takes the deal and enters the 3-D scanning machine, a sparkling hollow sphere of lights and cameras that capture her every movement and expression. To get some real feeling out of her, Al tells her the touching story of how he became an agent to the stars in the first place, and how much he loves her and her family. “This is your last performance,” he says as Robin breaks down in tears.
Twenty years later, Robin arrives at The Futurological Congress, Miramount’s entertainment gathering at a remote utopian city called Abrahama, a psychedelicmeets–Fleischer brothers “animation-only zone,” whose visitors are required to take hallucinogenic drugs in order to exist as animated avatars of themselves. Robin’s animated self, clad in a flowing red dress, appears older and more melancholy, her white hair coiled on top of her head, her eyes wide and exaggerated.
Niccol paints the early 2000s with echoes of the familiar Y2K-era suspicion of technology. Only a decade later, by the timerolled around, we could already imagine a world in which digital stars not only replaced real ones but were more popular. If a film studio created its own “Simone” today, how much pushback would it get from its audience before we accepted her?, the public has already embraced digital stars as their reality.
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