Subservience, If You’ve Seen One AI Robot, You’ve Seen Them All

Except this AI robot is the Megan Fox version. What could go wrong with a schlocky premise like that? The title, the cast, and the storyline, plus what we already know happens with robots that serve in movies, one would think that Subservience is about to hit the board with something new. Well, forget that. Hot on the heels of AI hate from the film industry and movie lovers alike, Will Honey and April Maguire’s script gives you another reason to beware.

Directed by Scott Dale and released on September 13th, 2024 Subservience plays through a naughty nanny scenario with abandoned science fiction glee. In the near or distant future, dad Nick (Michele Morrone) and Mom Maggie (Madeline Zima) are hunting for a helper. Maggie has been diagnosed with a serious heart condition. With a new-ish baby daughter and older sister Isla (Matilda Firth) to contend with, Nick saunters through the robot aisle of his local domestic service robot shop.

There’s nothing like the guilt imposed by children to pull at your heartstrings, so when Isla makes friends with Alice, a super friendly top-of-the-line SIM, he orders one for himself.

As Maggie waits for a heart donor, Alice gets busy being the new stay-at-home mommy, completing tasks with a cheetah’s lightning-fast reaction time and the strength of 1000 Machine Gun Kelly’s.

Casablanca Is Life

Nick and Alice watch Casablanca together while they get to know each other. Instead of Netflix and Chill, the two discuss how the classic film revolves around sacrifices in the name of love.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”

Quote from Cassablanca

However, Alice’s peaky programming points to an inability to experience the movie. After the flick of a button to reboot the old hard drive, Alice is a new woman, I mean SIM.

Now she understands that life is like Casablanca. Additionally, her primary responsibility is the happiness of Nick above all else. A simple reset created a bypass for Alice allowing her to recreate her protocols. Civility be damned.

Performances are on the better side of excellence. Despite the redundancy of the setting and the generic nature of the storyline, the cast is a well-oiled machine.

Megan Fox’s self-proclaimed plastic surgery makes her the perfect embodiment of how we humans imagine robot servants to be. Instead of the nubbin and barely detailed Barbies of yore, Alice’s make and model comes complete with high-end lingerie and perfectly sculpted parts. Add to that an un-moving face and you’ve saved yourself some money during the editing process.

Subservience 2024 Movie Review

Michele Morrone’s Nick is the ideal version of a simple man of simple pleasures. That’s of course if your measure of simple is everything I’ve discussed before. In any case, his character makes his naivety plausible. Because his wife is dying.

It’s safe to say, if you can buy a new wife, it may as well be one that looks like Megan Fox.

Madeline Zima’s Maggie is always amazing (Californication TV series), and does the perfect job of being a non-assuming dying parent of a hot husband who’s just hired a robot model nanny.

Also on the plus side, Matilda Firth’s Isla is far from annoying. She is wonderful to watch on screen wondering why her new mommy wants to kill her whole family instead of being her friend til’ the end.

If storylines similar to The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Sleeping With The Enemy, or Single White Female rings any bells, then Subservience will hit all those beats too. Only this title gives that idea a modern robotic Megan Fox fused visual.

But not before Alice glitches into a Terminator version of her polite model self complete with replicas. Alice is a single white female robot on the hunt for a Cassblanca-style love affair. And she only wants Nick.

In the second half, Subservience ramps up the action, delivering an intense series of sequences.

The film finishes with crashing cars, zappy electrocutions, lab workers, and intensive SIM recovery operations. All while Alice delivers her obsessive robot brain to the mainframe server of servant robots everywhere. However, it’s not enough to save this story from its tired bones of artificial intelligence overload.

We get it. Robots and artificial intelligence will result in killer robots that people can get it on with.

If Subservience was released ten years ago, it would be a refreshing change. But it’s not.

Nevertheless, I like Megan Fox. I liked her in Till’ Death and she makes a good robot.

Enjoy Subservience, but don’t take it seriously.

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It’s available from the 13th, September, 2024 in some countries (USA and UK) as a rental. In Australia, the film releases to VOD on 27th September 2024 with physical media in October.

Subservience 2024 is streaming on:

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