Well now I feel dumb for not cluing in to the identity of Hillary Swank until the movie made it obvious (I’m going to use the fact I watched it on a long haul redeye as my excuse).
Who shot APX-001?
According to her, one of the droids. Mother’s story to Daughter, that Hilary Swank was shot by her own gun, was revealed to be a lie. Given that Mother is all the droids, that basically means Mother shot her.
-Tom
Oooh, that last sentence makes it make sense. I was wondering how a human could take one well-placed bullet from a droid, and escape, but of course Mother wanted her injured and dying but not immediately dead. Mother probably chased her toward the bunker, too. Nice!
Well, kind of. Certainly Daughter felt that way, but as a non-expert looking at the two bullets on screen I couldn’t tell if they were actually different or just had deformed differently because one was shot into a human and the other into a robot. They weren’t obviously different caliber or anything.
Admittedly this ambiguity may be in my head rather than the movie.
The clone part was clearly supposed to be pretty obvious to me from the beginning. Listing how many days to show the girl was born well after the event plus the casting. The girl actress has a pretty good resemblance to Swank.
I hadn’t thought of that, but that opens up a whole new angle, doesn’t it? I just assumed Hilary Swank getting shot was part of the usual clean-up operations the droids have been doing for nearly 40 years. I also assumed Hilary Swank’s arrival was a genuine wrench in the works that Mother needed to resolve, an unexpected variable in the APX-003 iteration that she needed to address. But as I mentioned before, I haven’t quite parsed out how much Mother intended: specifically, Simon being united with APX-001, Hilary Swank’s interactions with Daughter, Daughter’s escape, and so forth.
That’s the thing about rogue AI movies. Rogue AI’s are too smart for us humans to fully understand!
I’d bet dollars to donuts they’re supposed to be different. Here’s a screen grab:
I feel like that’s movie language for “these are different bullets”. Daughter obviously thinks they are, and her takeaway that Mother was lying leads to a whole series of other revelations. It seems odd that those revelations would be based on a misunderstanding.
But the main takeaway is that Daughter thinks they’re different bullets, which leads her to breaking into the drawers to see the test results and then discovering the jawbone in the incinerator. At that point, Mother lying about the bullets is relatively small potatoes.
-Tom
I rather like the idea that Mother was rolling with whatever came her way, so maybe she didn’t shoot 001 to wound her. But without 001 showing 003 how to be brave, suspicious, and badass, I’m not sure 003 would have graduated in Mother’s eyes.
With the final revelation that all the robots are Mother, we now know, for example, that her being “asleep” when Daughter lets Swank in would not have prevented her from making sure that didn’t happen. She easily could have sent a phalanx of other robots to the door to stop it.
Though it’s a bit messy, I think it’s a reasonable conclusion that Mother orchestrated everything, possibly as the real test for 003. No real downsides - if 003 ended up staying with 001 then she just kills both and starts from scratch.
Ah, really nice way to put it. I like that a lot.
And that certainly fits with what mother says to APX-001 before she kills her. “Curious, isn’t it, that you survived so long where other have not? As if someone’s had a purpose for you.”
-Tom
You don’t think 001’s crowbar was +1 against Mothers? :(
So what song played over the end credits? Glenn Danzig’s song? Or the track from The Wall? Or the b-side from Synchronicity? Had to have been one of those.
If any Patreons really want to make Tom suffer, the next Adam Sandler netflix movie, Murder Mystery just came out!
Dude, I’ve seen The Do-Over and Jack and Jill. I think the most difficult times are behind me.
-Tom
Saw this last night and liked what I saw although I didn’t pick up on some things discussed in this thread. Probably because my wife was distracting me and kept asking questions. I guess I need to re-watch it by myself.
The clone thing…I liked how it was visually overt when the gun wound women shows up for the first time and you only see both women’s faces through a narrow glass window. There resemblance with such a narrow view is uncanny. I immediately thought we had a Moon-type situation on our hands. Glad it turned out very different.
I am pretty sure “APX” designates the females (XX chromosomes) and the “APY” designate the males (XY chromosomes). This was another of the subtle details you can miss if you’re not paying attention.
I thought it was pretty great.
I really enjoyed this one. A big thanks to Tom Chick for the positive review, which is what put it on my radar. An excellent movie all around. It’s nice to see a science fiction movie that has the look and feel of a big expensive blockbuster, but that budget is used to service a smaller, well told tale.
Cool video showing behind the scenes making of the robot by Weta Workshop.
I’m glad that the podcast was delayed so that I got a chance to watch this and write in.
I finally got around to seeing this. Really great movie, all female small cast (neat!), great look and feel to the backgrounds. I have a feeling I’m going to watch 10 Cloverfield Lane (again!) pretty soon for a different take on being in a bunker.
The math at the start made most of the points about the the relations between the characters in the film pretty obvious, as did the casting. I actually paused the movie as soon as H Swank appeared to make sure there were two actors and not a proliferation of the magic CGI aging process that is going to be shown in The Irishman. That said, the “twist” of the motivations for mother was really appreciated, and completely made sense as yet one more take on silly humans saying “Do what you need to protect human kind.” in that fun monkey-paw way that most wishes are granted.
I actually looked here for the thread after reading a few reviews - I’m kinda surprised that some of the movie reviews completely missed what Tom so eloquently stated about the chronology and character relationships. Those that blew it tended to rate the film more poorly, because I guess they just didn’t carefully watch/think about what they were seeing.