Pregnancy is tough work. Getting pregnant on the cusp of robots flipping their programming switch and violently taking over the world? That seems pretty close to impossible. Unfortunately for them, these are the circumstances faced by Georgia (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her boyfriend Sam (Algee Smith) in Mattson Tomlin’s new Hulu release “Mother/Android,” the latest post-apocalyptic sci-fi action-adventure romance cobble of a bunch of different ideas you’ve seen before in slightly new packaging.
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We’re introduced to Georgia and Sam as they discover Georgia’s pregnancy, a moment which is clear neither of them wants to be living in — three positive pregnancy tests on the bathroom sink and still Sam suggests maybe taking one more. Soon after they fight a party due to Sam’s overprotectiveness, something even worse than an unwanted pregnancy happens: the eerie android servants who exist in this near-future suddenly turn evil and begin murdering everyone for no discernible reason. It’s a bloody, jarringly violent sequence that lets you know Tomlin isn’t messing around when it comes to portraying the full brutality of this brave new world. Moretz and Smith may look like they’re about to take us into YA territory, but Tomlin has something else in mind entirely.
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Somehow, the duo survives the horror, and we jump forward nine months, conveniently timed to when Georgia’s belly is primed to burst. The pair have been able to survive this long, and we reunite with them as they’re on a journey to Boston, where they’ve heard rumors that there’s a safe haven that will take families overseas to Korea to live a happy life. We’ve heard it all before. Virtually every post-apocalyptic movie has the fabled ‘safe zone’ that everyone has heard about, and the main thrust of the storytelling is our characters attempting to make it there.
This isn’t Tomlin’s first time stepping into this sort of genre romance territory. Earlier in 2021 saw the release of Chad Hartigan‘s “Little Fish,” which Tomlin adapted the script for based on Aja Gabel’s short story. In that film, a memory loss virus spreads to pandemic levels and a couple, played by Olivia Cooke and Jack O’Connell, fight to stay together when one of them contracts the ailment. That film was able to navigate the conventional trappings by merely using the sci-fi set-up as window dressing — a means by which to focus on how any relationship struggles to stay afloat. In “Mother/Android,” however, the emphasis gets placed so much on the genre elements that we lose sight of the emotional core at the center of it all.
Part of that can be placed at the feet of Moretz and Smith, who simply don’t have the dimensionality and insight into their characters that Cooke and O’Connell were able to capture in “Little Fish.” With dry dialogue, stilted line readings, and a total void of chemistry, it’s difficult for us to invest much into the relationship between Georgia and Sam — a hoped-for investment that the film relies on more and more as events escalate. Tomlin tries his best to inject the humanity here, with occasional detours into intimate moments like them finding a Polaroid camera with one picture left and Sam remarking that they’ll now be able to have one family photo or a recurring bit of playful banter between the two over whether their kid is going to be a boy or a girl. The attempt is there to make us care for this couple, yet it all comes off as forced, too transplanted as moments that are supposed to make us feel this way but read artificial — less human than the androids hunting them.
It’s a shame because “Mother/Android” is a very personal story for Tomlin. Never having known his biological parents, Tomlin’s mother and father discovered they were going to have him when they were 19 years old, just on the cusp of the Romanian Revolution where they were living. In knowing this, it’s quite direct how the film’s events reflect Tomlin’s personal history and could, in a way, be a form of processing for him. That personal touch never connects with what we see on screen, however, which more often than not feels like a story that’s been done better hundreds of times before — a sort of “Children of Men” meets “A Quiet Place” meets “The Terminator” that doesn’t have any distinguishing factors of its own on the page.
While the storytelling of “Mother/Android” leaves a lot to be desired, Tomlin does prove himself to be an efficient stylist across multiple scenes throughout this journey. Each section of the film has at least one set-piece where Tomlin can flash his spark as a director — whether it’s a thrilling dirtbike chase with androids in hot pursuit or a nerve-rattling hospital attack that feels straight out of a horror movie, equipped with striking red lighting that helps the scene pop with a verve you wish had been more present elsewhere. There’s a sense of irony in the fact that this story is about the humanity of emotional connections distinguishing us from the cold callousness of machines; it’s the craft side of the genre filmmaking where “Mother/Android” succeeds most that human aspect feels sorely lacking. [C]