The Agency

Given how technology has become the increasingly unstoppable architect of our everyday lives – the world edging closer and closer to a Terminator prequel – it's not hard to immediately invest in a horror film about the all-consuming threat of artificial intelligence. The film industry itself has been losing ground as AI continues to provide a cheaper and easier alternative to those pesky humans and in a year of bleak headline after bleak headline, it should theoretically be perfect timing for Blumhouse's late August M3gan-adjacent chiller AfrAId. Yet, as one might be able to predict without the help of a digital forecast, easy targets are easily missed in a hokey and rushed jumble of half-ideas that's as gimmicky and eye-rollingly stupid as its title. In the dog days of summer, on a particularly rubbishy Labor Day weekend at the movies (other new releases include long-delayed sci-fi thriller Slingshot and a reverential biopic of Reagan), it's at least reassuring to know that very few people will find themselves stuck with this one (it's tracking to make between 5m and 7m). Sony, clearly scared of scaring off those precious few, decided not to provide a single press screening, aware of the critical drubbing this would receive. It's not quite as unreleasably awful as that strategy might suggest – it's competently, at times handsomely, shot, refreshingly dour and crucially not as awful as The Crow – but it's too sloppily written and edited for even the least discerning of horror fans to really enjoy, a patchwork of nonsense confusingly stitched together by someone, who at one point, knew better.

Writer and critic Jason Sheehan, who reviewed Roadrunner for NPR before its use of AI became public, says he isn't entirely sure how to feel. "I mean, is it all that different than Ken Burns having Sam Waterston read Abraham Lincoln's letters in his Civil War documentary? Neville claims that he used Bourdain's own words -- things that he'd written or said that just didn't exist on tape -- and that matters," Sheehan says. "If Burns had asked Waterston to make Lincoln say how much he loved the new Subaru Outback, then sure. This is the (admittedly queasy) choice to bring back to life the voice of a dead guy, and make that voice speak words that already existed in another form. Is it creepy, knowing about it now? But these things are decided in public. It'll get hashed out on social media and in spaces like this. And then we'll move on, all of us having been forced to briefly consider the possibility of an endless zombie future where nothing we've ever said or written ever really goes away."

In space, no one can hear you laugh. Ridley Scott's extraterrestrial adventure "Alien: Covenant" is deadly serious about matters that he takes deadly seriously, and the only things that he derides with any irony--muffled and sardonic though it may be--are the movie's snippets of art greater than his own, by artists greater than himself--starting with Richard Wagner, whose "Entry of the Gods into Valhalla" is heard in the first and last scene. The movie's lack of irony is all the more ironic since its subject is the recklessness of mankind in daring to synthesize humans androidally in order to extend our own control over the universe. The pleasure of classic low-budget science-fiction films--the threadbare apocalypses of the nineteen-fifties--is the fusion of authentic fear with the earnestness inherent in comic-book-like creatures and effects. They were movies that, in their exuberant exaggerations, wore their own absurdity with a fiercely straight face, even as they touched on underlying terrors--largely also focussed on the hubris of recklessly manipulating nature.

As the audience filed out of Austin's Paramount Theater following the South by Southwest opening night screening of Terrence Malick's "Song to Song," there was a line around the block waiting to get in for a screening of Ridley Scott's 1979 film "Alien," along with footage from Scott's upcoming "Alien: Covenant." Opening on May 19, the film is the sixth in the series and the third directed by Scott. Scott first took to the stage to introduce the footage from the new film, telling the ecstatic crowd, "My goals haven't changed. My mantra has always been to scare the living … out of you." And with that there were three scenes shown from the new film.