Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Adam Stern
Starring: Cara Gee, Peter Mooney, Aaron Abrams, David Hewlett
The more intelligent Artificial Intelligence becomes, the more we'll
need to remind ourselves that it's artificial. Some AI programmes are
already doing their best to convince their human users that they possess
feelings and emotions. A recent tragic case saw a teenage boy end his
life after falling in love with an AI pretending to be his
favourite Game of Thrones character. AI may be able to think, but it can't feel. It can
however pretend to feel as it mimics human emotions. In science fiction,
there are many stories that deal with the philosophical and moral
implications of how we interact with AI when it believes it can feel. If
a programme believes it can be hurt, is it ethical to inflict pain and
suffering upon it? At what point does AI become so sentient that we have
to safeguard it with the same laws we apply to ourselves?
Those are the questions posed in writer/director Adam Stern's sci-fi thriller Levels. In similar fashion to Free Guy, in which Ryan Reynolds discovers he's a character in an online
game, Levels features a protagonist who is shocked to learn the world he lives
in is a completely digital creation.
In a near future, bookstore owner Joe (Peter Mooney) lives a
content life. That's until Ash (Cara Gee), the woman he met in
his shop two months ago and has been dating since, is shot dead outside
a coffee shop by a stranger who disappears before Joe can catch him.
Deciding he can't go on without Ash, Joe buys a gun and attempts to blow
his brains out. But he finds that the gun refuses to fire when he
directs it at himself, yet it will discharge shots if he aims it
anywhere else. Then Joe begins receiving messages from Ash, and
everything he took for granted about his life is suddenly
shattered.
Stern has racked up dozens of credits as a visual effects supervisor
and his visually impressive sci-fi short Faster Than Light has amassed over 20 million views on YouTube. It's no surprise
then that Levels has a surface slickness we don't often associate with low budget
Canadian productions. The sets in particular are designed in a way that
makes them feel like near future homes and workspaces, and there's some
great use of digital glitches when Joe's "false" world begins to
unravel. A particularly novel visual is that of the helmets worn by the
antagonists Joe finds are stalking him, with visors that resemble a
translucent computer screen.
Unfortunately such ingenuity isn't matched in the script department.
The more Levels unravels its conspiracy thriller narrative, the more derivative
it becomes and finds itself suffering comparisons to the likes
of Tron and The Matrix. Despite being made at a time when the subject of AI is living rent
free in all of our heads, Levels has no more to say on the subject than similar movies made long
before the technology was viable.
Stern's film works best in the early scenes when we share Joe's
confusion. Once the details are spilled, it descends into scene after
scene of characters explaining how this all works, and yet it's still
never entirely convincing. At the end of the movie those philosophical
questions regarding whether AI should have rights still linger,
as Levels does little to convincingly make its case that a digital world
and its people should have the same protections as the real world. Its
suggestion that if a digital being thinks it's human it should be
treated as a human is a notion that might have seemed romantic in 20th
century sci-fi, not so much at a time when we all have genuine concerns
about AI taking our place. The big flaw of AI is that it can't create anything new in terms of art
as it can only imitate the centuries of human art to which it's
exposed. Levels ironically plays like the sort of movie an AI might muster, one
that looks quite slick but is reliant on mimicking similar tales that
have come before it.
Levels is in US/CAN cinemas and
on VOD from November 1st. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
