Connected stories of a doomed AI-human hybrid future struggle to hang together
Set in a not-so-distant future, this frayed assemblage of vaguely interconnected skits plays like ideas Charlie Brooker had while tipsy for episodes of
Black Mirror, then crumpled up and threw in his waste basket. But those ideas were retrieved, storyboarded, and shot by student film-makers whose underpaid tutors weren’t around to say keep working on this script until you have something interesting.
The opening sequence, which comes back throughout, concerns an
astronaut in outer space named David (Thomas Jane), who is doing a routine repair on a satellite when a power surge sets him adrift with only an AI link for company. As he floats in space, using up his last days of oxygen, he monologues about his regrets in life, talks to God and ponders what’s going on back on Earth (where electrical storms presage environmental disaster). On our home planet, a sad-eyed
Robot shelter attendant (the wonderful Tomasz Kot from Cold War, incongruously named Brian despite a thick Polish accent) tries to interest customers in an elderly, doddery
Android named Charlie (Rupert Everett) who tells lame jokes and can’t fix much and therefore is hard to adopt out.