Her (A Movie Review)

Good Day, Earth. How have you been? It’s been a while since the last time I post in anything, after the Creative Writing class and stuff. Now here I am, brushing up my dusty corner of this self-expressing space *sigh* all over again.

Today I just watched ‘Her’, a 2013 mind-provoking love story directed by Spike Jonze. All of a sudden I think I could use some succinct review of this movie starring Joaquin Phoenix as the lead character. So here it goes..

On a first glance, I had a notion that ‘Her’ is going to be like some documentary-ish romance of a deeply-fall-in-love man who's incapable of moving on from a female, i.e. her ex (crush or lover). And turned out that prejudice is just close enough—except that the subject here is barely a living soul.

Initiated with an acknowledgement of the mankind period under the reign of technology, the film introduced Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a man who practically lives his daily life with it. Theodore, whose job is to write others’ letters, is one of those who grabbed the latest fascinating artificial intelligent operating system. What makes this OS beg to differ is the feature of an intuitive entity which doesn't only listens and response to you, but it also knows you. It gives you sensation of communicating with an actual person, either male or female which has a mutual understanding with you.

By such cultivation on technology, it wouldn’t be impossible then that social interaction between human could get outperformed by an OS, especially to those with an anti-social disposition. That is exactly just about what happened to Theodore, who kept on seeking for a rebound—all of which were aided by technology around—after he got separated from his ex-wife, Catherine. From virtual games to blind-dates, Theodore winded up falling for his disembodied female OS, Samantha.

On his relationship with Samantha, though, the vexation of how real their feelings are often gets at Theodore. Despite the fact that he realized the oddity of such a relationship, he started to think that the feeling and everything about it was real. This led him to fight for her, until one day, he caught up the bitter moment in a conversation with Samantha. He learned the fact that besides talking to him, Samantha also talked to thousands of different people all at once. As if it was not bad enough, it got worsened as he figured out that she was yet to fall in love with numerous of them simultaneously.

Through the film ‘Her’, Jonze likely lets us, indirectly, perceive the social condition of people these days. He thoroughly portrayed the way human started to deduce their social connection with their kind due to the technology advances. Within ‘Her’, we were dragged to the lonely modern world where apparently, not only to facilitate human life, technology is also in charge of human escapism from reality. In this case, the captivating plot has the ability to engage our perspectives and emotions to both Theodore and Samantha. Even the sweet soundtrack, The Moon Song by Karen O also conforms to the melancholy ambient; nicely wrap the whole mood into a single harmony. Ultimately, I’m glad to say that I actually love ‘Her’.