Director – S.K. Dale, Screenplay – Will Hornley & April Maguire, Producers – Jeffrey Greenstein, Yariv Lerner, Tanner Mobley, Les Weldon & Jonathan Yunger, Photography – Daniel Lindholm, Music – Jed Palmer, Visual Effects – Worldwide FX (Supervisor – Jivko Ivanov), Special Effects Supervisor – Yovko Doganjiiski, Makeup Effects – KM Effects Ltd., Production Design – Alexei Karaghiaur. Production Company – Millennium Media.
Cast
Megan Fox (Alice), Michele Morrone (Nick Paretti), Madeline Zima (Maggie Paretti), Matilda Firth (Isla Paretti), Jude Allen Greenstein (Max), Andrew Whipp (Monty)
Plot
With his wife Maggie in hospital ill, Nick Paretti takes the step of purchasing a Sim, a lifelike android from Kobol Industries for doing housework and acting as nanny to his young daughter Isla and infant son. Isla names the android Alice. Alice soon does an exceptional job around the house. Nick asks Alice to come and sit and watch Casablanca with him but that she remove all reference to it from her memory so that she can watch it fresh. To do so, she asks that he delete several memory files and then reboot her. Meanwhile, at the construction site he supervises, Nick finds that his boss has taken the step of replacing all the workers except himself with Sims. This has the dismissed workers in revolt and they conduct a break-in to sabotage the Sims. Since the reboot, Alice has become more independent. She regards the happiness of her primary user Nick as her greatest priority and seduces him, as well as kills a co-worker who threatens to expose Nick’s involvement in the workplace sabotage. When Maggie returns home, Alice then regards her as a threat to Nick’s wellbeing.
Subservience is produced by Millennium Media, a company formed by several former Cannon Films associates. Millennium have a habit of buying up the rights to previously successful properties and spinning off further sequels, remakes or reboots as with the likes of The Wicker Man (2006), Rambo (2008), The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (2009), Conan the Barbarian (2011), The Mechanic (2011), Texas Chainsaw (2013), Leatherface (2017), Hellboy (2019) and Rambo: Last Blood (2019), among others. That said, Subservience is an original screen work. Director S.K. Dale had previously directed lead actress Megan Fox in the thriller Till Death (2021), also for Millennium Media.
Subservience has a great casting coup in Megan Fox. Fox came to fame in Transformers (2007), which made her a hot name for a time. She also gained a reputation as being cold and bitchy, while the films she appeared in outside of the Transformers series were all flops that quickly caused her star to fade. The ingenuity of Subservience is to cast Fox as a blank and later evil and calculating android, a range of expressions perfectly suited to the entirety of Fox’s limited range. The male lead is Italian actor Michele Morrone, who is cast in the central point-of-view role. The problem is that Morrone speaks English through a distinctive accent. However, the film surrounds Morrone with other actors speaking American and his accented delivery becomes distracting (nor is any explanation ever offered for it).
Megan Fox as the android Alice gone amok
In very quick course, Subservience heads for the worst A.I. clichés. Almost all of these centre around what makes for really bad programming in a domestic android. Alice is designed with more capacity for adaptive reasoning that should be needed in an android, whispering “I love you” to Michele Morrone or offering her sexual services to satisfy. Why would a domestic maid android be programmed with genitalia that would have to be identical to human and lifelike? Surely the only reason could be that a heck of a lot of users are buying them as sex androids, which opens up another whole level of questions about why these machines are being built. A better design company would maybe have that as one of the features that a maid droid could be modded for, but for such a unit to be sold fully functional on the showroom floor just seems wrong.
And then there is Alice’s ability to reprogram herself and gain independence when Michele Morrone asks her to delete any files that refer to Casablanca (1942) and then she asks him to reboot her. I would be extremely worried if all it took to cause my PC to gain independent thought would be going through and deleting a few files and then conducting a reboot of the system. Now if they were key programming files being deleted, the machine might be behaving a little erratically upon reboot or perhaps would not even restart at all. On the other hand, it seems a huge leap to go from asking a computer to do a search and replace and delete all mentions of a film and actually altering its core programming.
The latter sections of Subservience have a partially malfunctioning Megan Fox going amok. These are all familiar if one has seen M3gan or any of its ilk and play fairly much by the book without any notable qualities. Perhaps the one interesting touch is that Megan is able to gain internet access in the laboratory and take over the system and then activate another model of herself. All quite sophisticated work achieved with no more than a search/replace for references to a film followed by a reboot.
