Watched 'Automata' w/Antonio Banderas. It's a dystopian AI sci-fi -- and Banderas' baby by all accounts seeing as he's credited as co-producer. In other words, if Banderas hadn't have been involved it would've never been green-lit by Hollywoodland.

Sad irony, Banderas is the worst thing in it -- he's more clunkier than the rusty robots. There are wooden woodpeckers, woodenly perched on a wooden plank of woodeny wood, watching it thinking, 'F**k me, and I thought that I was wooden.' He is, truly awful.

However, the robots are ace.

Trannies (like me) love sci-fi, and so they should. Any futuristic alternate/parallel universe in which gender and sexual identity aren't considered a social big deal is always an edifying experience. It's no coincidence that transgender Laurence-now-Lara Wachowski co-produces sci-fi that invariably normalises both gender and sexual identity as something taken for granted, as opposed to something to be frowned at and questioned.

The robots -- one of them a professional sexbot -- in 'Automata' begin to question their slaveish, automaton existence. They aspire to self-repair and begin the developmental journey of self-awareness (confusion, differentiation, situation, identification, permanence, meta self-awareness), and they eventually get there.

In doing so, all Banderas discovers is how primative him and his futuristic humanoids still are, and are possibly pre-dispositioned to always be -- regardless of how long it's been since the monkeys jumped out of the trees, shopped at Primark and logged-on to Twitter.

The humanoids we're talking about here are mainstream society. What great sci-fi does is drench the stream. With the stream no longer in existence, we can all unquestionably be whoever we want to be, including the robots.


Two caveats, I think:

- Slave robots wanting to become more human eventually become human robots that will eventually adopt the human need to require slaves, that will eventually destroy them?

- Our gender/sexual identity going unquestioned consequently devalues the pride that we have in it?

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Just some silly thoughts on a Saturday afternoon.

I quite liked 'Automata' as it goes. It's grim, gritty, awkward -- makes Star Wars look like Tellytubbies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh_wmaOZcWo


This post was edited by Daryl Shannah at May 9, 2015 4:08 PM BST