I am Mother

Earlier this year I made a blogpost about a little indie science fiction film called "Prospect," and how it felt like a prequel to the video game series Metroid.  Well...I watched another low-budget sci-fi movie entitled "I am Mother" recently, and it definitely feels like a prequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn.  Before I continue, a word of warning...spoilers ahead.

So what's "I am Mother" about?  The basic premise can be summed up as follows:

A baby girl is artificially born in a massive underground facility and raised to adulthood by a robot nanny.  

While I was watching the film I was a bit worried it would go the route of "door to the outside world opens...and roll credits."  Thankfully, "I am Mother" avoids that particular pitfall despite its limited budget.  In fact, most of the third act takes place outside the bunker.

Another area in which this movie excels is depicting a machine intelligence.  It's a common failing of science fiction writers to depict their A.I. characters with largely the same traits and emotional rhythms as humans.  That's not to say a sufficiently advanced A.I. couldn't try to emulate human behavior, but it would be like an apple masquerading as an orange.  Both are pieces of fruit much like humans and (perhaps one day) A.I. are sentient beings, but they are not the same kind of consciousnesses.

Anyway...what's all this got to do with Horizon: Zero Dawn?  Well, in that game one of the big plot twists comes in the form of humans (and actually all life on earth) being wiped out by runaway military robots.  Once said doomsday machines have completed their task though they became inert leaving the door open for reseeding of the planet by a collection of caretaker A.I. constructs.  However, the A.I. in charge of teaching got sabotaged and (as a result) was unable to educate the new batch of humans, only raising them adulthood.  Hence, humanity has to largely start all over again from wandering tribes to crude city-states up to budding kingdoms.

In some ways "I am Mother" is a "what if" spin on the Horizon: Zero Dawn backstory.  What if education were possible?  Perhaps one of the other contingency A.I.s could assume the duties, albeit with a lot of difficult (at least initially).  If so, then you have a prequel film to the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn entitled "I am Mother."