Movie Review ‘Archive’: Cerebral Science Fiction with Intriguing Hook

Imagine the line where advanced robotics meets advanced artificial intelligence and you’re picturing a being that might be indistinguishable from a human. Now picture an actual human’s memory and experience, being loaded into the machine. It could even be the mind of a dead person. Maybe even your dead wife.

Archive (just released on VOD) isn’t the first time this idea has come to the screen, but it makes for a reasonably compelling, if chilly, sci-fi tale in the mold of 2015’s Ex Machina. Thirty years in the future, in a remote wilderness suggesting the Pacific Northwest (though it’s actually Japan), a tech genius named George (Theo James) presides over a factory/lab where he is steadily progressing toward creating an advanced artificial human. His problem is that he has gone off-piste from what the corporation funding his research had in mind. One boss (Rhona Mitra) harangues him about his progress via video calls while security enforcers (Toby Jones, Richard Glover) pay him a visit and inform him that he’s breaking all the rules. Nobody quite grasps what George is really up to, which is taking a hard drive containing his dead wife’s memories and loading them into a lifelike robot. We learn much of this in a series of flashback sequences that gradually lay out the backstory between George and his beloved French wife, Jules (Stacy Martin).

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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Imagine the line where advanced robotics meets advanced artificial intelligence and you’re picturing a being that might be indistinguishable from a human. Now picture an actual human’s memory and experience, being loaded into the machine. It could even be the mind of a dead person. Maybe even your dead wife.

Archive (just released on VOD) isn’t the first time this idea has come to the screen, but it makes for a reasonably compelling, if chilly, sci-fi tale in the mold of 2015’s Ex Machina. Thirty years in the future, in a remote wilderness suggesting the Pacific Northwest (though it’s actually Japan), a tech genius named George (Theo James) presides over a factory/lab where he is steadily progressing toward creating an advanced artificial human. His problem is that he has gone off-piste from what the corporation funding his research had in mind. One boss (Rhona Mitra) harangues him about his progress via video calls while security enforcers (Toby Jones, Richard Glover) pay him a visit and inform him that he’s breaking all the rules. Nobody quite grasps what George is really up to, which is taking a hard drive containing his dead wife’s memories and loading them into a lifelike robot. We learn much of this in a series of flashback sequences that gradually lay out the backstory between George and his beloved French wife, Jules (Stacy Martin).