Klara And The Sun Isn’t Worth The Thought Experiment
Taika Waititi’s sense of humor is a poor fit for this sci-fi dystopia.
Despite myriad prototypes for efficient artificial intelligence existing on-screen, humanity is in a furious race to develop a version of that phenomenon even stranger (and dumber) than fiction. We could have been using AI to cure cancer or send us deeper into space; instead, we’re teaching it Gen Z slang and asking it which aisle of the grocery store we can find pasta on. Chatbots are making us dumber, deepfakes make us less trusting, “AI overviews” make us lazier. Such dire straits make tales of artificial helpers that actually help feel almost quaint by comparison — but “quaint” isn’t quite enough for Taika Waititi, who takes a crack at cutesy near-future fable with Klara and the Sun. It’s a film that splices the cyberpunk worlds of Phillip K. Dick with the sunny-ish disposition of a Roald Dahl fairytale, but ultimately can’t part with its wisecracking long enough to unpack what that perfectly intriguing mash-up has to offer.
Waititi specializes in making the juvenile feel profound… or, at least, he did three or four films ago. The Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit tested the goodwill he’d earned with The Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Thor: Ragnarok, and most audiences balked. Thor: Love and Thunder only dug a deeper grave; Next Goal Wins, while worthwhile, was hardly a blip on the radar.
If we were hoping for a comeback, Klara and the Sun isn’t it. An adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name but with none of the interiority, it takes a surface-level scan of a near-future society already ravaged and restructured by a third World War. We’re told — through exposition that might very well have been slotted in during an ADR session — that said conflict wiped out the Internet and left society huddled in fractured, smog-choked cities. We’re shown blitzy ads for the military that Waititi’s eponymous, bright-eyed heroine (Jenna Ortega) mistakes for “sports.” And through Klara’s cloistered life at The Friend Store, we learn that teens these days are so lonely that their parents can elect to buy them “Artificial Friends” to guide them through the highs and lows of puberty.
As a B1, Klara is generations older than the ultra-chic AFs that are all the rage now — though fortunately, not nearly as dangerous as the B2s, which apparently were corrupted by a murderous glitch that ignited scandal years prior. None of that is relevant in a way that pays off in the long run. Far more pertinent are the flaws and tics that presumably make Klara “unsellable” — she stands on one leg like a flamingo sometimes, and prays to the sun, which recharges her battery, every morning — until the 14-year-old Josie (Mia Tharia) spots her in the store window and recognizes a kindred spirit. She chooses Klara on the spot, much to the dismay of her mother Chrissy, whom Amy Adams brings to life with a chilly, vacant reserve. Nevertheless, they bring their old AF (don’t worry, the movie makes sure to deploy this double entendre) back to their remote cabin on the outskirts of the city to give her a crash course in dysfunctional human life.
A character like Chrissy is too complex a mystery for Klara to unspool.
Klara’s script, penned by Waititi and Dahvi Waller, is all too eager to make light of its dystopia. The rapid-fire sniping that made What We Do In The Shadows so effective only betrays its tedium. Klara is Waititi on autopilot: even one of the film’s more pointed jokes (“You’re not the droid we’re looking for!”) reveals that his mind is already on other IP. But for someone once tipped to helm a Star Wars story, the filmmaker doesn’t seem to get what makes a sci-fi world so interesting. His direction downplays the details that gave Ishiguro’s beloved novel some tragic specificity, like the bleeding-edge procedure that rewrote Josie’s brain to genius levels, but doomed her with a debilitating sickness. This is ostensibly very sad for Chrissy, who already lost her oldest daughter to natural causes, and later, her husband for unspecified reasons — but beyond her protective instincts over Josie, or her fascination with Klara’s ability to imitate her daughter, we’re denied the context that might inform her more “heartless” choices.
What saves Klara from total insincerity is, ironically, the same thing that keeps us at arm’s length. Only Ortega really manages to make this feel anything but utterly glib: she sells tics and childlike foibles that might have been excruciating elsewhere, keeping this story’s storybook optimism alive and its comedy from landing with a thud. (Wilderpeople’s Rachel House is another welcome addition as Chrissy’s disgruntled housekeeper, but deployed too rarely to make a real difference.) When Klara sees the sun setting behind a far-off farmhouse, she braves a pilgrimage to “The Sun’s House,” despite the threat of a hulking, crop-harvesting machine that spits more smog into the atmosphere and blocks the sun’s “healing goodness” from reaching Josie.
But Klara is also somewhat limited by the character’s point of view. In a novel, following a manic pixie dream-bot as she works to unravel contentious family secrets might be compelling; on film, we’re steps ahead of Klara at almost every turn. Even when she stumbles into the truth of her role here — which has something to do with that aforementioned gift of imitation and a sketchy doctor played by Steve Buscemi — our story glitches out before it can say anything meaningful.
The chemistry between its two leads is not enough to save Klara from falling flat.
Neither Klara’s comedy nor its drama can get Waititi out of his comfort zone. Maybe it all lands with a thud because we’ve collectively outgrown this brand of humor. Or maybe we’re long past the point of making light of dystopia, whether it’s our own or something like it. By the time Klara realizes it should probably say something deep about AI in our modern market and what it means to have a soul, Klara has no bandwidth left to spare. What could have been the modern fairytale we needed is both too schmaltzy and too hollow, leaving us with an existential paradox that’s not worth the time it takes to solve.
