This is a fun, lighthearted movie about boy meets girl meets computer! Of course, the plot is a little cheesy and silly but none of that really matters when it's fun and takes us back to a simpler time. What makes it fun comes from the context of technology in the 1980s. Early home personal computers struggled with storage capacity and computing power to do little more than write a short letter and play primitive games, and their future role in the home was still being questioned.
Watching this film these days is a little laughable and a bit unsettling because of how far the technology has come, and as such it hits a bit different. There's less suspension of belief now which actually makes it a bit more distracting from the main plot than a simple fairy-tale. It throws a lot of shade on the film that was not originally intended because of how much it predicted that it got right.
We don't need to spill champagne on the circuit board to have a computer to perform a good facsimile of artificial sentience and intelligence when we have functioning chat bots using language learning models. And although there'd be huge network dropouts and long waiting times, our computers would not fry themselves trying to download the internet over a dial-up telephone modem! Leaving our computer on for hours hooked up to home automation isn't far fetched anymore either, and getting our news from the internet is commonplace - even if we don't need to make hardcopies of it! I just warn that you will have to suspend your thinking about the legal implications and health impacts of what damage that computer causes by the end of the film.
The arc of the computer learning about love mirrors the protagonists journey in learning to love. To that end it succeeds and the ending pays off thematically as well, because that's what it was really aiming for.
One thing I will say is that a fun film can never have too many montages, and Giorgio Moroder's end sequence music "Together in Electric Dreams" is a classic 80s hit that is still great even today.
Watching this film these days is a little laughable and a bit unsettling because of how far the technology has come, and as such it hits a bit different. There's less suspension of belief now which actually makes it a bit more distracting from the main plot than a simple fairy-tale. It throws a lot of shade on the film that was not originally intended because of how much it predicted that it got right.
We don't need to spill champagne on the circuit board to have a computer to perform a good facsimile of artificial sentience and intelligence when we have functioning chat bots using language learning models. And although there'd be huge network dropouts and long waiting times, our computers would not fry themselves trying to download the internet over a dial-up telephone modem! Leaving our computer on for hours hooked up to home automation isn't far fetched anymore either, and getting our news from the internet is commonplace - even if we don't need to make hardcopies of it! I just warn that you will have to suspend your thinking about the legal implications and health impacts of what damage that computer causes by the end of the film.
The arc of the computer learning about love mirrors the protagonists journey in learning to love. To that end it succeeds and the ending pays off thematically as well, because that's what it was really aiming for.
One thing I will say is that a fun film can never have too many montages, and Giorgio Moroder's end sequence music "Together in Electric Dreams" is a classic 80s hit that is still great even today.