Director: Garth Davis | Writer: Iain Reid
Starring: Paul Mescal, Saoirse Ronan, Aaron Pierre
A sci-fi movie with Saoirse-like-inertia, you say? A love story set amid a dust bowl dystopia, I hear? Sign me up, count me in, I’m there. But while all the pieces seemed present for Foe, from the source book to the talented director, from the excellent starring duo to the laden soundtrack, the result simply wasn’t a completed puzzle. Rather, it became a picture that just didn’t look right, and even when you figured it all out you’d almost rather you didn’t.
Set 40 years in the future on an Earth that has become wildly inhospitable, Foe is a love story on a Midwest farm, but inside a futuristic bubble that seems about to burst. Most agriculture is done by robots in zones humans can’t live it, a lot of people are fleeing to the stars for homes, but Junior and Hen still manage to scratch out a living. When he is “selected” to make the journey to space, the corporation/government in charge offers a solution for a Hen left behind; an AI replacement that will look like her husband and keep her (creepy) company.
As with too many sci-fi films, the premise is cooler than the film, like an idea thought up but not executed. In Foe, Davis tries for a depth that he simply can’t reach, he and his team are just not ready yet, and while these actors are great, perhaps they weren’t ready either. Or maybe it was just a bad script with bloated morals that was never going to come out clean in the end. Either way, audiences don’t like this movie, and I can’t blame them. Even Saoirse is bad, and I love her, but she better start picking better projects; she hasn’t chosen a good movie since Little Women. This film was like a bad Black Mirror episode with an even worse ending, a misstep if ever there was once, and something (unfortunately) just better left forgotten.
My rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆