Review of the film ‘A.rtificial I.mmortality’ (2021)

A.rtificial I.mmortality is a documentary about duplicating people through technology.

The host of the documentary explores a variety of technological duplicates from people. Duplicates are shown to be interactive: they can listen, recognize speech, and reply. Some are digital, image-only duplicates that are shown on a screen, and some are physical animatronics representing the person’s head. Even though some prototypes represent adequately the heads movements during speak, they all noticeably rely on loudspeakers – reproducing human phonation still seems to be an objective far away. The most recent advances seem to come from the use of artificial intelligence, so the duplicates are able to produce unrecorded answers.

The documentary shows the firms working on these technologies and the current prototypes, as well as the reactions from people; a prototype is modelled after the host and then it is shown to her and her daughters, so their reactions are captured.

While the documentary addresses realistic representations of people, it still fails to live up to its title: nothing is said about how to get these duplicates to get the original person’s personality or memories. Without that, the scope of the documentary is reduced to technological puppets that imitate people.

All in all, 2 out of 5.

 

Title:	A.rtificial I.mmortality
Genre:	Documentary
Year:	2021
Nationality:	Canada
Colour:	Colour
Director:	Ann Shin
Writer:	Shannon Kennedy, Erica Leendertse, Julia Nunes, Ann Shin
Producer:	Hannah Donegan, Erica Leendertse, Ann Shin
Executive producer:	Gerry Flahive, Ann Shin
Cinematographer:	Stephen Chung, Iris Ng
Film editor:	Shannon Kennedy, Stephen Taylor
Art Director:	Alexandra G. Brillembourg
Music:	Todor Kobakov
Running time:	74 minutes
Language:	English