“Wha… Are you asking me?”
“No, I”m asking Siri,” Eric said. “Siri, ‘What if?’”
“That’s a beer can, not an iPhone.”
“Shut up, Rob. They didn’t have to know that.”
“Well, I guess I’ll answer. Your first thought is, ‘Of course not.’ The idea of someone trying to fall in love with Siri seems like a silly concept, until you realize where director Spike Jonze is going to take it.”
“Her is a story of near-future man/tech love, but it’s not what you might expect given that premise,” Eric said, looking especially handsome and definitely not talking to a half-finished can of Lone Star. “This isn’t a Wall-E future showing modern man’s disconnect with nature or a bleak post-apocalyptic world where self-aware machines have all but eradicated mankind a la The Matrix or Terminator — though, for fun, you can pretend Her is an origin story for Skynet.”
“All of human history is an origin story for Skynet. Her is a commentary on modern relationships,” Rob said. “How much do they depend on authentic human emotion? Is it possible to have a real, intimate, emotional connection with someone who isn’t a real person?”
“But, this isn’t a one-way human/robot love in the sense of Jude Law in A.I. or some creepy guy who buys a sex robot,” Eric said, regretting that “sex robot” was now going to be in his Internet history. “No, this is real reciprocal human love with a big ‘L’ between a man and something man-made. It’s not just a man that learns to love his operation system; it’s an operating system who learns to love a man.”
(Rambling derelicts, Arrested Development, ScarJo and more after the jump.)