Movie Review : Her (2013)

The movies that appeal the most are the ones that cease to look like a movie every single chance they have. 'Her', at its best (and probably also the worst) felt like the pages of a book, one whose genre you could possibly never decide. In fact, the pages shift so fast that you can only wish they retained a little longer. 

One clear thing that the movie stands out is in its background designing, the constituent features and the highly neat, minimalist layout. Henceforth, you never notice the beauty of anything but the true context and the truer characters. What follows is the grace in the antithesis of what you might call time itself, or something even bigger. Despite the complexity of the subject(s), the director who also happens to be the writer of the film did a magnificent job in allowing an almost spectacularly spontaneous transcendence. The blend is super fine, like cosmic dust and ethereal symphonies intermingling to form a different dimension, something that "exists" outside the physical word - an area of emphasis that has been worked upon at the end of the film.

The film stands out at its depiction of the highly complicated subject with a fairly simple storyline. Almost any other film that shares a common interest or lineage, including Kubrick's 'A Space Odyssey', Nolan's 'Interstellar' or as for that matter, von Trier's 'Melancholia' or Michael Gondry's 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' share sheer brilliance ; however all the other storylines are highly hypothetical and need substantial analysis and counter-analysis, cinematic knowledge for the petty purpose of being communicated or understood, to begin with. 

'Her' combines romance, sexuality, cognition, human psychology, metaphysics and poetry together in a narrative that flows as easily as the dialogues that paint the greater picture. 

Joaquin Phoenix, as Theodore Twombly - couldn't have had a more perfect match. Joaquin almost penetrated and reprogrammed the nature of the character, then presented it in his own perception of perplexity, in his own understanding of nature. Not to mention how good Rooney Mara as Catherine Klausen felt, both in  portrayal and summarisation. Scarlett Johansson as Samantha (voice only) was near perfect, too. However, a little something - like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle was missing, and I could not fish out proper terminology for it but honestly speaking, somebody with more depth of thought would have suited the role better. 

The dilusion of the context and its encapsulation into something so fluid, so easy on the eyes yet not superficial at all, something so deep yet so prominent and profound without insinuating the imposition of the most complicated of theroies, or as for that matter even hypotheses previously not known. The entire backdrop is extremely elucidated, in a certain sense yet never overcrowded, never distorted. The void is felt in every second, "the gaping hole in the heart" is both semantically and metaphorically
the thirteen billion years old ordeal the film deals with, and the spectator carries the essence of it prior to heading for the movie and after he returns back with the experience. The only change that happens in between is that of a plane, of a few more dimensions added to our conception of reality.

Towards the end of the 'experience' we're pushed towards a dawn, an awakening, a beginning, yet again. Painful as it might be, it is a beginning - in the end. Most films trying to deal with artificial intelligence or communication or the relationship that we now share with technology or consciousness, both individual and collective and also beyond both somehow always lead you to sheer dystopia. Considering everybody has their own game of dealing with truth and how it surfaces in people's lives, dystopia is not something you intentionally pass on to an audience, at least not in the end. Despite the oblivion and the perplexity and the inability to reach out, to communicate, it ends on a humane note, in an unconventionally beautiful context.