Don’t you hate it when you ask if you can have Blade Runner, and mum says we have Blade Runner at home, but it’s not Blade Runner, it’s a generic knock off brand? Us too. On a completely unrelated note, Simulant is now streaming on NOW and Sky Go.
Directed by April Mullen and set in the not-too-distant future when human-looking robots called simulants are readily available (but shot in Toronto), Simulant sees Avatar’s Sam Worthington as Artificial Intelligence Compliance Enforcement agent Kessler, whose job it is to hunt down malfunctioning androids, which sounds awfully familiar.
While Kessler grapples with the dubious morality of his job, loving husband Evan (Arrow’s Robbie Amell) makes a soul-shattering discovery—he’s a simulant, programmed with the memories of his human antecedent, who died in a car crash—which explains why things have been a little off between him and his wife, Faye (Jordana Brewster, Fast X). Eventually these two story threads collide, along with that of Casey (Simu Liu of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), a hacker who jailbreaks simulants to liberate them.
It all sounds very familiar to us, but sometimes familiar can be fun, or new approaches to old material can produce interesting results. Screenwriter Ryan Christopher Churchill also cheerfully pilfers from Isaac Asimov as well as Philip K. Dick, with the former’s hugely influential Three Laws of Robotics (as seen in I, Robot) informing the rules that simulants have to abide by, and playing around in that space can be a real good time. But counterpoint: perhaps the real question here is not the nature of humanity but rather how the stars of three of the biggest franchises in the world can wind up in a low-budget sci-fi thriller together. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in craft services.
