In the world of Blade Runner, the Tyrell Corporation ran the following slogan for their latest line of Android replicants: "Nexus 6: More Human Than Human." This slogan always came off more than a little ironically until Spike Jonze's masterpiece, Her. This film creates one of the most charming and compelling love stories of modern cinema in two individuals, and one of them is a computer. Long gone are the days when HAL 9000 ushered in a whole new generation of cold, emotionless computer systems that view humankind with isolated detachment. The first startling revelation about this character is her genuine warmth and charm, and she only continues to surprise from the on. Samantha, as she named herself, is a fully-functioning "OS" that is in a constant state of learning about the world. In finding the perfect balance between robotic ignorance and childlike enthusiasm, she explores the sort of emotional depths that no other robotic characters in cinema have ever quite reached. Although she has no physical form, the integration of Jonze's writing and Scarlett Johansson's voice acting work perfectly to create a character Theodor Twombly can fall in love with.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
