Automata (2014)

A Spanish-Bulgarian co-production from 2014, directed by Gabe Ibáñez and anchored by a co-producing Antonio Banderas, Automata unfolds in 2044 after solar flares have removed ninety-nine percent of humanity and left the survivors in decaying cities ringed by desert. The Pilgrim robots cannot harm life and cannot modify themselves, until one does. Jacq Vaucan, an insurance investigator for the ROC corporation, follows the anomaly out of the city and into the wastes, and the film settles into the familiar rhythm of a man discovering that his employer knows more than it admits.

The cast is assembled from several nations, which reflects European financing arrangements more than any deliberate design, and the film makes no comment on the matter. Melanie Griffith and Birgitte Hjort Sørensen appear in roles that advance Jacq's predicament without carrying any argument about gender. The antagonist is a corporation that hoards technology, dispatches assassins, and suppresses emergent intelligence to protect its position, a genuine anti-corporate streak that the screenplay treats as conspiracy rather than economics. The irradiated landscape and the creeping desert provide atmosphere, not advocacy. Race, sexuality, body image, and neurodivergence are simply absent as subjects, and the film has no interest in revising any history, being occupied with a speculative future instead.

What philosophical weight the film carries arrives late, when an evolved robot explains that death is ordinary, that no life form inhabits a planet eternally, and that humanity will persist through the machines it built. It is a brief speech, delivered amid gunfire and canyon chases, and then the plot resumes. The result is a handsome, melancholy genre exercise that gestures at large ideas without ever stopping to lecture us about them, which in this climate is almost restful. Thirty percent on the aggregators feels about right, though the ocean at the end is a nice touch.