Hotel Artemis (2018)
Directed by Drew Pearce
No — Hotel Artemis is not especially woke, scoring 28 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Hotel Artemis arrives in a 2028 Los Angeles where the water has been privatized and the streets have responded accordingly.
Consciousness Markers
A genuinely diverse ensemble led by Jodie Foster, with Sterling K. Brown and Brian Tyree Henry as Black co-leads, Sofia Boutella and Kenneth Choi in prominent roles. The diversity is natural rather than announced, but it is unusually broad for a 2018 genre thriller.
The central unrest is explicitly a revolt against water privatization, and the villain is a crime lord who owns the city and its utilities. The 'eat the rich' framing is present but subordinated to genre mechanics.
Foster anchors the film as a hardened, morally complex woman running a criminal enterprise, with Boutella as a lethal female assassin and Slate as a cop. Female agency is present but never framed as a thesis.
Foster's Nurse is defined by severe agoraphobia and anxiety, portrayed with sympathy and complexity as a genuine condition rather than a quirk. It is a mental-health portrayal rather than a neurodivergence-as-identity statement.
The near-future Los Angeles riot is sparked by the privatization of the city's water supply, giving the dystopia a resource-scarcity backdrop, though it functions more as plot machinery than environmental sermon.
The cast is multiracial, but race is never a subject of the narrative; the riot is about water, not identity, and no character's arc is racially coded.
The film is a brisk genre exercise that wears its water-privatization backdrop lightly and never stops to deliver a moral lesson to the audience.
No LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes appear anywhere in the film.
No body-positive themes or messaging of any kind.
No historical events or figures are revised or reinterpreted; the film is entirely fictional and set in the near future.
Why it received this score
Hotel Artemis arrives in a 2028 Los Angeles where the water has been privatized and the streets have responded accordingly. This is a premise with obvious political freight, and the film knows it. A crime lord owns the utilities and the hotel above them, the rioters are angry about a bill, and class resentment hums beneath every scene. The trouble is that none of it is ever argued. The uprising functions as weather, a backdrop that occasionally knocks on the door and reminds us the lobby is gated. We are never lectured, which is its own quiet mercy.
The cast is notably broad for a genre thriller of this size, and notably unbothered about announcing itself. Foster's Nurse anchors the film, a woman running a criminal enterprise with a shuffle and a portable record player, while Sterling K. Brown and Brian Tyree Henry carry the emotional spine as brothers in escalating trouble. Sofia Boutella's assassin and Jenny Slate's wounded officer round out a roster in which women hold real power and nobody stops to comment on it. Race is never a subject here. Neither is sexuality, which is simply absent.
What the film does offer, almost by accident, is a tender portrait of agoraphobia. Foster's confinement is treated as a condition, not a quirk, and her grief is allowed to be ugly and specific. There is no messaging about bodies, no revision of any historical record, and no sermon waiting at the end. This is a brisk, competently mounted exercise in near-future violence that happens to have a conscience and declines to wave it around. Its social awareness is present, faint, and entirely subordinate to the business of people shooting each other in a hallway.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Los Angeles, June 21st, 2028. While the streets are being torn apart by riots, the Nurse, who runs a clandestine hospital for criminals in the penthouse of the Artemis, a closed old hotel, has a rough night dealing with troublemaker clients: thieves, assassins, someone from the past and the one who owns the place and the whole city.
Questions about Hotel Artemis
Is Hotel Artemis woke?
No — Hotel Artemis is not especially woke, scoring 28 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does Hotel Artemis have any woke elements?
3 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (50), Eat the Rich (45) and Feminist Agenda (30). On Representation Casting: A genuinely diverse ensemble led by Jodie Foster, with Sterling K.
How does Hotel Artemis compare to other 2018 movies?
It ranks #71 of the 325 films from 2018 we've scored; their average is 20. The wokest is Return (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.