Checked out the indie science fiction movie Archive via 99 cent rental on iTunes. The flick came out earlier this year direct to streaming and I’d been eyeballing it since then but never quite pulled the trigger. Couldn’t beat that price though…

Archive is about a scientist in the near future who is trying to build a robot to house the mind of his dead wife. Her consciousness has been stored as software in a kind of interactive backup computer. He operates out of an isolated high tech house/bunker and has to deal with – and lie to – his boss, agents from the archive company, and other sordid types who want to know his business. The film deals in concepts of memory, self, loss, and other heady concepts.

It doesn’t always deal in those concepts well though. I think there’s a lot left on the table for a movie that’s trying to say something profound. Amusingly, it kind of tap dances in the same realm as the perplexingly daft movie Replicas from a few years ago. This movie is more successful as a lucid, thoughtful picture though its hardly as inadvertently fun as that flick. And that’s kind of the problem with the movie… it wants to do more and be more than it can deliver. It winds up grinding too many gears on its way to the credits. I’ve said it before but this would have made a fine short film or hour long episode of an anthology tv series.

I’m not sure I’d recommend this movie to casual or hard science fiction fans. For casual viewers, I think it’s a little too slow and not enough “happens”. For people looking for challenging sci-fi, I don’t think it really has enough to say, much less enough unique things to say. A nice effort though.

Score: 72