College student Georgia (Chloë Grace Moretz) is halfway through telling her friend that she wants to get an abortion when her world is catapulted into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. The androids-turned-butlers that every family in America seems to have go from charming and subservient to malicious and bloodthirsty, with an automated eye on wiping out the human race. Next thing we know, Georgia is nine months pregnant, and she and her boyfriend Sam (Algee Smith) are terrified and on the run from a homicidal army of cyborgs. This sudden, jarring switch to a life-or-death state is given even more urgency by virtue of the ticking time bomb in Georgia’s uterus.
The initial setup of Mattson Tomlin’s feature debut Mother/Android offers two options for the trajectory of the film. One, it’ll explore the nuances of human vs. robot through Georgia’s pregnancy, which is a fascinating conversation that tends to bode well (see A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Ex Machina). Or, option two: The pregnancy won’t play into the film’s themes at all, and will instead serve as an arbitrary incentive for our protagonists to escape from their assailants. To his detriment, Tomlin chooses the latter.
This is not to say that the latter option precludes the possibility of a good—or even great—film. But despite choosing the emotional route, Tomlin doesn’t give us nearly enough emotional weight to cling to. When we first meet Georgia, she is struggling with whether she even wants to be with Sam, not to mention have his baby. Because of this, we expect that she’ll be fleshed out into a complex character. Sadly, she never really amounts to anything beyond a one-dimensional mama bear. Sam similarly isn’t given the material to progress beyond a listless, often misguided provider. They’re a couple whose chemistry is lacking, as is the rationale for us watching them in the first place.
But this isn’t for a lack of trying on the actors’ parts. Moretz is far and away the best part of the film, embedding subtlety into lines about monumental subjects such as the decimation of the human race, and when she isn’t speaking, she does a stellar job reminding us about the physical stresses of trudging through the woods when you’re well past your due-date. Her impressive effort only makes it that much more frustrating when none of the characters are really given the opportunity to move beyond a lifelessness that is, ironically, reminiscent of their robotic foes.