Peripheral

This movie was quite the bizarre fest as a writer gets introduced to TECH that helps her write better. Haha.... I don't know quite how I feel about this one. So I'm going to give it a 5/10

Peripheral was a strange movie. Not just in its title which is equally odd but must have some meaning, but also by the events that happen in it. Hannah artenten plays bobbi. A writer that uses a typewriter for her stories. But one day because of her boss something weird turns up on her doorstep. A strange computer or ai that is very advenced and can help her write more and so bobbie can be productive. It bassically wants to brainwash her and weird things happen after that and it leads somehow to a pregnancy due to the computer and bobbie starts to turn into one herself almost. Overall this movie is weird but it is acted well and the story was interesting.

So the setup is pretty simple and rife for some manner of scifi/horror examinations or exploitations; a broke writer grudgingly accepts an AI editor to basically live-edit her newest work as she writes and her publisher will pay her bills and such so she can keep writing.

Over time, they keep sending more upgrades and additions to the AI, to the point where the AI begins to manipulate the story itself.

But none of that is important or really tangential to whatever this film was going for. Instead, the writer, Bobbi Johnson, goes on drug-fueled writing binges rife with laughable "techie-techno" style music and flashing lights while writing some absurdly over the top purple prose. What little of it we are shown is essentially meaningless word salad. The tone of the film and its alleged theme seem to indicate this was intentional.

Along the way, Bobbi is harassed by a stalker who sends her video tapes, a brother who keeps pestering her to hold onto drugs and guns, a deadline that is thrust in her face at the very top of the neon-light eyesore of a computer she has to work from, and the fact that she is inexplicably coughing up ink and her fingers, hands, and arms are slowly becoming coated black with ink.

All of this keeps escalating and culminating in a finale that, without spoiling, seems to make little to no sense either to someone outside of the writing and publishing world, or else like the incoherent, esoteric rantings and ravings of a high-minded writer complaining about the state of modern literature without really having any specific issue beyond buzzwords like "technology" and "truth" and "lies" and "fourth estate".

What message is trying to be said is in no way reflected by what the film is actually showing us. The rising issues of "fake news", propaganda, and expanding corporate media are in no way reflected by Bobbi becoming inky and presumably hallucinating a lot and computer tentacles.

If this scattershot assortment of imagery and themes was supposed to say something meaningful to someone, it clearly wasn't someone like me.

Young London based writer Bobbi Johnson (Hannah Arterton) is so skint that she can't pay her bills. She likes to write old school by using a typewriter but her publisher convinces her to use a state of the art computer that features artificial intelligence, and so her nightmare begins. Quite an interesting story, very strange at times but thankfully I was able to stick with it and make sense of the ending. Very much in the vein of David Cronenberg and his movie Videodrome, with a splash of David Lynch. In one scene she is raped (?) by the computer, reminded me of Evil Dead but with wires and leads instead of tree branches and vines. The small cast all do a good time, nice to see Jenny Seagrove. Not a movie that I'd watch again but it isn't bad.

I don't think I would call this horror, although there is some horrible stuff here, it is more along the lines of a dark sci-fi, quasi dystopian thriller. It is a seriously flawed modern sideways take on "Videodrome", and reminds me a bit of the absurdly stupid "Await Further Instructions", it is better than that hackneyed piece of junk, though there are several similarities with that film. It certainly shares a lot of the flaws of "Videodrome", and unfortunately it has even more flaws. While the acting is very good in "Peripheral", the story is threadbare, and that is fine except we learn very little about this book that sparked youth riots, and I really feel that was an important thing to explore more. Take out the 5 minutes of useless sex scenes and go a bit into the history of that book, the most we get is that it was drug fueled and that she wrote it on an old typewriter, this just isn't enough to explain the fanatical response of one of her fans(whose response the Bobbi's book is pretty over the top). I really feel we needed to know what in her book made her feel this way? Even in "Videodrome", it's clear inspiration, we see what is causing the protagonist and his girlfriend to spiral into madness and more.

This is not a spoiler. Bobbi seems to be the by-product of a bad book deal, I think this is inferred in the subtext, she was a junky as well, so she very well may have squandered her money on drugs, I don't how see some people didn't get this from the film? Again, there were things here that do not merit more explanation. How many people have been the victims of bad contracts or wasted their earnings on partying and drugs? A LOT. This is absolutely inferred without a shadow of doubt throughout the dialog in the film, it just isn't explicitly said.

"Peripheral" has a very dark vision of the media and how it manipulates both the creators and the consumers. There is a lot of unexplained stuff here, though I don't actually think explaining a lot of those things would have benefit the film other than what was prior mentioned. What also would have benefit the film was cutting down the overly long sex scenes, seriously, there are two and they drag on into infinitum. There was genuinely no need for this, they went on for several minutes both and I found myself skipping them because they really had no need to be this long(I always skip sex scenes anyway if they are more than a few seconds and explicit at all). One of these is what is essentially a quasi technological date rape scene. I get the metaphor here, and that is fine, but it just dragged on and on, I kept skipping 10 seconds to see when it would end, and it seemed endless.

In the end, I thought it was an interesting movie though highly flawed movie. It is a bit obtuse, it doesn't explain much explicitly, by the end you really don't understand most of what is real and what wasn't, there are a ton of metaphors here, maybe too many. Though I suppose that was the point, and given the metaphors and surrealistic aspects, it would have been beneficial if the surreal aspects were pushed more to the forefront, and again, if we had more of an explanation of why her initial book was so influential. It is pretty explicitly stated why they want her to write more books by the end, and this again is an obvious commentary on how media manipulates and hurts people, and it shows this in quite explicit, yet metaphorical terms. This movie is actually better thought out than people are giving it credit for, but if you don't like strange movies and thinking a little and piecing things together, you will hate it.