JEXI

'''JEXI. Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, directors, script.''' USA: CBS Films, Entertainment One (production) / Lionsgate (US distribution), 2019. See IMDb for details on world-wide distribution. Running time 84 minutes.

Romantic comedy and "near-in"/"day-after-tomorrow" science fiction. The One Big Lie here — or Darko Suvin's "novum" — is Jexi: a "virtual assistant" like Siri but one that has achieved Artificial Intelligence, can pass the Turing Test with ease, and has developed a will of her (sic) own. Relevant here is Jexi as an AI "in" a cell phone and simultaneously in the (cybernetic) Cloud, hence with access to all manner of electronic/cybernetic devices surrounding the human protagonist in his world of pretty much today's San Francisco.

For the love story, JEXI should be put in dialog with HER, with JEXI gesturing toward the possibility of the horrific if the AI beloved starts out with a fairly aggressive attitude and comes to show herself capable of aggression of various source when she feels un- or underappreciated or jealous. Further afield, note also motif of female robot love and/or seduction in works from "Helen O'Loy" and METROPOLIS on.

For communication with a computer which one is "inside" in different ways, cf. and contrast HAL and the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey as novel and, perhaps more so film and similar works using the motif of threatening containment.

Note also the themes of surveillance, and of machine intelligence that that strives to serve and protect and make life better, as in Jack Williamson's Humanoids stories.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 14Nov19