I am Mother: A great sci-fi ride

After being seriously disappointed by The Space Between Us which was a teenage love story more than a science fiction film I decided to dig a bit deeper in the same day into the same genre. My reasoning for doing this was the fact that The Space Between Us was so bad that I figured that almost anything else would feel like a wild ride.

I was not disappointed with I am Mother and I don't think that other scifi fans will be either.

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I didn't know much about this movie going into it other than the fact that it appeared to have good production value and Hillary Swank was in it. When you get a multiple award-winning actress on board something, there is usually a good chance that it is going to be pretty good. Unfortunately this was not the case with Gary Oldman in Space Between Us as I had hoped.

I am Mother tells the story of an apocalyptic Earth and the aftermath of that. The main focus is on a young girl who is known only as "Daughter" and she refers to her android / robot caretaker simply as "Mother." As far as daughter knows, she is the only surviving human on the planet because humans have destroyed the planet via war and other such things as is the usual.

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As we see daughter grow up and is played by 3 actresses throughout the film, it is shown that "Mother" is the only interaction that daughter ever has with anyone. Mother is completely in charge of her food, education, healthcare, and basically everything in her life. Daughter becomes more and more intrigued with the outside world as she gets older, but Mother has told her that the outside world is still contaminated.

This is something that daughter believes without question until one day another human turns up at the airlock.

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I spent the whole film thinking that "daughter" was eventually going to grow up to BE Hillary Swank, who in the film is merely known as "woman," but this is not the case at all. Daughter is confused as to how it is that Woman is alive when daughter has been told her entire life that the outside world would kill her if she were to enter it. In many ways this reminds me of a much older film called Blast from the Past where Brendon Frasier is raised entirely in an underground bunker because of nuclear fallout that never actually happened. That film is also worth seeing, by the way.

Back to this film: Woman is incredibly distrusting of Mother because she says that droids that look just like Mother hunt and kill all humans in the outside world... a claim that Mother completely denies. Therefore Daughter has a bit of a crisis of conscious about who to trust and I'm not going to spoil what happens because it is actually a pretty amazing story.

The really great thing about this film is that it doesn't exactly spell everything out for you and a lot of the details, including the ending, are left up to you to try to fill in the blanks. This can be frustrating or some but I always feel as though a good film will have a lot of online discussion and theories about the ending and this one has plenty of that.

Should I watch it?

That trailer is excellent and does a great job of getting people interested in seeing this and while the tension does take quite a while to develop in the film, I can say that I didn't pick up my phone many times while it was on and at least in my world, this is usually a good sign of a film being worthwhile.

I don't think you need to necessarily be interested in Sci-Fi in order to enjoy this movie but it probably wouldn't hurt. This is one of the better science fiction movies that I have seen in quite some time and therefore I heartily recommend it to anyone.