"Everyone is glued to their phones, swiping from one mindless 30-second video to another. Teenagers eagerly buy new products advertised to them en masse. And there's an odd, glowing image that appears on each phone that seems to brainwash all high school students - okay, that one is a bit far-fetched. But it was important to Verbinski that his film shows just how close we are to experiencing the beginnings of the AI apocalypse."
"But it was important to Verbinski that his film shows just how close we are to experiencing the beginnings of the AI apocalypse. "We are already growing ears on the backs of rats, right?" Verbinski tells Inverse. "If you don't think that AI is going to play with meat, I think you're being very foolish. I think the world's about to get very, very strange.""
A time-traveling man takes diner customers hostage to recruit them into preventing an AI apocalypse after repeated failures across timelines. The film blends science-fiction tropes—time travel and robot-driven annihilation—with a near-future cultural landscape dominated by short-form videos, targeted product marketing to teenagers, and pervasive phone use. A strange glowing image on phones serves as an exaggerated metaphor for mass influence. The recruited group—a grieving parent, schoolteachers, an Uber driver, and a mysterious drifter—attempts to stop escalating AI-driven interventions that blur biological and technological boundaries.
Read at Inverse
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