Gabe Ibanez
Automata

When you are thirty-three, almost thirty-four, you are at that typical age where you should have already been the protagonist of a resurrection, and where, in any case, your peers, especially your female peers, start having children and fulfilling that age-old task assigned to us by nature, which is reproduction. This somehow led me to reconsider this "phenomenon" from a different perspective, as in a complex society like that of humans, it assumes a broader significance because reproduction is supposed to be accompanied by a strong conscious emotional involvement, constituting a bond that is as natural as it is emotional. This last component strips both the reproductive act and reproduction itself of that fatalistic view that sees it as an intermediate phase of the "birth-reproduction-death" cycle, and with all its implications, it thus becomes a distinction between humans and other species, as well as one of the characteristics on which different social structures are based, just like those renewal processes that are then entrusted to generational change.

"Automata" is a film by Gabe Ibanez starring Antonio Banderas. The film received mixed reviews and opinions, and I must say that it was partly these that pushed me to watch it. It must be said that the overall quality of the plot is just sufficient, the actors' performances do not leave a mark (Banderas would rate around 6-6.5), while the very suggestive settings in the first part tend to become more banal in the second, filmed in a kind of desert-like environment in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria), which has now become a typical destination for setting such scenes. But the film has its interesting elements that indeed revisit those themes already mentioned and related to reproductive processes: in the near future (2044) after the devastation of the planet due to global warming, an insurance agent named Jacq Vaucan, who works for Roc Robotic Corporation, investigates some "defective" androids. They are programmed with the condition not to harm human beings and at the same time not to make improvements on themselves or other androids. When Vaucan discovers that there are robots circulating that are developing in a way that surpasses the second "law," humanity is faced with the most classic ethical themes proposed by philosophy even before science and science fiction: who/what is intelligent? Does "intelligence" (I suggest reading "Interplanetary Consciences" by Joseph Green, 1972) constitute the parameter for recognizing equal rights and dignity to some animal species or any entity as to a human being? And if it were a machine, a robot, capable of experiencing emotions, what would make it different from a human in terms of rights?

The issue is ethical and/or moral, and from this point of view, the film provides its answers, but it is evident that even in a less science fiction context and in the most pressing present, what we recognize as the "right to life" appears to be something also subject to legal issues. Evidently, whether you are a human or a machine, you are still subject to that higher entity called "bureaucracy" from which there is no escape.