Kimi

Backdrop from The Movie Database

Over the 2 years of pandemic we've lived through most of the culturally permanent artifacts that have been created that will represent this time period have been songs and music, however Kimi stands to be a movie that represents the time without it being the entire plot.

Zoë Kravitz plays Angela Childs, an agoraphobic tech worker whose job involves improving the quality of a home assistant (think Alexa, Google Home, Siri) named Kimi by listening to recorded audio clips that Kimi didn't understand and manually classifying them.

COVID-19 does get name dropped but the only real consequences of it are that people are wearing masks in public and that Angela's preexisting agoraphobia was made worse.

Angela is attempting form a relationship with a man in the apartment across the street, Terry Hughes played by Byron Bowers, which adds a lot of context to her personality. She wants to leave her apartment to spend time with him, but after doing all the prep work she can't make it out the door. The only time she spends with him in person is when he's visiting her apartment which also gives us a look at her personality, which is a form of blunt.

This context is important because when Angela hears a crime while classifying audio clips that a Kimi has heard she puts all of her effort into trying to gather information about the crime and the person whose Kimi overheard the crime, including leaving her apartment to report what she heard.

The main struggle is convincing people to believe her because her personality and mental state is much different a standard person.

I thought the movie was good and was worth watching, but it did have some drawbacks. The worst part about it is the infeasible conspiracy of how things are connected seems in excess. The first 30 minutes of the movie could have been the introduction to a movie that was just as good but also be more believable for the real world.

Not every movie hero needs to be an action hero.