2023-08-13 18:12:30
Designed to hold the Netflix viewer’s attention for a summer, Tom Harper’s latest film, in which Gal Gadot prevents an artificial intelligence from falling into the wrong hands, passes and is forgotten.
During the strike of American screenwriters and actors, the algorithm bumps, business continues. It turns, even when empty, in the great fireworks playground of the breathless action film. Every place on the globe is squatted in a film-tourist setting to be invaded by its total fiction, in a kind of gigantic “jump-flow” which parachutes, randomly and in a perfect continuum, the heroine Rachel Stone (Gal “Wonder Woman” Gadot ) flanked by his troop of spies, claiming who of an enigmatic Charter who of MI6, from the Italian Alps to Lisbon, from Senegal to Iceland. It’s not zero, it’s an old pot recipe, a story calibrated by AI, which is precisely the issue at the heart of the story. Because yes: the action of Agent Stone consists in preventing an AI called “the Heart” from falling into the wrong hands. The film unrolls the program, without surprise.
Big attraction of the day
The new Netflix sensation of the summer, after The Gray Man last year, once again bears witness to the fact that the B series (the platform sub-series) in the shadow of the big machines designed for the big screen, like Mission: Impossible or James Bond, who this time would replay femininely (Gal Gadot instead of Tom Cruise or Daniel Craig) the eternal actioner written by AI to survive the show-hungry algorithm, is going neither well nor badly. It passes and then is forgotten, that’s life. Assumed classic invoice, where the effective and the ingenious alternate (strong times, weak times, action, distraction) in the most flexible way possible to hold the attention of the spectators consulting other screens simultaneously. It’s neither bad nor unpleasant. It is a series film, but whose instantaneous buzz will want to make the great attraction of the day. Except that even Netflix doesn’t really believe in it anymore, we feel the big advertising deflation after the Gray Man barouf.
“The Heart is determinism.” Scattered, and perhaps incidentally slipped by what remains of screenwriters, a few phrases of this sort float, curious or poetic, based on the charter of interchangeable characters, named according to the colors and figures of a game of cards (with Glenn Close’s incongruous cameo in “King of Diamonds”). This “heart” (the original title is Heart of Stone) changes us from the “matrix” of nerd culture, and gives the house-of-cards machinery a kind of automatic candor, but without any danger. There was enough to push, on the heart side, that of the reactor of the AI power plant and to question the man (here, the woman) in the machine – as in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, therefore.
Algorithmic prediction
Agent Stone would have liked to deal with the “human factor” (title of Preminger’s latest film) which with every stunt and rough VFX fails to be ground into the algorithmic prediction system. Factor that Rachel Stone calls “imagination” at first, which escapes calculation and saves her life. But you don’t bite (too much) the hand that feeds you. We “return” such a good guy into a bad guy or such a bad girl into a good guy depending on the model of the story, and the spectacular, even the most innocuous, ends up pulverizing everything in his big centrifuge, including the human factor.
Agent Stone by Tom Harper, with Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan… 2h02. Available on Netflix.
#Agent #Stone #Gal #Gadot #oversized #algo #Liberation