#643 – Eva (2011)

Eva (2011)

Film review #643

Director: Kike Maíllo

SYNOPSIS: Alex returns to his hometown after ten years when he is commissioned to finish building a robotic child with emotions that he abandoned ten years earlier. He chooses to base this child on Eva, a young girl who is the daughter of his Brother and former girlfriend.

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Eva is a 2011 sci-fi film. Set in 2043, Alex returns to his hometown as he is commissioned to finish a child-like robot with emotional intelligence, which he abandoned some ten years ago. Looking for a child to base the robot’s emotions on, he comes across Eva, who later turns out be the child of his Brother and former lover. The core of the story is a recognisable sci-fi one, a commentary on humanity, robots and the like. There’s nothing too special here that hasn’t been said by other films. It’s simple enough to follow, but that’s mostly because there’s not a lot going on. We’re introduced to a world where robots are commonplace, but we don’t really get a sense of how this has really effected or transformed society. The film is more focused on the individual characters though, so that’s excusable to a point.

Given that the film does centre around the characters, the biggest flaw in the film is that there’s little to no character establishment or development. Alex is essentially a mystery: we know he left for ten years after developing robots, but nothing else. We don’t know his stance on anything, what has been happening in his life, or anything of the sort. As such, it’s difficult to connect the events of the film to how it affects his character because there’s very little to affect. Lana, Eva’s Mother, is essentially that: she only exists as a Mother and love interest, and suffers severely from her personality being that she is a woman, which shouldn’t really be a thing in 2011. The performances are decent, but it often feels like they’re given very little to work with. The effects and CG models are fine for the time, but the main robot lacks the intricate lifelike movement and expression that would make them more significant. There just seems very little at stake throughout the whole film: it doesn’t really matter whether Alex creates this robot or not; nothing really depends on it, he’s just doing it because…? also, it turns out that [SPOILER] Eva is actually an android that can basically do everything he is trying to do anyway, being built by his Brother and Wife beforehand. The decision he takes to shut Eva down because she can apparently be dangerous just doesn’t seem justified either: she loses her temper, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s much different than a typical child, so essentially killing her for doing it is a very strange thing to end on. It’s nicely shot and produced, but there’s a void at the heart of the film that fails to generate anything substantive, or make an emotional point due to some very poor character development. Reviews for Eva generally aren’t too bad, but honestly I can’t agree: the good elements fall away due to a lack of cohesion in the screenplay and characters, and there’s many films that broach the same subject that do it better.