It’s a long and noble Hollywood tradition: an actor scores the coveted Academy Award at long last, and then promptly squanders that industry cachet on the most mortifying work of their entire career. Mere days after picking up a statuette for Boyhood, Patricia Arquette was off solving computer-crimes on CSI: Cyber. Eddie Redmayne took home the gold for The Theory of Everything, and celebrated by bellowing his way through an utterly incomprehensible turn in Jupiter Ascending. A decade and a half out from his win for The Pianist, and Adrien Brody is still doing this.
To this proud list we may now add Gary Oldman, who may not have won this year’s best actor prize at all if Netflix’s new sci-fi picture Tau got a release prior to the voting deadline. (Scholars refer to this occurrence as “the Murphy”, in reference to Eddie Murphy’s Oscar-killing performance in Norbit.) Oldman voices the title character, an artificial intelligence program tasked with keeping reluctant test subject Julia (a lost-looking Maika Monroe) captive, and not since Patrick Stewart voiced a literal pile of feces in The Emoji Movie has an actor so thoroughly embarrassed themselves without appearing onscreen.
Tau’s creator Alex (Ed Skrein) informs Julia that this Siri-on-steroids is his technological magnum opus, an automated sentience so advanced that it must be “cut off from the world” to prevent it from exceeding safe limitation. What this actually entails is unclear, as is the case with many things in the film. (To wit: why Julia is referred to as subject #3 despite being explicitly named as their seventh prisoner, why Alex needs a human being to test an AI, why the final 20 minutes spring a sneak attack of gore on an unsuspecting viewership.)
In practice, however, all that really means is the most sophisticated feat of computer engineering in human history acts like a complete blithering idiot. For the impressively moronic dialogue, Oldman brings a lack of imagination so complete that he could plausibly explain this performance away as a high-concept ironic joke. Tau is capable of managing Alex’s inexplicably mood-lighting-splotched domicile of the future, and speaks with the buttoned-up diction of a user agreement. But somehow, it possesses zero factual information, and thusly must badger Julia with incessant questions like an inquisitive three-year-old. What is the sky? Why didn’t cavemen live in houses? What does it mean to be … alive?
Julia doesn’t have a great answer for him, and neither does the movie containing her. The director, Federico D’Alessandro, and screenwriter, Noga Landau, have purloined Ex Machina’s motherboard and transplanted it onto machinery with faulty wiring; while both films ponder the precise location of the line separating a person from a convincing facsimile thereof, Tau’s choice to reverse the gender dynamic scrambles its philosophizing. Alex Garland’s film plugged the stock noir plot of a woman making a lecherous man her patsy into futuristic hardware, making the faint suggestion that cunning may be the X-factor separating humanity from our cyborg cousins. Even in this broad thematic wheelhouse, D’Alessandro and Landau can’t muster a single idea beyond “I think, therefore I am”, and they’re about four centuries late to that particular pearl of wisdom.
When not striking a thoughtful pose, the script behaves like any other captive-woman drama does. Julia cowers, concocts daring escape attempts that invariably go awry, and eventually goes with the oldest trick in the book by turning Stockholm syndrome on her captor. Her blossoming relationship with the profoundly dim Tau leaves Alex to fill the villain role, which he does as flatly as possible. Skrein has none of the typical mad scientist’s kooky charisma or manic abandon, only the sadistic streak. The lone thing separating him from the nightly news’ usual predator is a big investor meeting mentioned no fewer than four times. Perhaps Alex created Tau in his own image: unaccountably dumb for a self-proclaimed genius.
Sci-fi has a reputation as the most conspicuously cerebral film genre, and Netflix appears to be on a mission to change that. Tau’s potent mixture of derivative 22nd-century production design with a visible lack of brain activity must play to whatever algorithm compelled the streaming giant to pick up Mute, The Cloverfield Paradox, Anon, Lucid Dream, The Titan, What Happened to Monday, and Orbiter 9. The middling-to-unforgivable sci-fi picture is Netflix’s calling card, saved from the straight-to-video bin by the internet’s infinite sprawl. These films become interchangeable the moment they’re over, in which case Oldman’s calamitous vocal work may be an asset if for no other reason than setting this apart from the slew of all-but-identical duds. Tau may go down as an awkward thorn in Oldman’s filmography, but it’ll be right at home in Netflix’s content library.
- Tau is now available on Netflix
