Rather than imbuing the story of a man literally falling in love with a computer with an aura of freakshow, Her is oddly sweet, sympathetic to Phoenix’s Theodore and Johannson’s “Samantha.” It’s that sympathy-or, really, empathy-that made it last this decade, and will likely make it last the next. (Lookin’ at you, Ready Player One.) Spike Jonze’s strange romance, Her, starring Scarlett Johannson as an operating system and Joaquin Phoenix as a sensitive, heartbroken man in high-waisted pants, leaps over that pitfall with ease.
When striving to be prescient, science fiction often becomes a twisted, myopic portrait of the present. A jittery drone and disquieting bass blasts (scandals, notifications, atrocities) slowly drown us out, until all that’s left are discordance, disunity, devolution. We the people are the lone piano, plinking nervously in the foreground, straining for a melody. "Hand Covers Bruise," the opening track, which underscores Mark Zuckerberg’s scampering between Harvard’s redbrick dorms with baleful foreshadowing, might as well be the soundtrack to the decade. All of that was topped off with an Academy Award-winning techno-industrial-horror score that launched Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as the decade’s composers of America’s anxieties ( Gone Girl, Bird Box, Watchmen). Aaron Sorkin’s best script, a dolphin-skin-smooth nightmare, and Jesse Eisenberg’s best performance, megalomaniacal paranoia at its most delicious, nailed (spiritually, if not entirely factually) Facebook’s slippery origins and presaged its assaults on privacy, democracy, and consciousness. “The movie,” as Facebook executives still indignantly call it, set the tone for the decade in both film and the tech metanarrative. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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