40/100
1: Cut a hole in a box2: Put your sheep in that box3: Make her open the boxAnd that's the way you do it...
Title's actually a Little Prince reference, with the box-enclosed sheep—it's in there, we're assured, you just can't see it—representing an automaton's soul, or something to that effect. Hard to say for sure, because man this is just lukewarm tap water of a movie, tackling weighty questions with polite, nearly soporific diffidence. As everyone who reviews it will inevitably note, because you can't not (although Gleiberman somehow managed), Sheep in a Box extends the first act of Spielberg's AI to feature length, with the ostensibly heavily fraught wrinkle that our couple isn't being presented with just any old child robot but a robotic replica of their own son, who'd been killed in a car accident two years previously. The most quickly damning thing I can say about Sheep in the Box is this: I was not 100% sure that was the case for a good 10-15 minutes (to the point where I spent some time wishing I'd paid closer attention to a family photo briefly seen earlier). Think about how you might react if the human being you loved most in the world, dead for years, now apparently stood before you, looking and sounding as you remember. (Example of how much that'd wallop you merely via phone: Peggy Sue, in Got Married, answering the phone and hearing her grandmother's voice, which renders her unable to speak.) Imagine your involuntary response even if you'd ordered Fake Reanimated Robot Son from a catalogue and spent months anticipating its arrival. There's no way that wouldn't be intensely emotional, right? Well, it ain't for these folks. They just kinda roll with it: "Ah, a robot in the form of our dead child. Let us treat it like a very intelligent dog and resume our normal lives." Sheep in the Box boasts none of AI's creepiness and discomfort and eventual raw anguish (plus our deeply conflicted response to same); it's the most anodyne possible treatment of this subject, briefly coming to life only when it appears as if Dad agreed to the idea in the quixotic hope that a robot version of his kid would somehow be able to help him determine who drove the car that killed his actual kid. (It cannot help with that.) A badly underdeveloped subplot about the robot creating its own forest community with fellow robots (plus what seems to be the topically symbolic equivalent of a trans robot, i.e. a human being who identifies with robots) ultimately moves front and center, but the child actor here's no Haley Joel Osment and Kore-eda (or Koreeda, as he's now spelling it in English) has kept things so remote throughout that one never really gets intrigued (much less worked up) by the ramifications of artificial consciousness. Well made, as ever, but I found it quite dull. Glad to see that it won no prizes at Cannes, as that means I needn't (yet) write off Park's jury as delusional.