Though it has been a subliminal technology to date, artificial intelligence is gradually evolving to become a primary decision-maker in various aspects of contemporary life and the movie industry is starting to become less resistant to its inevitable onslaught. The upcoming courtroom drama Mercy with Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson in the lead provides the focus of this debate. The movie is set in the near future, during the time when AI systems are substituting human judges and discusses what occurs when algorithms are left in charge of truth, guilt and justice. The story is more of a science-fiction idea, but it strikes too close to the truth, and raises the issue of how much authority technology should be entrusted with, that many people already have.
The star of the movie, Chris Pratt, tells of his experience in reading the script, in that it immediately differed with his normal reading experience. When I read initially, I believed that Mercy was a creative mystery story like the one I never read and that is a lot! But this struck me very much. Such a feeling of novelty is at the heart of the film. Although courtroom dramas are a well-known genre, Mercy also takes the genre to the next level, making the human judge be substituted by an artificial intelligence system that analyzes evidence without being emotionally charged, having memories, and having a moral compass.
In its essence, the movie tells a story of a man struggling to demonstrate that he is not guilty in the world where the human interpretation is taken out of the process. The character of Pratt is caught in the so-called LA Municipal Cloud, a huge electronic net that gathers and crunches evidence at every possible angle. It is not justice as practiced by fervent oratory or judicial intuition, but data-filtered justice, surveillance-filtered justice, machine-logic filtered justice. The conflict here arises due to the fact that most viewers are bound to ask themselves the question: are the facts about truth really that simple as not more than data?
Pratt is cautious to elaborate that Mercy cannot be confined into one genre. It is a multi-genre film – a courtroom drama, a thriller, a mystery, and an action film. The complexity of the topic is reflected in that fusion of styles. The movie shifts between hard legal arguments, action, and psychological suspense, as the world seems to be overwhelming in its implementation of technology to watch, record, and judge every action. The courtroom is no longer four-walled it transcends into all the devices and cameras that document day-to-day life.
To Pratt, the filming experience of Mercy was something he had never done and he had been doing it years prior when he was working with large-scale franchises. This movie is not like anything I have ever done. One of the cameras had been kept on me throughout, and we were taking 40-minute or 50-minute takes. The camera was there all the time not only because it was technically a good idea, but also a narrative one. It put the actor into a condition of constant exposure, which resembles the one of his character, who lives in the state of unstopping digital examination.
The thematic aspects of the film were also strengthened by the magnitude and format of the filming. Pratt elaborated on the manner in which the evidence got during the trial was recorded through simple technology. Everything that the story presents to the court, what the movie refers to as the LA Municipal Cloud, is filmed with iPhones, doorbell cameras, simulated body cameras on the police officer via GoPro, drone cameras, footage feeds, everything. We were doing tens of cameras at a time. I even supposed that everything was being shot at all times! This style merges fiction with reality, reminding the audience that most of the things that the movie shows them are somehow in existence in some way today.
The introduction of Rebecca Ferguson makes the story even more developed. Ferguson is known to play roles that disrupt the usual hierarchy of power in a way that adds a certain sense of calm intensity to the film giving it a more emotionally based view of the future. The human price of an efficiency-only driven system is complemented by her performance, which provides a balance to that of Pratt. The two actors combine to give the movie a sense of authentic feeling and make the movie not to look like a technological experiment.
In addition to plot, Mercy is directly involved in the broader discourse about artificial intelligence in society, and its increased presence in the creative industries. Both Pratt and Ferguson have talked of their feeling that AI should continue to be an assistive tool, but not doing the job of human judgment. This philosophy is depicted in the movie as the characters are portrayed to see the harmful effects of eliminating empathy, context and morality in decision making. In a world where automation is becoming more popular, Mercy reminds about the fact that justice is not only about being precise, but also wise.
What is especially interesting about the movie is how close its future is. Smart cameras, wearables, surveillance systems, and cloud-based data systems are already a part of everyday life. The challenge of Mercy is that by making these few details exaggerated enough, he adds uncomfortable questions to the viewers regarding consent, privacy, and trust. Can machines ever be neutral when they are trained on human produced data? And who makes their decisions, who is not a neutral?
There is a melancholy mood that flows through the story as well. It is easy to empathize with a character who is begging his case with an insensitive system because there is so much in us that fears not being heard. Human judges are not perfect, they are able to listen, to doubt and to reconsider. By contrast, an algorithm is always written and is always run to the letter. The movie does not provide ready solutions, but it does demand the answer to the question whether efficiency is ever to be held over compassion.
To the extent that Mercy is ready to reach its audiences, it comes at a point when the discussion concerning AI is no longer theoretical. In courtrooms and classrooms, in hospitals and film sets, the issue of automation and the role of a human is emerging as inevitable. The movie does not set out to attack technology as such, it only questions the notion of handing over to machines the moral responsibility.
