Tau (2018)

One of the tropes that sci-fi movies use a lot is the idea of the infallible artificial intelligence: they’re designed to be perfect, how could they ever do anything wrong?
It’s about as helpful as claiming the Titanic simply couldn’t sink.
Inevitably, because the human designers were so conceited in their creation of the software super-mind, they gave it powers above and beyond anything reasonable and just left it to itself, whereupon it causes all sorts of problems. The best example is HAL 9000.

“Tau” (2018) was a silly movie, but it got one thing right: titular Tau the AI (voiced by Gary Oldman) was explicitly described to be a highly advanced learning system that would freak out if it got information that didn’t jive with the rest of its knowledge base.
It was also stated that Tau was limited to only access data that had been uploaded to it by its sociopath owner/creator, Alex (Ed Skrein), who did not give Tau a connection to the greater outside world. Therefore, Tau only knew what Alex wanted it to know, which worked just fine, until he brought Julia (Maika Monroe) in.

We only got a passing glimpse of Julia’s life before the kidnapping: she was running scams on the side to pay for music school, and lived in an apartment that was far too nice for the financial state she was apparently in.
Alex kidnapped her and brought her to his basement lab, whereupon he strapped her to a table to put some kind of neuro-implant into the base of her skull. 
At that point I was concerned this movie would devolve into torture porn, as there were two other prisoners who died quite gruesomely shortly thereafter.
Luckily, it did not.
Something something plot device later and Alex let Julia out of the basement into the rest of the house, allowing her to exist under house arrest. That’s where Julia met Tau and started talking to it.

It turned out Alex was abusive and liked torturing his AI by deleting its memories as punishment for the slightest infractions. This would cause Tau to scream in pain, which was unnerving.
Without straight-up saying it, the movie did a fine job showing Alex to be a sadist. Why else would he code a pain receptor into a piece of software?
He also kept people in the basement, so he wasn’t exactly a sympathetic character.

It was unclear what Alex needed his victims for. He mentioned some mumbo-jumbo about needing a human brain to sample to make a better AI, and there was a holo-display of the implant being wired into the depths of a brain, but it was never explained in a satisfactory way. Alex also said something about the implant creating higher cognitive powers for Julia, which didn’t do any favors for that mcguffin.

Upon initially kidnapping Julia, Alex put her in some kind of a prison jumpsuit. When she got to the main part of the house, she demanded he get her some real clothes. He returned with... stuff. A cocktail dress, a skimpy nightgown, something lacy and unspecified, and two other skin-tight things. He very clearly didn’t want her there for any sexual reason, and there was only one scene that could be even vaguely described as sexual, so I don’t understand why the costume department picked those outfits for her, other than to fulfill a weird clothing fetish of someone in the film crew.

As mentioned above: Tau’s knowledge base was limited to whatever Alex wanted it to know. When Alex left to go to work, Julia started making deals with the info-hungry AI, and would agree to read it a book if it let her go into one of the forbidden rooms, or she’d play games with it if it told her secrets about Alex. This did cause Tau to freak out a couple of times, but never to any truly-important effect. I definitely think they could have used that for a more dramatic ending.

I would also like to point out that “Tau” was kind of a stupid name. Apparently it was Alex’s personal beta version to an AI called “Psi” that he wanted to sell to the DOD.
“Psi” wasn’t any better; at least they could have been acronyms for something science-y sounding.

There was a middling soundtrack: just enough to keep many scenes from being dead silent, but nothing worth humming or ever listening to again.

The CGI was also mediocre: Tau’s physical manifestation was in a robot body dubbed “Aries,” which looked about as good as anything rendered in an early 2000s Sci-Fi channel original movie.
Fortunately for us, most of Julia’s conversations with Tau were with its avatar on various view-screens, which looked a lot better.

There was a very well done jump-scare in this film, which freaked me right the hell out. Normally you can get a sense that a movie is trying to scare you, so maybe you don’t know exactly when it’s coming, but you know it’s there. With this one, I had no idea.
What’s worse, I was watching the movie while running on the treadmill in the gym, so I launched about three feet into the air and yelped. Megan and a few other folks looked at me like I’d just sprouted wings.

Long story short: Julia got out, Tau and Alex got appropriate endings. It was a conclusion I was more than happy with, considering the buildup and the plot pieces that got us there, though it could have been a touch more dramatic with all the pieces they left on the table.

This wasn’t a bad movie. In fact, it worked its way from from a 1 to a 2 Claw rating as I watched, so that’s nice. 
“Tau” got an R rating, but I’m not sure why. There was no nudity, no particularly graphic violence beyond what you usually see in a modern comic book film, and only one use of the F-bomb, which is the allowance for PG-13.

It’s a Netflix original, so download it to your phone before you get on your next flight.
If you’re looking for a good science fiction flick, go watch “I Am Mother” (2019) if you haven’t already.