I saw this film over the weekend and it was a huge disappointment. I was expecting big things because the central idea was interesting and it was critically acclaimed and won director Spike Jonze the 2014 Academy Award for best writing of an original screenplay. But I found that it really dragged.

For those unfamiliar with it, it tells the story set in the near future where the character played by Joaquin Phoenix acquires a new verbal operating system similar to Siri but with a far more advanced Artificial Intelligence system that enables it to learn and grow and have a personality. Phoenix is in the last stages of a divorce and is withdrawing from relationships though ironically he is the star employee of a firm that writes ‘personal’ letters on behalf of its clients to their loved ones. Over time, as Phoenix and his operating system talk more and more, they get romantically attached.

So far so good. The catch is that this central conceit kept me interested for the first half-hour of the film and then I started to get bored. This film suffers from the usual problem that I have railed about and that it is too damned long. At over two hours in length, it became tedious with Phoenix spending a lot of time wandering around futuristic cityscapes and gazing off into the distance, surrounded by people who are also absorbed with their smartphones.

The obvious irony of a person who makes his living writing deeply personal letters on behalf of others and yet unable to relate deeply with real humans beings and finding love with an operating system was not enough to overcome the relentless moodiness of the main character and it just started to wear me down. If they had cut 30 minutes out of it and moved the story along faster, I think it would have been a whole lot better.

Here’s the trailer.