The Last Spark of Hope

Arthur is not as nurturing as the android grandma in Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric!” Not even close. To be fair, that was never his intended function. He is a patrol robot, who was deployed during the “climate wars.” Those wars are over and everyone lost. After a little makeshift reprogramming, Eva’s now presumed dead father left Arthur to look after her. Unfortunately, Arthur is downright “robotic” when it comes to following his directives. Ironically, that endangers Eva in director-screenwriter Piotr Biedron’s The Last Spark of Hope, which releasees today on VOD.

Those who could, bugged out on spaceships bound for nowhere. Eva is relatively lucky among those who remained. Her mountain-top camp remains higher than he worst of the toxic atmosphere. Despite the risks, Eva most regularly ventures down in search of supplies. One day, she returns home after Arthur’s monthly password has already changed. Awkwardly, the password list is inside, but Arthur will not let her enter without the password. There is nothing funny about this Catch-22 for Eva, because without the water inside, she dies.

In a way, Last Spark is a very zeitgeisty film, but while most artificial intelligence thrillers worry about AI’s taking too much initiative, Arthur is dangerous because he is so blinkered by his rules and procedures. Arthur’s visual design is also quite shrewd. He looks like one of broken down robots the Jawas were hawking in the original Star Wars, but the obvious mileage makes his unreliableness quite believable.

Of course, some viewers might well ask how Eva could lose sight of something as important as her killer robot’s passwords. That is a very Gen-X attitude, reflecting an instinctive distrust of technology. Eva is several generations younger than Gen-Z. Presumably, she grew up with very different attitudes towards tech, despite witnessing the horrors of robotic war.

Biedron also capitalizes on some amazing locations, including a deserted but still automated power plant that truly looks post-apocalyptic. The problem is Biedron essentially hits the same note, over and over again, which happens to be a very depressing note. There is not much sense of surprise, once all the elements are sufficiently established. Arguably, this film would have worked better as a short film, much like Biedron’s two prior similarly themed shorts, than as his feature debut.

Magdalena Wieczorek carries the film nicely as the sole human cast-member, but it is a physically-focused performance, more concerned with matters like hunger, thirst, and exhaustion than creating a compelling persona. Think of this like a Jack London story with a killer robot. Indeed, it has a similar bitterness. Often impressive on a surface level, it cannot quite sustain its full feature length. Not quite enough to recommend for paying customers, The Last Spark of Hope releases today (4/29) on VOD (but anyone intrigued should wait for it to surface on ad-supported platforms).