Frank E. Jackson Jr. showcases not only his acting chops but also his skills as a writer and director in the sci-fi romance The Algorithm of Us, where two strangers try to find love through an AI-powered dating simulation. In a world where ChatGPT is becoming the norm, why not use a little AI for matchmaking?
The film begins like a season premiere episode of The Bachelor; we’re introduced to Indigo (Leela Heart) and Blue (Walter Maxfield Jones) and hear their reasons for trying out AlgoRythm. They have their initial reservations about resorting to AI, but there’s a plus side: you date virtually for only 30 minutes, which feels like months, so you don’t have to worry about wasting too much time.
The device setup for AlgoRythm almost looks like Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic: you lie back in a chair, put on a pair of clear wrap-around glasses, and drift asleep into your date. Luckily, that’s about as invasive as it gets. Outside, the founder Drake (Frank E. Jackson Jr.) and his assistant Sylvia (Miina Saray) are closely monitoring the simulation on computer screens. Once inside the date, visually the setting is very much AI-generated, and it transports the daters to five different locales. Each date takes them on a journey to places they may have wanted to travel to but couldn’t afford, and now they’re able to soak in the scenery while meeting the person of their dreams. With each date, Indigo and Blue get to know each other better, and a romance begins to blossom.
“…we’re introduced to Indigo (Leela Heart) and Blue (Walter Maxfield Jones) and hear their reasons for trying out AlgoRythm…”
After their final date, the two daters can choose to continue into the real world, but there’s a catch: if one or both decide the virtual romance should end, they have 48 hours to ultimately decide whether to keep the memory of the dates or have it entirely wiped. There’s also more to Drake’s story, giving the audience a better look at who this founder is and his motivation for building the simulation. It reminded me of The Social Network, and the idea that Mark Zuckerberg getting dumped caused him to create Facebook.
In this day and age, the film has the right design and idea. As I watched, I thought about how bad and cheesy Doctor Who used to look production-wise prior to the Christopher Eccleston reboot, so why not use AI to tell a cost-effective story, especially when it looks this good? The technology also doubles as a background character, literally. This is where director Frank E. Jackson Jr. went right. He is also able to blend in the social question of how one finds love. There are so many different algorithms meant to help people find one another, and yet we live in a society full of single people. Jackson’s use of AI to tell this narrative, and to experiment with the tech to show off his filmmaking chops, was clever.
There was a point in time when it came to finding “the one”: it was done the organic way- you see someone you like, you approach them, and ask them out. Then came Match.com, which seemed to mean you were desperate and could only resort to finding love online through questionnaires and photos. The joke was on us, because the organic way of meeting someone failed on some end, and more dating websites were created, and now it’s all about the apps. The Algorithm of Us possibly takes us into a not-so-distant future.
"…why not use a little AI for matchmaking?"
