Heeb

By Jed Oelbaum

Daft Punk has been tooling around with different iterations of their “we are robots” business for awhile, but Electroma, which clocks in at over an hour, marks their most serious effort so far. Beautifully shot, but inescapably boring, the film tells the story of two robots who trek around in a Ferrari in a desperate quest to become human. As cool as that might sound, there’s no dialogue and the majority of the film is made up of a long series of panoramic desert shots. And when I say long, I mean like fifteen-minutes long. At times, it’s somewhat amusing to watch those blank Daft Punk robot faces staring out at you in muted angst, inspiring a sympathy you have to laugh at yourself for feeling, but then it’s back to the desert.

Fairly early in the film, the pair of robots visit some kind of clinic where they have giant, ridiculous latex, human faces fitted over their own. Unfortunately, the sun melts them horrifically, inspiring terror in some small-town robot folks who chase them out of town. They take refuge in a restroom, peeling the melting humanity from faces and flushing the bits down the toilet. Staring at themselves, disgusted at what they are and what they can never be…a dilemma that can only be solved with another 20 minutes of panoramic desert shots. Ugh.