Chris Pratt is a police officer on trial before an AI judge in the new film Mercy.
The film, which was directed by Timur Bekmambetov, arrives in theaters on Friday.
Rebecca Ferguson co-stars as Judge Maddox, an AI being in a future dystopia tasked with determining whether Officer Raven (Pratt) killed his wife or if he is innocent. Judge Maddox has a little over an hour to make the decision, and if Raven is found guilty, he dies instantly.
Ferguson told ABC Audio about how she approached playing an AI character.
“I think it was quite good to keep her as automated as possible – as simple as possible – and then work within where the cracks lay in the foundation,” Ferguson said. “AI is supposed to copy human beings. And that was an interesting aspect of it for me.”
Ferguson said that her character has sentenced many people before Raven, but saw something different in him.
“Rather than going into victimization of himself, he was starting to see the flaws within her. So he was starting to question her behaviorism. He was seeing something that she wasn’t prepared for,” Ferguson said.
Pratt said he believes there is a part of Raven that thinks he may have actually committed the crime. This, he says, helps Judge Maddox develop intuition.
AI beings “are not intuitive, they’re just mimicking human behavior,” Pratt said.
“She’s starting to understand that she’s becoming a little bit more sentient, and a little bit more aware and a bit more human, but also is protecting herself from being reset,” Pratt continued. “She’s actually fighting, in a way, for her own life, so that her agency in this thing that she’s developed and who she’s become can be preserved.”
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