SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Mother/Android. If you have not yet watched the film, proceed at your own risk!
Mattson Tomlin’s Mother/Android packs one heart-punch of an ending. After everything that the characters, Georgia and Sam, go through over the course of the film, the only choice that’s left for them is making a devastating emotional sacrifice, and it’s wonderfully executed with powerful drama in the writing and great performances by stars Chloë Grace Moretz and Algee Smith. By the filmmaker’s own admittance, however, the impact that it makes wouldn’t have been nearly as great without some key advice from director Matt Reeves.
The filmmaker best known for Cloverfield and the last two Planet Of The Apes movies (not to mention the upcoming The Batman) came aboard Mother/Android as a producer when the movie was in early stages, and during a recent virtual interview with Mattson Tomlin he told me about a key piece of advice Reeves provided that wound up having a massive impact on the film’s script. As he explained, the character Sam was originally going to die in the second act, but he was convinced to keep him alive. Said the filmmaker,
The ending was always the ending. Algee Smith's character, Sam – this is all spoiler-y – but he in, I think, my first draft dies halfway through the movie. It was when Matt Reeves came on to produce it, and one of his really excellent notes was 'You're undervaluing this relationship, and you're undervaluing how important it is gonna be to have this scene at the end where she's thinking about giving the baby up and there's somebody to bounce that off with her. That should really be their decision together.'
Fully registering the impact of seeing Georgia and Sam toiling with the idea of giving up their newborn so that he can have a better life in a country that isn’t in the midst of a tech-centric apocalypse, Mattson Tomlin knew what he had to do:
And goddammit, he is so right, because that scene, watching the two of them really function as parents for the first time and to make these really intense adult decisions where we've seen them not be on the same page the whole time, it really, for me, seals the deal of me saying what I'm trying to say.
Having personally been given up for adoption at a young age during the Romanian revolution, Mattson Tomlin was inspired to make a movie about the sacrifices his birth parents made, and it’s wonderfully delivered as the metaphor through the science-fiction genre and a Terminator-esque technological uprising. It’s personal and powerful, and part of that is due to a successful collaboration between two smart filmmakers.
Mother/Android, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Algee Smith, and Raúl Castillo, is now available to stream on Hulu. To get prepared for all of the movies heading to theaters and streaming in the next year, check out our 2022 Movie Calendar.
