Klara and the Sun Review

Taika Waititi takes on the job of adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s dark sci-fi novel Klara and the Sun and turns it into a whimsical fable.

In the future, androids have been developed and sold as artificial friends for wealthy teenagers. One of these artificial friends is Klara (Jenna Ortega), an old B1 model. Klara gets her wish when she is brought by Josie (Mia Tharia) and her mother, Chrissie (Amy Adams). However, when Klara enters her new home, she faces hostility from Chrissie and the housekeeper Melania (Rachel House), and Josie’s declining health.

Taiki Waititi’s career reached a high point with Jojo Rabbit, a comedy-drama set during the dying days of the Nazi regime. It was nominated for five Academy Awards and won the Best Adapted Screenplay. Since then, he made the maligned Thor: Love and Thunder, which was one of the worst films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Next Goal Win was seen as a pointless film because it was an adaptation of a critically acclaimed documentary. Waititi didn’t help himself when he mocked Thor: Love and Thunder‘s visual effects with Tessa Thompson, which was in poor taste considering how badly Marvel Studios had treated VFX artists. Waititi’s bad run of form seems to have continued with Klara and the Sun getting a dismal 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics at The Guardian, The Times, and Little White Lies giving it one-star reviews.

Waititi seemed like a weird choice to direct Klara and the Sun because the novel was a dark story, and Waititi has a silly sentimentality. He brought that sentimentality because there was a lot of wacky comedy. Klara was shown to be a weirdo because she did quirky things like stand on one leg and slide down stairs like a child. Serious and sentimental moments were undercut because they had to end a scene on a gag, as Klara’s first encounter with Josie ended with a pratfall. Klara and the Sun was a lopsided film because as the film progressed and Josie’s illness got worse, the comedy went down and the sentimentality went up. Klara and the Sun was undercut by the silly humour when even the stripped-back version had a lot of ideas. Jenna Ortega and Mia Tharia give the film a lot of its heart as they grew close before their relationship became strained.

Klara and the Sun will be compared to AI: Artificial Intelligence and Bicentennial Man because they are all about robot companions that all have a similar tone. AI: Artificial Intelligence was particularly fitting because that film was a futuristic version of Pinocchio, where it started as a fairly light film as a family is given a robot child before it turned into a dark and sentimental film. Waititi was trying to make a Spielbergian film since he was pulling on the heartstrings, as it explored illness, death, and grief, as a childlike robot did everything she could to solve these issues and bring a fractious family together.

There was a bit of Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson in this adaptation. Gilliam has made some great sci-fi with Brazil and 12 Monkeys, which had lots of quirky humour amidst their dark settings. Like Anderson’s work, there was a dream-like quality due to Klara’s innocence and the bright, over-saturated visuals. The family home was surrounded by wheat fields that glowed gold. Klara and the Sun was set in a retro-future. The Store Manager (Natasha Lyonne) said there was a Third World War which resulted in the internet being banned. There were no smartphones or PCs; music was played on record players and tape decks, and when Klara did use a computer, it had a simple switch to answer yes or no questions. Yet, there was also advanced technology because of the androids, genetic engineering, and self-driving cars.

Klara and the Sun will also be compared to Never Let Me Go, the other adaptation of an Ishiguro dystopia story. Never Let Me Go was a faithful adaptation of a bleak story where an underclass of clones was conditioned to be living organ donors. The film was able to show the quiet shame of the rest of society knowing their exploited clones, something the novel couldn’t do. Klara and the Sun was a looser adaptation. Klara and the Sun was tonally different to the novel; some plot elements were merged together, and characters were cut, whilst The Scarecrow (Jesse Griffin) was an addition to the film. Some of these changes did make sense, and there was more ambiguity in the film adaptation. However, the film was too constrained to the family drama and mostly set in the family home. There was little shown of the wider world, and prejudice against non-lifted people as a new elite began to form.

The final comparison is with The Lovely Bones. Both films were adaptations of dark stories given a lighter touch-up. The Lovely Bones was a story about a girl watching her family struggling with the aftermath of her murder, but the film was more focused on the visual spectacle of the afterlife.

Fans of the novels will hate the film version because of the liberties it takes with the source materials and the over-reliance on comedy, but there were some redeeming features due to acting and story tightening.