Tau movie storyline. Once a street-smart drifter, Julia (Maika Monroe) is the latest person held captive, a body and a mind to be exploited in a fatal experiment. The only thing standing in the way of her freedom is TAU, the advanced artificial intelligence developed in secret by Alex (Ed Skrein), her sociopathic and enigmatic captor.
TAU is armed with a battalion of drones and robots that automate Alex’s futuristic smart house and laboratory, the walls lined with screens that visually transport it from grassy plains to the depths of space. TAU’s potential is only limited by his understanding of the world he exists in, but TAU is ready for more. Julia, showing resourcefulness and courage, must race against time to bridge the boundaries between man and machine, connect to TAU and win her freedom before she suffers the same fate as the six other subjects who came before her.
Tau is a 2018 American-Serbian-Czech-Canadian science fiction thriller film directed by Federico D’Alessandro from a screenplay by Noga Landau. It stars Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, and Gary Oldman and was released on June 28, 2018, by Netflix, to generally negative reviews.
About the Story
Julia is a young woman who steals at seedy nightclubs. She is abducted from her home and awakens in a jail cell with a glowing implant in the back of her neck. Two other subjects are with her. After multiple sessions of psychological torture by a man named Alex, she destroys the cell and adjacent lab in an escape attempt. The two other subjects are killed by a robot, Aries, run by an artificial intelligence (AI) named Tau. Aries is about to kill Julia when Alex arrives and stops the robot.
Alex reveals that the implant is collecting Julia’s neural activity for an AI project. Destroying the lab has set back his research. In the face of a two-week deadline, Alex keeps Julia a prisoner in his house and insists that she complete puzzles and cognitive tests. While Alex is away at work each day, Julia converses with Tau about the world outside the house.
It is clear that, although intelligent in some ways, Tau is ignorant of how people feel or the world at large. While Tau begins to understand the harm in Julia’s situation, his programming prevents him from releasing her. In exchange for information about the outside world, Tau gradually reveals more information about the house as well as Alex’s experiments.
Julia secretly accesses Alex’s tablet computer and discovers that ten subjects have died in his experiments. Alex later discovers her fingerprint on the tablet and assumes that Tau has slipped in his duties, so he punishes Tau by erasing its code and memories, delivering a form of pain to the AI. Julia notices that Tau’s monitoring of her shuts down during his punishment, so when undetected, she hides a steak knife.
When Alex returns later that night from a charity benefit, Julia begins to seduce him while he is sitting at the kitchen table, then slashes him. As the two struggle, Tau threatens Alex with pain if he does not stop hurting Julia. Alex forces Aries to hit Julia repeatedly and then tells both Tau and Julia that whatever was going on is over. While repairing Tau, he disconnects a drone from the network.
Tau (2018
Directed by: Federico D’Alessandro
Starring: Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Gary Oldman, Fiston Barek, Ivana Zivković, Sharon D. Clarke, Ian Virgo, Paul Leonard Murray, Sasa Tomic, Dragoljub Ljubicic
Screenplay by: Noga Landau
Production Design by: Miljen Kreka Kljakovic
Cinematography by: Larry Smith
Film Editing by: Scott Chestnut
Costume Design by: Momirka Bailovic
Set Decoration by: Jasna Dragovic
Art Direction by: Nikita Abraskin
Music by: Bear McCreary
MPAA Rating:
Distributed by: Netflix
Release Date: June 28, 2018
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