This romcom lets you pick the ending — that doesn't make it good

During the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, one topic of interest has been AI, or artificial intelligence — really, more accurately, machine learning. Nobody seriously believes that AI is currently in a position to write its own movies with any success, but there have been scenarios floated in which perhaps consumers could use AI-generated scripts and digitally stored copies of actors to essentially choose their own film: "I want a romance starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone where she's a bank robber and he's a cop" or something like that. Honestly? Sounds terrible!

Into this landscape comes the movie , Netflix's most recent experiment in making "interactive" films. The highest-profile effort up to in 2018. While it was interesting to see the technology at work (you make a series of choices using your remote, which drives the story forward), it didn't really work narratively. And it doesn't work narratively here, either.