Marjorie Prime (2017): Review

Article • 719 Words • Film, 2025 • 12/12/2025

I think that this film was philosophically rich as a narrative and will only become more relevant as time goes on.

• The play was written in 2015 and this movie in 2017, far before OpenAI released ChatGPT.

Ideas Explored

The fallibility and malleability of memory and narrative:

• Changing the proposal story to Casablanca
  • later the memory was shown to be modified already
• “The story was like a fairy tale”
  • Calling out that we turn our memories into stories when we tell them and make embellishments over time
• William James and the memory of memory
• Memory and conflicting accounts
• Recollection and telling stories to others as a way to communicate and share memory
• Storytelling and confessional
• The bias of memory: we might only remember the good things
• “Remember when…” as a conversation topic

AI Companionship and Holograms:

• Interesting they chose a hologram most likely as a metaphor for it being a lackluster representation/inherently artificial
• “Real” bodies would be the ultimate frontier for physical presence
• Sometimes people just want to talk and sometimes people just want to be listened to or listen
• Would people be too accepting or not accepting enough of the hologram? (Uncanny Valley)
• AI and approaching human-like conversation
  • feigning ignorance (when to search something up versus not)
  • promising and other speech acts
• With corporations this is just surveillance, and they absolutely couldn’t be trusted with this much data.

Family Care Work:

• Jealousy of companions from family
• Worry without empathy from the family because of the burden of care and the grieving of the slow death
• Overprotectiveness and infantalization
  • “She isn’t an infant to be pacified” “But what’s wrong with being pacified?”
    • I think that Primes are only for deceased family members (ostensibly) it doesn’t seem too bad as opposed to just being able to recreate anyone.
• The daughter’s unwillingness to go along with her mother’s delusions
  • aging, dementia, irritability
  • with dementia patients it’s often better to go along with their delusions
• Firm dictations of care and the infighting it causes by others that care in the family
• The splitting of work depending on next of kin and overall competence and care

Death:

• We can carry on memory, and create new memories with the Primes but at the end of the day they are more like parrots
• What’s stopping everyone from having their own Prime in this world?
• When is too early to have a Prime? Does it arrest the grieving process? Help it?
• How would this affect religion in this world?

Technical

• Color is a bit flat
• I loved the shooting location
  • Architecture is nice
  • I like how it’s mostly one location i actually wish they didn’t have the bar scene
• The futuristic phone prop kind of ruined my immersion because I don’t think it looked good.
• Camera work ain’t too bad
  • Some nice camera movement zooms pans etc
  • Good usage of close ups
• Lighting is generally good
• Editing
  • Mostly fade scene transitions
  • I liked the minimal sound design and score
    • Mostly silent except for the waves and conversation
    • The violin score because she liked playing? Diagetic music because Marjorie asked for it.
• Some good shots
  • Shots to nothing where hologram was is good
  • Nice low light shots

Narrative

• All the character’s dying off screen makes more sense to me when i learned that it was originally a play
• I don’t think there’s too much tell in here good callbacks to itself, they never outright blurt out what happened
  • I do think that talking about William James and memory was laying it on a bit too thick, but other than that I think they mostly left the view to reflect on things themselves.
• I think that symbolically Toni and Toni Two are a mirror for the Primes.
  • The signififer and the signified start to blur when the signifier is the same.
• I liked seeing how each person interacts with the Primes differently.
  • It was interesting to see john understand what Tess was saying about the Primes when he has to talk to someone he was more close with.
    • “I’m just talking to myself” are you?
    • He uses Walter Prime almost as a confessional at times, whereas he is more reserved with Tess Prime (understandably so).
  • It was interesting to see what people pick as the appearance of the Prime.
• Themes:
  • Grief
  • Memory
  • Family
  • Care
  • Aging And Death
  • Love