Being Human Gets Complicated in 6 Movies and Shows Like VisionQuest
VisionQuest puts AI, memory, and identity at the center of Marvel's latest story. Six sci-fi picks on Tubi have their own questions about who gets to call themselves human.
Being human sounds pretty straightforward until science fiction gets involved. Give someone a new body while their old memories remain and suddenly the usual checklist starts falling apart. Artificial life only makes the paperwork worse once it begins thinking, feeling, and making choices nobody programmed.
Marvel's VisionQuest has reopened that particular identity crisis with Paul Bettany's Vision trying to understand who he is after being rebuilt with memories inherited from a previous version of himself. AI personalities inside his programming only make the question messier, but you don't need an MCU flowchart to understand the problem underneath it. If your body can change, your memories can come from somewhere else, and other people helped program parts of who you are, who gets the final say on the person you become?
The question is much more interesting than whether AI is simply good or evil. Science fiction has spent decades moving the line between human and machine, usually just as we're getting comfortable with where it sits. We've already wandered through some of those reality-bending questions in our guide to the best sci-fi movies on Tubi, where everything from memory to time itself gets considerably less reliable. VisionQuest gives us an excuse to zoom in on one particularly messy corner of that conversation: identity.
Tubi's Robots & Cyborgs collection has more than a few stories willing to mess with that boundary. Our six picks approach identity from different sides without promising the line will be any clearer when we're finished.
Identity crisis: now available in both human and machine.
Robocop
Alex Murphy knows exactly who he is. A corporation has other ideas about what he could become.
After Detroit police officer Murphy is critically injured, OmniCorp sees an opportunity to put a human face inside its robotic law-enforcement program in RoboCop. Joel Kinnaman emerges as a heavily augmented version of the man who went in, complete with technology designed to make him faster, stronger, and more useful to the company responsible for keeping him alive.
His memories tell him he's Alex Murphy. His family knows him as Alex Murphy. But software can influence how he responds, corporate interests can dictate what his new body is designed to do, and suddenly personal autonomy has a settings menu. Vision starts from artificial life and reaches toward a self he can claim. Murphy travels in the opposite direction: unquestionably human until other people acquire the ability to modify how that humanity operates.
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Humans
The family bought a household appliance. Of course, the household appliance has opinions.
Highly advanced synthetic people called Synths have become ordinary parts of everyday life in the world of Humans, taking care of chores, children, and whatever else their owners would rather outsource. The Hawkins family brings Anita into their home expecting exactly that kind of useful technology. Anita doesn't stay comfortably inside that definition.
As her behavior becomes harder to dismiss as simple programming, the relationship between owner and appliance starts feeling less comfortable. A machine that looks human is one thing. A machine that appears to feel, remember, form relationships, and want something for itself creates a different problem entirely. Humans makes the everyday relationship between people and machines increasingly difficult to categorize. If something behaves like a person long enough, the burden eventually starts shifting.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Time of Eve
There's one rule at this café: stop asking who's human.
Teenager Rikuo lives in a future where androids are commonplace and expected to visibly identify themselves, so treating his family's android as an appliance barely requires a second thought. His assumptions get harder to maintain after he discovers her visiting the café at the center of Time of Eve, where the usual distinction has deliberately been removed.
Inside, humans and androids are treated equally. Without labels or an obvious hierarchy, Rikuo loses the visual cue telling him which conversations supposedly matter more because the person across from him happens to be biological. No giant heroic act is required to prove anyone's humanity here. Time of Eve is more interested in whether knowing what someone is made of should determine how much personhood you're willing to grant them. Existential crisis, table for two.
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Demascus
Robots aren't required for technology to make identity complicated.
At 33, Demascus is still trying to figure himself out when experimental technology gives that search a much more literal form in Demascus. His unusual therapy sends him through different perspectives and possibilities surrounding his own life, making “find yourself” less metaphorical than most self-help advice intends.
Choices that once looked permanent can suddenly be viewed alongside lives that might have unfolded differently. Technology gives Demascus the chance to confront those possibilities directly, but seeing more versions of yourself doesn't necessarily make choosing the “real” one any easier.
An entirely human character belongs in this conversation for a reason. Identity doesn't become unstable only after somebody installs a circuit board. Technology can hold up a mirror to people too, and Demascus is interested in what happens when the reflection refuses to stay singular.
A-X-L
Nobody asks whether their dog has achieved personhood before loving it. A-X-L makes that distinction more complicated.
Teenage motocross rider Miles isn't looking for artificial consciousness when he encounters an advanced robotic military dog abandoned in the desert. What he finds in A-X-L is technology designed as a weapon but capable of forming a bond with him, turning a military asset into something Miles begins treating much more like a companion.
Miles doesn't need to conduct a philosophical examination of artificial consciousness before deciding A-X-L deserves protection. He cares first. The complicated questions can catch up later. People rarely decide what matters to them through perfectly organized thought experiments anyway. We get attached. We recognize loyalty. Somewhere along the way, “it” starts becoming “him.”
This title is available on Tubi until further notice.
Automata
Humans built the rules. The robots have started editing.
Insurance investigator Jacq Vaucan spends his days examining cases involving the robots helping sustain what's left of civilization in a damaged future. In Automata, Antonio Banderas plays a man expecting to investigate another violation until the evidence points somewhere his job isn't designed to go: the machines may be modifying themselves.
Programming is supposed to provide certainty. A machine does what its code allows because somebody else decided the boundaries in advance. Self-modification destroys that comfort. The moment a creation can change itself, humans stop being the only ones deciding what it gets to become. The machine moves from following an identity assigned by its creator toward participating in the creation of its own.
Vision inherits pieces of himself from the people who built him. Automata pushes the dilemma further: what happens when a creation no longer needs its creator's permission to decide what comes next?
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