Review: Silicon Docks

For those that don’t know, the title of Graham Jones’ new animated feature-length film, Silicon Docks, is inspired by an area in Ireland where all of the world’s major tech companies have some sort of affiliate office in place. For the most part, most tech company CEOs seldom even visit these offices, and instead, rely on local leaders to man the day-to-day operations.

But, let’s pretend that the likes of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Evan Spiegel who created Snapchat, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk all decided to head to the Silicon Docks of Ireland at the early start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but weren’t allowed inside because of the shutdown, so everybody has to sit outside and discuss dramas endured by the cold and frustrated tech millionaires & billionaires as they stumble around locked-down Dublin in desperate need of a pint. That’s the premise for Silicon Docks. The film animated by Kasia Wiśniewska actually looks fantastic. Like a dirty rotoscope-animated feature-length using live-action set pieces but with hand-drawn character models which actually comes out looking quite solid, a method that has increasingly become popular over the last couple of years with other feature-length films going this same route.

Unfortunately, the same can NOT be said about pretty much every other facet of the movie. For starters, the dialogue is just plain unlistenable, and while this is attempting to be a satirical urban odyssey, the result is a bunch of jibberish back-and-forth reiterating Twitter-produced jokes from the last three years along with jokes that clearly were borrowed from movies like Social Network and even South Park. The voice direction is just as terrible, featuring often monotonous deliveries of poorly mimicked impersonations that largely sound nothing like the actual people. I could almost forgive this like I do with South Park if there was at LEAST one funny joke made through the entirety of the near ninety-minute runtime, but I couldn’t find any.

A lot of what’s wrong with Silicon Docks isn’t too far away from what is also wrong with TV efforts like Comedy Central’s Fairview, young writers break into the industry having been raised on a healthy diet of social media jokes that feed their own tribe, when they get a chance to put their own voice into something they often stumble and do not want to upset aforementioned tribe, and instead opts to just use punchlines authorized by social media. Unfortunately, Late Night comics then pick up these jokes in much quicker fashion, use them 10,000 times, and by the time an animated series or film like this comes to pass, those jokes are already so over that there’s almost no going back.

As for Silicon Docks, not only am I not going back, I could barely make it through. The aesthetic for the COVID-produced animated film has a lot of positive qualities, but the script and dialogue makes me beg for an out.