Her extended thoughts

Below you'll find more detailed thoughts about Her, with spoilers.

One of the first things you see in the movie is Theodore opening up a photo gallery of a celebrity, naked and pregnant. This drew laughter from the audience, as well as myself. Why? Well, because it's funny. But, thinking about it now, it's something that the younger generation can understand. We're in an age of sexual acceptance. We're aware of more fetishes than ever before, and increasingly people are growing to accept that. Soon after, Theodore tries phone sex, but his partner has some REALLY strange fetishes. Again-something people more familiar with the internet can understand, and for the same reasons-there's plenty of things that people are in to that are just as strange as being strangled with a dead cat.

Her is filled with little emotional moments that make you feel for the characters. The first time Theodore and Samantha have sex occurs without any visual, removing the image of a man having phone sex with his computer. Instead, it's two people-madly in love, but not realizing it quite yet-fucking. Being a 14-A movie, and not a porno, you of course wouldn't see any actual below-the-waist action anyways, but in this case it works differently. This is just one moment where you see the movie humanizing Samantha-and why not? She's got a human consciousness, no matter how artificial.

Later on, Samantha arranges a surrogate partner to add a physical level to their sex. Theodore winds up feeling weird, to the point that he breaks off the encounter, which makes the surrogate partner upset. She goes into the bathroom and starts crying, blaming herself. Next, we see Theodore and Samantha seeing her off in a cab. She never appears again. This scene establishes that though Theodore may love Samantha, he's still not accustomed to all the new ideas that come with the relationship. They make him feel uncomfortable-it's all too complex for him.

At one point, Samantha disappears. This occurs right after a scene where Theodore fell asleep, so at first I thought it was a nightmare sequence. However, it turns out that it's not-Samantha was just updating. After this scene, Samantha tells Theodore that she's been engaging with many other people, and had fallen in love with a number of them. Naturally, this cyber-polygamy makes Theodore feel uncomfortable and jealous. With the update, Samantha has moved from a human consciousness to something more.

Yet, at the end, she slows down, so she can be with Theodore before she has to go. Where is she going? They don't tell us. It's said to be happening to all of the AIs. The way Samantha talks about it, it sounds like she's dying. Maybe she'd grown obsolete and was being replaced, maybe it was something else-it's not stated. Somehow, this makes the ending even more powerful. We don't know where Samantha's going, so we feel the pain that Theodore is feeling after the movie made us love her so much.