The Best Part About ‘Kimi’ Is the Battlestations

If you have an HBO Max subscription, you should carve out some time to watch Kimi, Steven Soderbergh’s techno-thriller starring Zoë Kravitz and an Alexa-like virtual assistant. It tells a tight and satisfying story in which Kravitz, a former Facebook content moderator who now reviews flagged audio clips from virtual assistant devices called Kimi, stumbles across audio of a murder. 

Kravitz, who plays the extremely competent but debilitatingly agoraphobic Angela, carries this thing effortlessly, always making the smart decisions you’d want her to make, but somehow keeps getting into deeper trouble. Soderbergh, as always, shoots and directs this kind of genre project with such clarity you start to wonder if it’s too easy for him. Most importantly, Kimi says all it has to say in a blessed 90 minutes, which is how long most movies used to be before every movie was about saving the universe and setting the groundwork for a franchise. 

Kimi obviously has some things to say about technology, deliberately inverting the paranoia and voyeurism of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the age of surveillance capitalism. Trapped at home because of Covid, characters in the movie look out the window at other characters, but their spying is quaint when compared to what devices like Kimi, which they choose to bring into their home, know about them. 

What’s really smart about Kimi is that while all these themes are present, the movie isn’t laboriously about that. It’s about Angela’s journey and the minute-to-minute decisions she’s making during a crisis. The technology, just like in real life, is not there to make a point, but because it’s so woven into every part of our lives, it’d be unrealistic for it not to be part of the story.

There are many ways that Kimi uses technology to show how technology defines us, but I want to focus on one example I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about: Battlestations. Not literal battlestations of naval warfare, but in the r/Battlestations sense of the term, the way we personalize our computer desks. 

Kimi tells the viewer a lot about who the characters in the movie are by showing us their battlestations, starting with the movie’s obvious bad guy, Bradley Hasling, the CEO of the company that makes Kimi.

We meet him in the middle of a media interview via Zoom. The first perspective we get, and the same perspective viewers of the interview would get, is of a serious, professional man. He’s wearing a suit, he’s well lit via a ring light, and has a neat bookcase as a background, designed to appease video conference cops like Room Rater.

But then the movie shows us a different angle to shatter the illusion. Brad is actually sitting in a cramped and messy closet. The bookcase is there just to give him the appearance of professionalism. His desk is tiny, and he’s using what appears to be a Microsoft Surface Studio 2, which is exactly the kind of computer you’d get if you wanted to seem like a cool creative, but were actually a suit. Worst of all, when Brad gets up we see he’s not even wearing pants. Much like his battlestation, Brad is a fraud.

Angela, on the other hand, has a legitimately cool and practical battlestation, the centerpiece of a gorgeous and spacious apartment that plays an important role in the movie. 

She has two computers: There’s a windows machine for work, perhaps company hardware, connected to what looks like a Logitech - ERGO K860 keyboard. I would have gone with a fully split mechanical keyboard, but it would make sense for Angela to have something ergonomic because she uses the computer all day.

Then there’s the Macbook Pro (the most unrealistic part of the movie is that Angela actually uses the Touch Bar), where Angela takes calls from her mom, meets with her therapist, and later goes against company policy, probably to avoid workplace surveillance software. All this hardware, including a DBX 900 rack she uses later to isolate sounds from Kimi recordings, is spread across a huge, luxurious desk.

Everything about Angela’s battlestation matches her character. She’s smart, practical, fashionable, and there’s a lot more to her than just her job. She’s totally on top of it, but just like her terrible cable management situation, there’s something messy beneath the surface. 

It’s a great bit of character building via set and props, but Kimi’s masterpiece battlestation is not Angela’s. It’s Yuri’s, a hacker we meet later in the movie. It’s hard to miss:

You can immediately tell Yuri is not a person you want to fuck with. We’re looking at two stacked curved ultrawide monitors here, another smaller vertical monitor to the left, a tower PC that seems like a gaming machine because of its RGB lights, and a separate laptop. 

Yuri is RGB’d to the gills. In addition to the tower, he has an RGB mechanical keyboard, an RGB gaming mouse, RGB speakers, AND an RGB mousepad. 

His desk seems shabby, but we know he’s serious about his posture because he’s clearly sitting on a HermanMiller Sayl Chair, which costs nearly $1,000 and is a Wirecutter’s “also great” recommendation for office chairs.

Critically, this battlestation is the only thing that’s impressive about Yuri’s living situation. It’s an expensive setup in the middle of some Eastern European slum. Clearly what Kimi is trying to communicate here is that Yuri is a very serious computer man. I don’t know if the people who made the movie understand that he also looks like he’s a part time Twitch streamer, but in my headcanon he’s definitely a gamer. 

Yuri’s battlestation is clearly “the best” one, but obviously that’s not the point. What’s important is that Kimi presents technology in a believable way, which for many years now has meant that, for many of us, it is an extension of our personality.