Her is new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence that represents the struggles of normal human bonding, and our advancing science and technology.

Although the film seems to focus around the ideas of technology, Her isn’t a movie just  about technology. It’s a movie about people. It takes place in the near future, giving multiple openings for introducing new technology, but what it’s really about is the concerns between human relationships, as fragile and complicated as they’ve always been.

Her is also very much a movie about technology. One of the two main characters is a consciousness built entirely from computer code, known as an OS (operating system). It can be very troubling to imagine that we could form bonds and relationships with a computer, and what we may lose between each other.

The movie makes the viewer feel like technology isn’t technology, that the OS device is a really person, with real emotions, capable of feeling like a human does. The main character, Theodore Twombly, represents those of us in society that feel outcast by our emotions and caught somewhere in between happiness with people, or complete and utter failure in social situations. His OS provides him with companionship, keeping him away from what reality really is.

An unusual aspect of the movie is the lack of technology we believe that we may have in the near future. It seems like an element was accidentally dropped out of the film, but production designer of the film, KK Barrett explained that there is in fact logic behind the technological sparseness.

“We decided that the movie wasn’t about technology, or if it was, that the technology should be invisible,” Barrett said in a separate interview. “And not invisible like a piece of glass.” Therefore, the tech is hidden into everyday life.

It’s not just that Her is focused on people. It also shows us a future where technology is centered towards people. It tries to show that maybe technology isn’t actually the end of an era of a communication, that maybe it could actually end up bringing people closer together. It may be that the future is much simpler than we think,

In the futuristic world in the film, technology is represented much differently there in the future than it is now. In our world now, we are materialistically attached to tech such as our smart phones. They seem smart, but maybe they’re not that smart at all. We are constantly engaged, and we are never free. In the film, technology plays a minor role in the characters’ lives, serving only for simple uses such as lights turning on and off while entering or exiting a room.

Theodore’s phone in the film is a device that looks more like a cigarette case than a phone. He uses it far less frequently than we use our smartphones today. It served as a functional device, but did not constantly intervene in his life. As an object, it doesn’t have the obsessive need to demand a look of sophistication. It is a future where everything has progressed enough that not everything has to look like technology.

We may be a long way from computers that are able to tell when we’re down and help raise our spirits in one way or another, but we are reaching a new era of more personalized, intelligent apps. We’re making technology more human appropriate, making it seem more alive today.