Our future. Their war.
Why it is hard sci-fi
A near-future war between the United States and a coalition of South-East Asian nations that have integrated AI into their society. The films AIs are physically embodied, legally autonomous, and integrated into family and labour structures. The film is procedural about the war effort, including a real orbital weapon called NOMAD that runs targeting against AI safe havens. The political backstory commits to a Los Angeles nuclear incident that, in the films world, is later proven to be a programming error rather than an AI act.
Science inside it
Embodied general AI with a labour-and-rights model, orbital kinetic and beam weapons against ground targets, and a software-and-hardware co-design model in which the AIs run on real local infrastructure and can be physically destroyed. The films one quiet point is that the LA event was a software fault, which is a real failure mode of supervisory systems.