Jenna Ortega plays a sad robot in the shamelessly programmatic ‘Klara and the Sun’

Early on in “Klara and the Sun,” Michael Giacchino’s aggressively precious score makes its first appearance, practically serving as a warning for what’s to come. The syrupy strings, treacly piano and awed choral vocals conjure an atmosphere of strained enchantment, suggesting a film burdened by fatal amounts of whimsy and emotional manipulation. Adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel about a lifelike robot who’s purchased to be a lonely teenager’s friend, filmmaker Taika Waititi continues down the saccharine path he has traveled since 2019’s Oscar-winning “Jojo Rabbit.” The movie’s guileless android will learn about love, loss and other far-too-common human experiences. Meanwhile, the audience will wonder if the sentimental pummeling will ever end.

Jenna Ortega plays Klara, the B1 model of a robot companion known as Artificial Friend, or AF. She lives in a dreary future. (A side character mentions that World War III occurred a while ago, though on the plus side, apparently the internet has now been outlawed.) Klara is an outdated AF — the much more advanced B3 is all the rage — and if she doesn’t find someone to buy her at the rundown shop where she and other B1s are sold, she’ll get turned into scrap metal. The smiling, amiable android understands very little about her surroundings, believing that the sun (which recharges her batteries) is a deity that listens to her prayers to be chosen by a human. Klara’s fellow B1s may consider her peculiar but in a Waititi movie, being a quirky oddball is actually a badge of honor.

Just then, Klara meets Josie (Mia Tharia), an eccentric teen, and her distant single mother, Chrissy (Amy Adams). This family has endured tragedies — Josie’s sister died when she was very young, which prompted Josie’s father to leave the family — but Josie feels a kinship with Klara over her mother’s objections. Soon, Klara comes home with Josie, getting her bearings in the world outside the store and trying to prove to the skeptical Chrissy that she can be a valuable addition to the household.

Conceiving his adaptation as a childlike sci-fi fairy tale, Waititi draws from his cheerful 2016 adolescent adventure “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” and the mixture of pathos and irony that informed “Jojo Rabbit.” With shades of Ishiguro’s previous dystopian novel “Never Let Me Go,” “Klara and the Sun” is seen through the eyes of an innocent in the process of fully grasping humanity’s horrors, which are only exacerbated by the bleak setting. But although Waititi eventually reveals the darkness at his story’s center, before then he lacquers the film with a calculated gooeyness that’s stultifying before it becomes downright exasperating.

In recent years, moviegoers have encountered several pictures that tackled our anxious AI age — “M3GAN,” “Companion,” “Sheep in the Box” — but “Klara and the Sun” is easily the most simpleminded. Where Waititi once brought an authentic ache to his bittersweet sagas of wayward souls, he’s resorted to sledgehammer mawkishness that’s meant to be offset by his droll humor. But the sneaky charm evident in projects like “What We Do in the Shadows” has, of late, been replaced by laborious comedic set pieces and in “Klara and the Sun,” the results are disastrously twee.

Ortega brings the right wide-eyed wonder to this kindly android that just wants to be Josie’s pal, having no idea about a secret medical condition that afflicts Josie. But the “Wednesday” star is left stranded in cutesy scenes in which her character is tediously befuddled by humans’ unpredictable behavior. Tharia fares better, possessing the same snarky delivery that Waititi wields when he has been in front of the camera. But genuinely funny moments are rare, badly outnumbered by done-to-death musings regarding the mysteries of being alive and torturous melodramatic moments in which Klara dully absorbs the severity of Josie’s illness and Chrissy’s sorrow.

Even Adams, who is usually superb at exuding effortless warmth and smarts, struggles to find layers in a cliched closed-off mother who finally bonds with Klara after realizing she is able to imitate people’s mannerisms and speech patterns. Chrissy’s discovery sets the stage for a twist that merely draws unfavorable comparisons to far better speculative science fiction about our growing dependence on AI companionship.

Such flat, enervating filmmaking makes the whole endeavor a shockingly cynical affair. “Klara and the Sun” keeps insisting we feel things when the storytelling hasn’t earned our tears or despair. Waititi confronts an ominous future in which children undergo genetic enhancements to become super-smart and society is even more stratified than it is now. But there’s no icy chill to his vision, only the glib confidence that a feel-good montage or a piercing Anohni and the Johnsons ballad will blind us to his film’s lack of human connection. If he thinks such gimmicks will work, he’s even more naive than his robot.

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