Robot World

I was intrigued by the picture used on Amazon to promote the movie, and the description sounded like it would be at least fairly interesting. Not even close. Worst of all, I paid $3.00 for it. Free would have been bad enough.

We see these Acme Corp robots just a few times (looking NOTHING like the high tech robot used to promote the film), but there's little insight into why they're going about killing everything in sight. To protect the few survivors of the holocaust? But by the looks of it, the robots would kill them too. Who knows? And maybe the details were there somewhere, but I got so bored with such a slow paced, unproductive story line, if you can call it that, I kept skipping ahead.

There's a few revelatory moments, but the majority of the film is just very long, drawn out moments, one to the next, over and over again. Here's a suggestion, if you want torture, try the less time consuming variety, like maybe a good punch to the face as a superior alternative to this movie.

So, far too much time is spent getting to the plot twist. Once it's revealed, the movie plods on to a second plot twist. As some have said, 25 minutes is sufficient to tell this story. And to the author of the "Sleepy Astronaut" review, if you want to review a film, at least watch it in its entirety so you don't embarrass yourself by missing the important plot twist.

I loved this movie. Judging by the artwork I expected a dumb movie that I could just have a have a drink, watch, criticize and and go to bed. I was pleasantly surprised by the believable graphics, (most sci-fi films over due it and it ends up looking plastic and fake) the amazing plot and eeriness of it. I value authenticity in sci-fi films and this film has it all. Definitely a thinking mans's movie. The only thing I would criticize is the artwork, (they were clearly trying to sell it as something other than what it was and that alone is the closest I come to understanding why it has such low ratings) and lastly the ending could have been a little more complete.

If like me you spend more time paging through streaming services looking for something decent to watch than actually watching movies, then you probably have a similar process of compiling a shortlist of movies that don't have stupid titles, don't have stupid covers, aren't made by a certain science fiction channel, and don't have a blurb featuring the words "zombie" or "found footage". I then run my list past IMDb's and other aggregators' reviews to arrive at the Least Worst Film.

And thus it was with "Robot World", which nearly didn't make the cut because it doesn't feature at all on most review sites, and has a different name on IMDb ("Reconnoiter"), all of which are usually very bad signs indeed.

But on this particular evening the competition was unusually dire, so I decided to go for it, and boy was I glad I did!

This film has a tiny crew, no doubt a tiny budget, and practically no cast at all. Yet it delivers a tight, well-plotted, well-paced story with considerable aplomb, and surprisingly decent visual effects to boot. At times it reminded me of Moon, Sunshine, or Extant, and is heavily influenced by 2001 and Battlestar Galactica. Maybe a hint of Blake's 7 (upholstery, mainly).

This exceedingly fine British film is 1000 times better than most of the dross out there that has 1000 times the budget, and I hope that Rendered Pictures go from strength to strength. It is so refreshing to be *pleasantly* surprised by on online movie these days.

Do yourself a favour and watch it, then find their website and read the production blog, and marvel at how such a film came to be!

It was very apparent that this film had almost no budget. Only one astronaut for critical mission? I guess that saves a few bucks in actor salaries. But the real downfall for this film was the mismatched tone of the score and cinematography to what was actually happening to the character/story. There were many places where the character was experiencing one emotion, yet the score set the exact opposite mood. The same with the cinematography. (Jump cuts when character is experiencing long bouts tedium?)

Another problem was the unrealistic dialogue. For example, at one point the main character is suppose to give a report back to mission control, but he sounds more like an eighth grader than a highly trained professional.

The robotic special effects were great though. It appeared that they used actual robots (not CGI) for the majority of the robots in the film, and they were able to convey some personality for the robots. Also, the acting by the main character was well done, even though he had very few lines of poor dialogue.

Overall I wouldn't recommend this film unless you really like robot movies and don't mind exercising your suspension-of-disbelief muscles.

Triggers: violence - guns, lasers, bombs, war; graphic depiction of cadavers.