Robot World

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!

Let me start by saying the lead image of the fancy robot is a laugh.

The special effects were bad but could have been a lot worse. It actually had them which is more then I can say for some movies. So do not watch this movie for the effects.

I watch this movie some time ago and forgot how it ended so I ended up watching it again. It actually kept my attention for the 80min+. You just want to see what is going to happen next.

I like the way it ended. Very thought provoking.

Truth be told, I have to admit that I figured I would be in for a stinker here, as the movie's cover seemed to be the type of cover that over-sells the movie by a landslide, whilst the actual contents of the movie is a questionable low budget affair. And I guess the glorious 3.8 rating the movie had landed on IMDb, as of the very moment I sat down to watch it here in 2025, was also a testimony to the fact that this was most likely not a stellar movie. But I still opted to watch the movie on account of it being a movie that I had never heard about, and thus also never seen.

And seeing that the movie was directed by Neil Rowe, written by Neil Rowe and also had Neil Rowe on the cast list, well that definitely also raised some alarm bells. Movies with one guy in all those roles tend to be lousy movies. So there was just a lot speaking against "Robot World".

The narrative in the movie was sluggish and generally failed to provide me with much of any entertainment, so it was a struggle to sit through the movie, especially since nothing overly interesting was taking place throughout the course of the movie. And there wasn't really a coherent red thread to lead the audience through the narrative.

Needless to say that I was not familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list, and that was actually something that spoke in favor of the movie. The acting performances were okay, but nothing mentionable.

The special effects were actually not all that bad. I've seen far worse effects in sci-fi movies even newer than this 2015 movie.

My rating of writer and director Neil Rowe's 2015 movie "Robot World" lands on a generous three out of ten star.

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.

It wasn't half bad considering it was a low budget movie, but majority of it was just me trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I get some of it... I think... But not entirely sure. I liked the robot dog though. It was cute.