Robot World

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.