Robot World

Don't expect rock-em sock-em action from this robot movie. This is not the worst sci-fi flick I've ever seen. The premise is great, it just isn't enough to fill 82 minutes. This would have made a great Outer Limits, or Twilight Zone episode. Though the budget was obviously pretty low, they did a fairly good job with what they had. The space scenes looked pretty good. The CGI robots were pretty bad, but again, I've seen worse. Aside from a home movie reel of people having a barbecue, the only person you see throughout the entire movie, is the protagonist. Well, him and a dream baby, for no apparent reason. Ian Rowe's performance was pretty good, but he didn't have many lines to deliver either. Maybe four or five total throughout the whole movie. Overall, the movie is a bit boring. There were some robot fight scenes, here and there, but even those were lackluster, and, well... robotic. I'm a die hard sci-fi fan, so I kind of enjoyed it, but if you don't REALLY like science fiction, I'd avoid it. If they had more money to sharpen up the graphics, and if it were fleshed out a bit more, it could have been a really great movie. If you do watch it, expect a slow paced, not terribly made, low budget movie.

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.

The basic idea of the movie is an interesting one but everything else is terrible. There's a huge lack of dialogue/monologue and I might have been OK with that if it wasn't for the annoying cinematography and boring story. Most of the movie is shaky as if it was shot by a cell phone in the hands of someone with multiple sclerosis.

The premise is interesting except they give away the 'big secret' halfway through. The one and only human character is really slow with figuring things out, leaving viewers to sit through the rest of it wishing they could smack him.

If you have young children who don't want to go to sleep at night, this might do the trick.

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.