Like _Dog Soldiers_ meets _The Terminator_, except nowhere near as good as either. Cliché sci-fi but with some great original designs.
_Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._
The plot of this movie is not exactly a new one. Robots created by humans, created to learn, decides to do things their way. The way of robots is usually detrimental to the health of any humans nearby. When the robots in question happens to be combat robots then shit is about to hit the fan … big time!
It sounds pretty good. The problem is that I found the implementation rather mediocre.
It starts off looking rather good with scenes of Mills in the company head quarters and a few cool scenes showing off her eye implants. The movie then moves on to present the military squad that are about to have an unpleasant first hand experience of the “robot way”. Unfortunately the writer fell for the all too boring and cheap plot element of making the commander an asshole who looks down on anyone who is not a marine grunt. Sigh.
Then it is quickly off to the island training facility. After the obligatory banter between the marines and Mills in the rather bizarre and not very believable transport ship it is time for some action as the marines deploy.
The rest of the movie is pretty much a long sequence alternating between shot outs between the troops and the robots and moments of reflection. The behavior of this so called elite marine squad is amateurish. The robots are underwhelming. What especially ticked me off was that the robots did not seem to be able to hit anything except by pure luck. And these were supposed to be high tech stuff. The marines even use simple smoke to evade them. What the fuck? Advanced killer robots in the future that relies on visual and cannot shoot straight? That is disappointing to say the least.
Of course there had to be a big shootout in the end. Unfortunately it was just more of what we had seen before. Robots shooting, and missing, wildly. The marines killing them off in rather large, but not sufficiently large, numbers. Finally someone thought about using EMP charges. However here the writer comes up with another stupid plot element. Implants that were not immediately hurt by an EMP pulse but would slowly degrade afterwards and, just for good measure, erase the human memories of the implanted person as well. Contrived and stupid as far as I am concerned.
The end? Well about as meh as you could expect from a low budget sci-fi/horror movie wannabe. The movie was not outright bad and it did have some interesting ideas but it was pretty clear that it was on a budget with constraints. The writing, the robot designs which seemed to be done by someone caring only about visual appearance and not if the design actually made sense, dragged down the movie.
