Viking Night: Robot Overlords
By Bruce Hall
March 28, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Last week, I was your guide through the magical world of Charles Bronson. And in May, I have a very special treat for all of you, indeed. But what of today? What should I write about today? A Sergio Leone Western? A ‘70s horror flick? A cocaine and testosterone fueled actioner from the 1980s? Or, perhaps we set the WABAC machine to the Eisenhower years, and immerse ourselves with a heaping helping of Cold War alien invasion paranoia?
All fine ideas, but I just wasn’t sure how to choose. My day job has gotten more demanding lately, which usually means I end up crossing everything longer than 90 minutes off the list. Don’t worry, someday you will see, in this space, a review of The Great Escape, or Magnolia, or some other transatlantic flight-length masterpiece. But for now, that’s a no-go (at least...until May). But at the exact moment that last paragraph finished winding through my head, I landed on something.
Something...big. Something called: Robot Overlords.
Just look at that title. How many times have I expressed my love for films whose entire pitch can be summed up in the title? That is an automatic one-point-five stars with me. But Robot Overlords isn’t just ANY self-descriptively titled, apparent Transformers knockoff. It is, in fact, one that stars Oscar winning actor Ben Kingsley, and walking nerdgasm/beloved former star of the X-Files, Gillian Anderson.
That’s a little like cranking out a thinly veiled, awesomely titled, low budget copy of Star Wars, somehow starring Anthony Hopkins and Summer Glau. It doesn’t make a lot of sense on paper, but it’s hard not to like the two leads on an individual basis, and I can usually tolerate a blatant lack of originality - if it’s well executed. And you never know - sometimes what at first appears to be a cynical cash grab turns out to have a little something exciting to bring to the table.
So, let’s talk about Robot Overlords. The setup is that - wait for it - Robots invade the earth and enslave humanity, hence becoming our Overlords. Opening title cards inform us that the battle lasted about 11 days. And the background audio indeed establishes that the most exciting part of the story would seem to have happened off screen - before the movie you’re about to see. Savvy readers may recognize this as reminiscent of the opening to (the also gloriously titled) Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000.
A cheap narrative trick like this would normally irritate me. But remember - this is a movie called Robot Overlords. And while such overblown, McCarthy-era B-movie titles are indeed magnificent, they also imply an inherent need to temper your expectations. So, I tempered mine to approximately zero (Twilight fans, you know what I’m talking about), and unscrewed my brain in the way you do a lightbulb that you wish to temporarily disable, but not remove. Good. Brain off. Check.
Now, let’s hit PLAY.
As we established earlier, robots have taken over the earth. They say they want to study us, and then they’ll leave. Their one rule, for reasons that I am sure will in no way become significant, is “stay indoors.” This is something that the disabled, the mentally ill, functional alcoholics and gaming nerds would no doubt find easy to do. But for the rest of you (see what I did there?), this would be a fate worse than death. So just before the title card, we see what happens to those who defy the law. The robots, we learn, force all humans to wear cumbersome tracking devices on their necks. The devices light up rather conspicuously because in movies, the only way to be sure something is working is if it lights up.
You can see where this is leading, right? When the robots sense that you are outside, one of them will politely confront you with your mistake. Then it breaks out a rather genteel ED-209 impression and blasts you to pieces after a hasty countdown. This is what happens to the father of a young boy named Connor (Milo Parker). Connor himself is rescued by Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley), a human “collaborator” (they prefer the term “volunteer corps”) who acts as a liaison between the oppressed masses and their aforementioned Overlords.
Smythe places Connor in the care of Kate (Gillian Anderson, rocking a completely disarming British accent), who apparently has a kind of a Children of Disintegrated Parents/halfway house situation happening (conveniently, right across the street from Connor’s former home). Kate is the nurturing, maternal type, while her son Sean (Callan McAuliffe) is both the oldest male as well as a rebellious teen who lost his father in the “war”. But don’t tell him that his father’s not still alive, because Sean can FEEL it. Yeah. That’s right. Robot Overlords should have been subtitled Not Afraid to Lean on Convention.
There’s a method to this somewhat generic madness, though. One of the reasons those neck implants are so visible is because eventually, the children (plucky, imaginative things that children are) find a clever way to disable them. And now that the robots cannot track them, the kids decide to execute some good old-fashioned adolescent shenanigans. In time, this leads to bigger things: Sean begins to mature into the hero he was always meant to be, everyone starts to rediscover their humanity, battle lines are drawn, yadda yadda yadda.
You know the drill; if you’re old enough to read and comprehend this article, you have seen at least 6,000 movies that follow the same template.
For a while, though, Robot Overlords is slightly more than the sum of its parts (intended). It’s not really about the robots; they serve primarily as a plot device to drive the development arc of Kate and her brood of misfits - to whom Kingsley serves as a sort of incidental surrogate father. If Kingsley did not repeatedly vanish from the film for 20 minutes at a time, this could have reminded me of something Charles Dickens might have produced after being transported 150 years into the future, fed a tray of pot brownies and forced to watch Transformers 3 with James Cameron. It’s a strange-but-compelling mix of mild drama and well-worn sci-fi tropes.
But then, during the second act, something magical happens. The tone changes, and things begin to feel more like a Jason Statham fever dream - without Jason Statham.
The kids are the real stars of this film, and much of the story focuses on their transition from mischievous street urchins to hardened insurgents (a transformation that admittedly, takes up less than minutes of screen time). Over the course of the film they learn to work together, and begin to think of one another as a kind of mad, fractured family. They’re instrumental in coming up with a way to fight back against the robots - a process that utilizes a weird mix of drama, humor, and a handful of scenes that might feel right at home in Snatch, Crank, or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Portions of Robot Overlords are genuinely entertaining, and the visual effects are, mercifully, almost uniformly decent. Even the soundtrack is much, much better than one has a right to expect from a $20 million giant robot movie. At first, the only thing that disappointed me were trying to find the logic in the robot invasion, and this is usually my problem with invasion movies; the reason for invasion usually doesn’t add up.
Why would you invade the earth for water, minerals, or biomass - when all those things are found in greater abundance with much less effort, all over the galaxy? What possible reason is there to occupy a planet populated by seven billion resentful meatbags when you can do almost anything else with your time? Well, the robots actually do have a game plan, and not only is it more nefarious than first implied (obviously), but it kind of makes a macabre kind of sense - if you’re a Nazi sympathizer who admires cold, machine-like efficiency.
The robots use a human-shaped android called Mediator 452 (Craig Garner) to help Smythe and the collabor-- I mean “Volunteer Corps” keep humanity docile and compliant. Mediator 452 is an appalling, androgynous, condescending little monster. His distorted mechanical patois is made more disturbing by the fact that he looks to be built from parts of three or four different people. He often appears on television to reassure the public, and tends to punctuate these cybernetic fireside chats with the chilling phrase: “robots never lie”.
For a short time, Robot Overlords serves up some moderately compelling allegory regarding how benign aspirations can lead to terrible things - when pursued with excessive vigor.
And then, it’s not. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of films just kind of “give up” once the second act begins, and it’s time to start throwing obstacles at the heroes. It’s the part of the script where the switch gets flipped from “PARABLE - MINOR” to “CHASE - EXTENDED”. At some point, Sean discovers the Magic Bullet they need to fight the invaders, and it’s right about the time we discover the true, horrific plan in store for humanity. But it’s mostly fun, watching Sean and his youthful cohorts dig deep on this digital dilemma. Pay attention Spielberg - it IS possible to include children in an action movie without presenting them as treacly, sepia-toned metaphor for your own past, or as the fulcrum for an insipid act three deus-ex-machina (“It’s a Unix system! I know this!”).
I’m not sure how you write out a physical shudder. Just imagine me doing it now.
Honestly, the only truly terrible part of Robot Overlords is the absolutely bonkers ending. But by that point, you must realize that once you’ve consented to watch a film called Robot Overlords, you relinquish the right to be overly critical. And if make it to the climax, you have by default given it your express approval. Don’t get ¾ of the way through a plate of eggs and THEN tell me you don’t like it. You have no room to complain about ANYTHING. The ending of this movie is nuttier than a Snickers bar, but Robot Overlords is a film that clearly understands what it is, largely sticks to this template, and delivers on everything it promises.
In the end, it’s no worse than one of the many Star Trek episodes where Captain Kirk talks a super intelligent computer into committing suicide - “Kirking” it, if you will - with a fatal dose of smug self-assurance.
“It never makes much sense, but it’s fun as hell to watch!”
As far as I’m concerned, that is both a suitable tagline FOR, and my entire advance review OF Robot Overlords II.