Kill Command

Perfect Saturday night fodder….Well, put it this way, in my house, when the alternative is either Pointless Celebrities (never has a show been more aptly named) followed by Casualty or The X Factor, why the heck wouldn’t you want to watch a movie where robots run amok and there’s lots of blowing stuff up? Which is what I’d quite like to do to most of those pointless celebrities, most of whom we wouldn’t recognize if we bumped into them at the chip shop.Anyway, back to the plot…Which is as old as them there hills, but it doesn’t make the movie any less watchable. OK, so it’s low budget and I’m not sure any of the faces were familiar (like those aforementioned celebs) but, by gum, it delivers on the action...in other words, it does exactly what it says on the tin.Sure, it comes under the heading ‘B Picture’, but you could apply that to Dog Soldiers (mentioned by a fellow reviewer), Attack the Block, Ironclad and most of Luc Besson’s output, so there ain’t nothing wrong with lower-down-the-totem thrillers if they provide the thrills, which this one does.For the dosh, the effects are pretty damned good and the mostly-forest setting works, too. I was surprised to discover in the very watchable ‘making of’ section on the DVD that the writer/director, Steven Gomez, is, in fact, British, as were a fair number of the cast and seeing how they made the effect shots through the use of green screen showed just what you can do if you have the imagination but not necessarily the Hollywood coffers.In that regard, he joins a line of very talented low-key directors such as Jonathan English, Neil Marshall, Joe Cornish and Jon Wright.So, while it’s unlikely to win any awards, if you’re a fan of Sci-fi and you just want to settle back with a cold one and a pack of Doritos and let yourself be seduced for 90 minutes, you won’t go far wrong.

Set in the near future and in the US Army we meet an elite team of soldiers who have been designated to do a test on a remote island for an arms company that have developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) robots to take the place of real soldiers on the battlefields of the future.They are assigned a chipped human called ‘Mills’ (Vanessa Kirby) who has electronic capabilities and is like a walking search engine – only better. The real humans do not take to her – they are led by Captain Bukes (the always good Thure Lindhardt) who is the no nonsense sort of leader but who knows his stuff. Once the ‘exercise’ begins they soon realise that the AI they are fighting is slightly more Intelligent and is far from being ‘artificial’.Now I did not expect great things from this but was really surprised. It is played with a straight bat by all the players and because of the nature of what is happening it has to be, I had flashbacks to ‘Aliens’ on a couple of occasions but this is not a creature feature. That said the CGI kill bots were excellent, believable, well designed and thoroughly dislikeable. It is a Brit indie affair too and one that shows that with a great idea and some well chosen talent you can do great things with not very much. This is a 'shoot em up' with attitude and a bit of real time intelligence thrown in for good measure, one I am happy to recommend.

Very entertaining for a low budget British sci-fi movie.

I came across this movie on Netflix, a film that, like other streaming discoveries (Blue Ruin, the TV shows Occupied and Colony etc) caught me unaware. Within 15 minutes I had stopped playing with my phone and realised this was a cut above the usual drek I melt my brain with. By the end I was on social media telling nerdy friends "you need to check this out".On paper it sounds like a cross between Predator and Hardware, a cookie cutter B-movie sci-fi pitch about an AI gone rogue hunting soldiers that could come from a million different comics or books. But it's intelligent, grimly serious, and underplayed, which ramps up the tension. Vanessa Kirby (most recently in MI6) plays a William-Gibson-esque augmented human embedded with the soldiers, and sells it well, and her interplay with with the "man-of-few-words" Captain (Thure Lundhart) proves to be the core relationship that the movie pivots on. And it's all beautifully shot in the perma-dusk of forest light, with tight set-pieces.So ignore the identikit photoshopped cover -- this is quality genre fodder, and deserves a bigger audience.

This is really good - admittedly it plays with ideas and scenarios we've all seen before but there's not much new under the sun anymore and they do a good job here.The cover suggests Predator meets Terminator, I'm going with Southern Comfort meets I Robot. We're in the near future where a small team of crack marines are sent to a remote island on a training mission. A mysterious female cyborg is sent with them which is the first sign that this isn't gonna be a routine mission. It won't be the last.For a film with a relatively modest budget, they've used it wisely and demonstrate some pretty decent effects and world building. There's plenty of gun toting action to keep things ticking alongside some more thoughtful moments pondering the age old Human v A.I conundrum. The actings solid across the board, the plot twists in interesting directions and it all adds up to a neat little sci-fi package. It doesn't exactly re-write the rule book for this type of flick but it works, it really does. Recommended.