Rating:
★½
USA. 2015.
Crew
Director – Andrew Bellware, Screenplay – Steven J. Niles, Producer – Laura Schlachtmeyer, Music – Rob Hurry & Wayne Hurry, Visual Effects – Ian Hubert. Production Company – Pandora Machines.
Cast
Virginia Logan (Constable Hawkins), Mary Murphy (Vic Richmond), Walter ‘Barney’ Barnes (Argus), Dirk Voetberg (Glenn Bennicker), Matthew Trumbull (Tyrone Volaire), Kimball Brown (Brigade Leader Yerkov), Steve Deighan (Lowell), Sarah-Doe Osborne, Vincent Marano & Anne Michelle Abbott (Couple in Apartment), Sarah Schoofs & Kate Britton (Girls in Stairwell), Annalisa Loeffler (Luisa Vega), Don Arrup, Clark Loeffler (Carl Vega)
Plot
Police constable Hawkins is sent into Tower Block Z-83 along with her robot partner Argus. She is seeking information from tenant Vic Richmond about Damien Ra, leader of the terrorist group the Brotherhood of the Sun. While they are there, Ra’s associates arrive. During the shootout, the nanobot cloud that Vic was creating is released and gets into the building’s air system. The nanobots are designed to turn machines hostile and proceed to get inside human id chips and turn the users into zombies. With police backup busy elsewhere, Hawkins leads efforts to get the survivors out of the building to safety.
Andrew Bellware is a director whose work is under most people’s radar. Most of the films he makes are micro-budgeted and released to dvd. Beginning with his Shakespeare adaptation Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1997), Bellware went onto a string of low-budget science-fiction and occasionally horror films that include Apostasy (1998), Millennium Crisis (2007), Alien Uprising (2008), Angry Planet (2008), Clonehunter (2009), Battle, New York, Day 2 (2011), Earthkiller (2011), Android Insurrection (2012), Prometheus Trap (2012), Carbon Copy (2017) and Android Uprising (2020).
Robot Revolution feels like one of the video-released 1980s/1990s copies of RoboCop (1987), albeit having been shot on one of Bellware’s micro-budgets. We do get a robot and its human partner but the locale is no more than a regular apartment building. Bellware disguises this somewhat by aiming for a quasi-futuristic look as we cut to the Argus’s point-of-view with various digital readouts overlaid and a repetitive pulsing score run over everything.
Robot Revolution does have a decent idea – one about the release of a designer Nanotech swarm that invades and reprograms machinery. This could have worked quite well had it been given the B budget of a 1990s sf/action hybrid. However, on one of Andrew Bellware’s micro-budgets, the film feels stripped to a minimum. The nanoswarm takes over the id chips on the characters, which serve to turn the infected into zombies of sorts, meaning that the more conceptually challenging ideas get short shifted in favour of scenes with the cast being pursued by zombified tenants.
There is a not bad crab-shaped robot. However, the zombie scenes fail for the simple reason that the surroundings are too cramped and Bellware simply not enough of a director to build them for any tension and impact. The cast are passable, the better performance coming from Mary Murphy. Matthew Turnbull plays what is described as an underage teenage delinquent despite being at least the age of thirty.
Full film available here
