Director – [uncredited] Marcus Friendlander, Screenplay – Lauren Pritchard & Joe Roche, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Richard Chapelle, Music – Mikel Shane Prather & Eliza Swenson, Production Design – Jason Roose. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Katalina Viteri (Tara Lopez), Noah Jay Wood (Jorge), DeAngelo Davis (Wilson), Jessica Chancellor (Zee), Olivia Crosby (Red Dragon/Black Dragon on end credits), Tito Ortiz (Derek), Barry Piacente (Dr Marietta), Jeff Marchelletta (Dr Abel Lopez)
Plot
Scientists activate a giant robot only for its controlling A.I. Medusa to go out of control and begin writing vast screeds of code. They realise that Medusa has become sentient just before it kills them. Tara, the hacker daughter of the project’s Dr Abel Lopez, receives a call warning her. She immediately sets out to try and stop Medusa as it takes over worldwide military systems and the power grid. However, Medusa becomes aware of her and her colleagues and sends out killer drones and robots to stop them. Outwitting these and making it to the control bunker to input the kill codes requires considerable technical ingenuity on their part.
Since the early 2000s, the low-budget US production company The Asylum has been known for their output of Mockbusters – films that come out with titles intended to mimic those of big-budget releases in the hope that people will mistake them or not look too closely. In between these, they essentially created the Gonzo Killer Shark film, as popularised by their bad movie hit Sharknado (2013), and have made an assortment of monster films and disaster movies.
When Robotapocalypse came up as a title to watch, I immediately made the assumption that it was the adaptation of Daniel H. Wilson’s best-selling novel Robopocalypse (2011), which has been announced as a Steven Spielberg film some years back. This led me to wonder how it ended up being produced and released without any fanfare that I was aware of, before the credits revealed a suspicious number of The Asylum’s names.
You get the impression that Robotapocalypse was a troubled production for The Asylum. As the opening credits come up, there is no director’s credit. The name Marcus Friendlander only appears among the list of assistant directors some way down on the end credits – however, in that Friendlander has no other credits, your suspicion is that this is a pseudonym. Similarly, there is no credit for visual effects anywhere throughout. Furthermore, while the first two-thirds of the film shapes up in a way that gives indication that Katalina Viteri is the lead, her character abruptly disappears two-thirds of the way through and it said that she has been killed, although we never see any death scene, leading you to believe there were some troubled production or shooting cuts/curtailments somewhere, or that what we end up with was a patch-up job.
The machine revolution
Whatever went on behind the scenes is purely speculative. However, the one advantage the film does have is a script co-written by Joe Roche, who in the last couple of years has proven one of the most entertaining of The Asylum’s scriptwriters. Roche has turned out scripts for several films for The Asylum with the likes of Collision Earth (2020), Meteor Moon (2020), Alien Conquest (2021), Devil’s Triangle (2021), Planet Dune (2021), Battle for Pandora (2022), 4 Horsemen: Apocalypse (2022), Moon Crash (2022), Methgator (2023) and Doomsday Meteor (2023). These brim with almost-credible sounding science doubletalk and complete mad science feats of ingenuity and technological innovation that you end up cheering for their sheer invention.
With Robotapocalypse, Joe Roche delivers a splendidly madcap script, overspilling with crazed hacking schemes, where characters talk of quantum hacking and breaking into the Pentagon with casual regard, wield EMP grenades, kill codes, practical invisibility camouflage shields, along with guns that fire chips that transform people into cyborgs, flotillas of giant robots being dropped into action by helicopter, killer drones strikes and the like. The hacker characters spout technical doubletalk at 33rpm, letting it pass by at such a blurred speed that it becomes joyous.
