Directors/Screenplay – Casper Christensen & Art Hines, Based on the Short Story The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1973) by Robert Sheckley, Producers – Cassian Elwes, Julian Favre, Stephen Hamel, Sasha Krnajac, Thornton Schumacher, Lars Sylvest & Bernd Wintersperger, Photography – Luke Geissbühler, Music – Magnus Fiennes, Visual Effects – 22DOGSVFX & Labyrinth VFX (Supervisors – Suhaag Hiradhar, Shrikant Patil & Sachin R.J. Toraskar), Robots – B2FX Inc., Robot Prosthetics Designer – Barney Burman, Production Design – Travis Zariwny. Production Company – Robots Filmproduktion GmbH & Co. KG/Company Films/Road Films/Rocket Science/Elevated Films.
Cast
Jack Whitehall (Charles Cameron/C2), Shailene Woodley (Elaine/E2/E3), Paul Rust (Zach), Paul Jurewicz (Ashley), David Grant Wright (Ted Cameron), Nick Rutherford (Ted Cameron Jr.), Emanuela Postacchini (Francesca), Jackamoe Buzzell (Sheriff Bill Horton), Samantha Ashley (Deputy Chavez)
Plot
In Albuquerque, Charles Cameron is a womaniser who picks up girls using a routine where he falls over in an ice-skating rink and appears helpless as a girl comes to his rescue. He then sends C2, an illegal android double of himself, out on the date to woo the woman, before turning up in person for the sex. He also uses C2 to go to work and family functions in his place and as general home help. He then meets Elaine at the ice rink and falls for her, unaware that the real Elaine is also using an illegal android double E2 to woo and bed men so that she can obtain financial benefits from them. Due to a mix-up, Charles sends C2 to bed with Elaine in his place and it sleeps with E2. As both the real Charles and Elaine try to untangle the mix-up, they discover the other’s ruse. Meanwhile, the two androids announce that they have fallen in love and are eloping across the border to Mexico where robots enjoy equal status with humans. Bickering the entire way, the real Charles and Elaine set out to stop them.
Robots is directed and written by Casper Christensen and Art Hines. Christensen is better known as a Danish comic, appearing in and co-writing the Klown (2005-22) tv series, among other works. Art/Anthony Hines is a writer on assorted Sacha Baron Cohen tv series going back to Da Ali G Show (2000-4) and including the Borat movies and Brüno (2009). Both make their respective directorial debuts here.
Robots – which should be confused with the animated Robots (2005) – is a film where I struggled to find the basic premise plausible. We have a near future world where androids have been built that fulfil most of the low-level functionary roles in society – I would expect this to result in unemployment and mass protest, but I was prepared to go with this set-up. These androids that are meant to be programmed with limited functionality, but we have one nerd who has managed to hack them and has the androids acting with such lifelike traits and physical appearance that family are not able to tell the difference when the androids are impersonating the human counterpart, or even when the person they are having sex with is an android.
Shailene Woodley, Jack Whitehall and their android doubles
Into the midst of this, we have two central characters who seem to be the only two who have employed these modded androids. The main purpose they are putting them to is romantic deception – Jack Whitehall to get the android to do the spadework of romancing girls so that he can then turn up and sleep with them, Shailene Woodley to lure men and get her android to sleep with men so that she can profit off the gifts they give her. (If such were possible, you would expect the secrets of jailbreaking androids would be known throughout hacker circles. And you can bet that this would result in a fear of being catfished in such a manner and there be some ways devised to detect whether a person is real or android). The whopping improbability that the script then tosses in is to have the only two people who have employed these lifelike android duplicates caught up in a series of identity confusions with one other, only to then find that the two androids have eloped together, forcing their disgruntled real-world selves to have to combine forces to apprehend the rogue androids.
Robots starts in on an amusingly sarcastic note with the completion of Trump’s wall with Mexico in the year 2032 and androids being cheered as an end to immigrant labour. Thereafter though, the level of comedy is down at the excruciatingly unfunny. Everything in the film takes place at a level of cartoonish silliness. It is a film with a premise that sounded like it should have been hilarious on paper. Instead what we get is a far-fetched plot that makes no effort to make anything seem believable, indeed goes the other way into cartoonish absurdity, and then a low-key road movie of more farcical contortions as the two characters, who spent most of the time snipping at one another, set out to retrieve their doubles while predictably discovering attraction.
Robots is adapted from the short story The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1973) by SF writer Robert Sheckley (1928-2005). Other Sheckley works to have been adapted to the screen have been The Tenth Victim (1965) about a future where human hunting is a legalized sport; The Prize of Peril (1983), which features more televised human-hunting; the Disney film Condorman (1981) about a comic-book artist who gets to bring his creations to life, which was very loosely based on Sheckley’s spy novel The Game of X (1967); and the future body-snatching/time-travel film Freejack (1992).
