Director/Screenplay – Neil Johnson, Producers – Tracey Birdsall & N.B. Lindley-Johnson, Photography – Kyle Wright, Music – Alex Staropoli, Visual Effects – Thomas Boettner, Darko Dartner, Neil Johnson & Sasha Porth, Creature Effects – Midnight Studios FX (Supervisor – Kyle Thompson), Production Design – James Zicree. Production Company – Empire Motion Pictures/Pacific Coast Entertainment.
Cast
Tracey Birdsall (Sienna), Tim McGrath (Blister), Daz Crawford (Skullcrusher), Ashley Park (Rhianna), William Kircher (Dr Johnson/The Scourge), Stephen Manley (Ralston), Tony Gibbons (Voice of Hoagland), Marilyn Ghigliotti (Xarsis), Livvy Stuberrauch (Annika)
Plot
Humanity has been engaged in a war with A.I.s that has left Earth devastated. In the ruins, Sienna operates as a scavenger, shooting down rogue robots. Upon learning that the A.I. known as The Scourge is developing new protocols that could eliminate humanity, Sienna defies orders and takes a shuttle and heads to the centre of the galaxy in search of a bomb that will eliminate The Scourge.
Neil Johnson is a British director who has been making low-budget science-fiction and horror films since the 1990s. His films include the likes of The Demons in My Head (1998), To Become One (2002), Battlespace (2006), Nephilim (2007), Humanity’s End (2008), Bipolar Armageddon (2009), Alien Armageddon (2011), Alien Dawn (2012), Dawn of Destruction (2014), Starship Rising (2014), Starship Apocalypse (2014), Doomsday (2015) and Chrononaut (2018).
Neil Johnson has been operating in the US in the last few years and Rogue Warrior, Robot Fighter is shot there (around the Mojave Desert and Salton Sea areas of California). Moreover, it is co-produced by Tracey Birdsall, an American actress who has been appearing in B-budget fare since the late 1990s including supporting parts in three of Johnson’s earlier films, and her Pacific Coast Entertainment production company. Birdsall apparently received some action performer of the year award for the film and there were rumours of turning Rogue Warrior, Robot Fighter into a tv series, which appear to have come to nought.
Rogue Warrior, Robot Fighter has been made on a low-budget. Johnson’s films always have good visual effects – the ones here are very clearly being produced on a low-budget but display a considerable creativity despite. There is quite a degree of imagination gone into the design of the robots. On the other hand, it frequently becomes apparent that the film lacks adequate resources in many essential areas – Tracey Birdsall and others are often outfitted in regular everyday clothing, while the supposed planetary locations consist of just the front of someone’s house or a bunch of abandoned buildings in the desert. Birdsall travels around the post-apocalyptic terrain in a standard contemporary SUV (albeit that is outfitted with a controlling A.I.).
Tracy Birdsall against the robots
Tracey Birdsall makes for an entertainingly absurd figure. She had a pneumatically inflated figure and spends the entire film with her impressively large breasts spilling out of low-cut tops as much as is seemly for general viewing. When we are first introduced to her, she is in the desert in the midst of action while wearing platform heels (and in some scenes is seen tripping over in them). It is the kind of outfit that is someone’s imagined ideal costuming for a kick-ass babe heroine but in reality seems distractingly absurd for the occasion. Indeed, Birdsall feels more like a MILF engaged in Lara Croft cosplay that someone convincingly tough who lives the part of the titular rogue warrior. (Although given the twist revelation that comes later in the show, you can sort of go with the idea at a pinch).
Rogue Warrior, Robot Fighter is construed as a planet-hopping Space Opera. That and standard tropes of the battle against the machines that seem lifted from the assorted Terminator films – see Machines Amok. The budget gets in the way of adequate portrayal of this – the robots and ships look good but the locations feel as though Neil Johnson and co have done no more than hop over to the next sand dune or butte to shoot. The one plus is that the film makes very good use of drone photography in the desert.
The latter sections of the film are boosted by an okay Philip K. Dickian-ian twist revelation about the identity of the lead character, which is played with some amusement. There are also times that dialogue makes you raise your eyebrows – at one point, Ashley Park’s sex robot is invaded by malware from the A.I.’s and has to be rebooted, whereupon she comes out with the line “I feel like I have just been fisted by a whole football team.”
