Director – Andrew Baird, Screenplay – Bryan Edward Hill, Producers – Andrew Baird, Martin Brennan, Deborah Kolar & Jib Polhemus, Photography – James Mather, Music – Raffertie, Visual Effects – Windmill Lane VFX (Supervisor – John Kennedy), Special Effects Supervisor – Ryan McNeil, Prosthetics – Millennium FX, Production Design – Philip Murphy. Production Company – DMA Films/Moffen Media Limited/23ten Productions/Source | Management + Production/Bairdfilm.
Cast
Guy Pearce (David Carmichael), Matilda Lutz (Jane), Jonathan Aris (Joseph Veidt), Travis Fimmel (Marlon Veidt), Olwen Fouere (Royale), Ned Dennehy (George), Antonia Campbell-Hughes (Jaden), Colin Salmon (Hawthorne)
Plot
David Carmichael, a former police detective turned private eye, is hired by Marlon Veidt, head of the Veidt Corporation, to find his daughter Melissa. She has gone missing somewhere in Zone 414, an area of the city where androids are allowed to live freely among humans. David is given a pass that allows him to travel into the zone. There he seeks the aid of Jane, an android that Marlon regards as one of his best creations, who has started to discover independent thought. David also agrees to protect Jane who is being stalked by a mystery figure. The trail of Melissa takes them into the dark underworld of Zone 414.
Zone 414 was a British-made science-fiction film shot in Northern Ireland. Irish director Andrew Baird makes his feature-length debut after work on music videos for artists and bands like Avenged Sevenfold, Ke$ha, Korn, The Weeknd and others, along with assorted commercials. The script comes from Bryan Edward Hill, known for his work on tv series such as Ash vs Evil Dead (2015-8) and Titans (2018- ).
Zone 414 promptly proves to be one of several films that have borrowed substantially from Blade Runner (1982) and its mix of a Cyberpunk setting with Film Noir. Just like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, Guy Pearce is a private eye specialising in rogue androids who is assigned to find a missing persons case. In the course of the story, he finds a romantic attraction to a female android – although this is a somewhat more substantial story than Blade Runner offered where he also ends up being her protector against a stalker – before reaching the same ending where they head off into the sunset together. This is such a blatant copy that the opening scene directly replicates the Voigt-Kampff test scene with Brion James. The same year as this saw another film substantially borrowing the Cyberpunk/Film Noir mix with Reminscence (2021).
Guy Pearce hunts android Antonia Campbell-HughesGuy Pearce and android love Jane (Matilda Lutz)
On the down side, this is also a Cyberpunk future on a low budget. This means no towering skyscrapers with building-sized commercials, no spinners flying through the air, no blimps advertising off-world tourism. All we get is a film shot in contemporary surrounds with not much effort expended to dress things up. The buildings are all clearly contemporary ones with neon lights inserted everywhere to give it a quasi-futuristic look. Nothing seems to puncture the look of a future setting more than watching Guy Pearce travel around the titular zone in a standard contemporary yellow cab.
Mathilda Lutz’s Jane is an outright copy of Sean Young’s Rachel in Blade Runner. The disappointment of her as a character is that Jane could be written as the missing daughter or any of the other missing persons being sought in a standard Film Noir detective story and it make no difference to what happens. Blade Runner made an attempt to show the replicants as playfully innocent children. There have been some standout explorations of themes of Androids and Artificial Intelligence since the mid-2010s with works such as Ex Machina (2015), The Machine (2013), Automata (2014) and Finch (2021), among others. By contrast, Zone 414 feels like a film where it has an android that has gained self-awareness at the centre of its story but also where the filmmakers demonstrate zero interest in showing how Jane differs from a regular person or anything.
