I have really mixed feelings about this film because it’s a robot emancipation film that feels like it was written by a leftist but at the same time it has some really serious issues as a film that holds it back from being an outright good movie

The Good

  • This is like, one of the only modern+mainstream man vs machine narratives I can think of that is explicitly sympathetic to oppressed humans hand in hand with the sympathy towards robots. In this film, the robots are in solidarity with the humans they are living together with (robots protect human civilians and vice versa, humans attend robot funerals, they’re seen cohabitating together, etc) and they fight together against the NATO coded invasion forces.

  • In fact, there’s even a scene at the beginning that, although brief, shows that working class western citizens are very sympathetic to the robots, and have to be conditioned and propagandized into dehumanizing them.

  • It’s a very pretty film. The sets and sci fi designs look really good and the robots have some cool designs among them, humanoid and less humanoid. …Wait it only had an $80 million budget? God damn

  • In addition to the more overt anti-imperialist themes of the film I feel like there’s a lot of room for a Marxist interpretation of the film, that the robots could represent leftist groups in Southeast Asia, with the fear of use of nuclear weapons being one of the main propaganda pieces used by the West against them, the West’s fear of the robots disrupting capitalist markets, the fact that the main goal of the film is to destroy a physical representation of Western military power and how that representation allows the West to invade and bomb countries with impunity, and so on.

The Bad

  • The first half is a fucking mess, both pacing and writing-wise. There’s a lot of narrative choices that are inconsistent with the second half of the film to the point that it’s a detriment to the story. In a film with a focus on robot sapience and compassion, we get a Star Wars-esq scene where a grenade thrown by a robot soldier is rolled back into a crowd of robots, and the following shot of their maimed bodies flailing around is instead played for laughs. The discrepancy in the two halves is VERY noticeable, it feels like some sort of editing fuckery happened.

  • It somehow manages to fumble 3/4 emotional beats that happen in the film. This is arguably the big issue here. Like it is genuinely impressive how consistently it missed the mark when attempting to pull off scenes that should have had emotional impacts. Like, my guys, you are writing a narrative about a grizzled reluctant father and an odd troubled daughter figure. This shit should be color by the numbers by now. I don’t even think its the main actor’s fault here because the scenes that do work, work fine. Like, the turning point when the lead starts seeing the robot child as a person? Skimmed over, no impact. Choosing to side against the West? Skimmed over, no impact. A sort of reunion with his dead wife? They bungled that scene so badly.

  • The worldbuilding can kind of get wishy-washy. I feel like the story suffers for not having a human voice on the side of the New Asia coalition. It didn’t even necessarily have to be a big role either, just a named human character to be all ‘hey I’m from Bhutan and robots are people too and we want to build a new future together’. There is technically a character who fills that role but it’s the fridged dead wife character so her voice only exists in retrospect and in the lead’s memories in relation to himself. Without that presence existing in the story, what the (human) people of the New Asia coalition feel about anything goes kind of unspoken when it should have been a bigger aspect of the story.

Anyways it’s not a good good film but it’s a fun enough watch and you can watch it here lol