Robots: La invasión

For some reason this movie reminded me of a Famous Five story - possible because when I started watching it I didn't know it was aimed at a pre-teen to teen audience, however that soon became clear...

Group of kids on an adventure to save humanity from robots that have overrun the Earth and made everyone prisoners in their own homes.

Low budget, but surprisingly good effects and acting, story line that flows well, but not much to it and most of the situations the are not realistic.

I don't really think this one is for the Sci-Fi fans - there's just not enough Sci and too much Fi!

Would appeal to ages 10 to 16 or so, not much of a target audience which is why this film is getting low scores.

I give it 6 because it is good for a low budget movie and deserves more credit than it is getting.

I'm surprised by some of the caustic reviews of Robot Overlords. I can but assume the reviewers missed the memo that explains this film is clearly pitched at a teen audience.

That said, Robot Overlords has enough on offer to prove enjoyable for anyone. Its adopts a softened approach to sci-fi, with the hard core death and destruction found in films like Alien, left on the shelf. What you get instead is a cleverly directed film, that is more reminiscent of Doctor Who or perhaps the Sarah Jane adventures.

The hero is a young teen boy and his friends who, inexplicably, take on an invading army of robots who conquered the armies of earth in short order. The story is not supposed to be taken seriously and instead, represents a fun ride for those willing to accept the limitations imposed, which reflect the ages of the likely target audience.

The acting is good with a strong cast and pretty decent special effects. My advice ignore the negative nellies and give Robot Overlords a go, you won't be disappointed. Seven out of ten from me.

Aimed at the CBBC teen market, this reminds me of some kind of Terminator Salvation meets Tripods. (Ask someone 40 plus!)

The plot doesn't seem overly logical to me... The war with the robot overlords has damaged things so much that the homes and infrastructure of the remaining humans are relatively untouched with everything functional. Street lights blaze away, no one looks gaunt or starving with their nice clean clothes etc.

These superkids can disable advanced robot technology very simply, whilst the adults under curfew can still have a good old Victorian style knees up including bare knuckle fighting! Maybe the booze is provided free by the robots so they can study drunken humans? Anyway why travel vast distances across the Milky Way to put us in an unnatural situation for them to scrutinise us? All the Transformers had to do was watch TV and hack the net!

The robot overlords are obviously not that good at Overlording as they need a pantomime human villain to do the more mundane stuff, like kidnapping and using the mind probe machine and other admin duties.

I'm not really sure how he fitted into the plot as the whole premise seemed so ludicrous and un-apocalyptic that I got bored at the point where Gillian Anderson escaped from the castle and stole the horse!

I understand this was low budget but then so were the original episodes of Dr Who. The cybermen made for much better, and scarier adversaries. None of the characters had any depth and the acting lacklustre.

I think the average teen would struggle to get anything out of this film, let alone anyone over the age of 18.

What would you expect from a film with so triumphantly cheesy a title as Robot Overlords? Something fun, campy and silly, probably, as ultra-stern robots try their darned best to lord it over a bunch of utterly disobedient humans. That is, indeed, broadly the plot of Jon Wright's film. But, somewhere along the way, it seems to have forgotten to include much in the way of humour or silliness. Instead, Robot Overlords seems rather too intent on crafting a somewhat dour vision of a robotically dystopian future - which, truth be told, it doesn't quite pull off.

Three years after the dreaded robot invasion, the entire world is kept on a strict curfew - no one is allowed to venture outside their designated homes for more than a few minutes. All humans have tracking devices implanted in their necks, which allow the robots to swiftly find and vapourise anyone who fails to comply. There doesn't seem to be much hope left for the human race, apart from those who have decided to cooperate with the robots, like uber-smug collaborator Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley). But a quiet revolution begins when Sean (a decent but unremarkable Callum McAuliffe) and his buddies - clever Alexandra (Ella Hunt), her smart aleck brother Nathan (James Tarpey) and resourceful ten-year-old Connor (Milo Parker) - discover that an electric shock from a car battery can temporarily disable their tracking implants.

The film is not without its interesting moments. In fact, you might find yourself wishing that it would dwell a little more on the pockets of human resistance that we discover have sprung up all over town. Geraldine James - Kingsley's co-star in Gandhi - plays the matriarch of a community living out of a bar, evidently cobbled together from whomever was drowning their sorrows in alcohol three years ago. Sean's predicament also contains quite a few good sci-fi ideas, as he realises how he might be able to take down these apparently invincible machines.

But Robot Overlords never really fulfils its potential. Instead, it's a largely schizophrenic (and, fatally, predictable) experience. There are moments clearly targeted at a younger crowd: Sean and his buddies are undoubtedly the protagonists who propel the story forward, their youthful exuberance shining through when they mainline candy to celebrate their first taste of freedom. And yet, Wright also tosses in moments of horror so dark that it's impossible to tell just what vibe he's going for. The film opens with a terrifying and frankly not very kid-friendly sequence in which Connor becomes - quite spectacularly - an orphan. Sean also runs badly afoul of Smythe in another creepy scene that lays bare the extent of the robots' experiments on mankind.

At least there's fun to be had from the excellent adult cast, who manage to say a great deal with just a handful of scenes. Kingsley is delightfully pompous, a windbag who picks the worst side in a war to save his own hide. Gillian Anderson gets way too little to do as Kate, Sean's mom, but it's nice that her character doesn't merely sit around waiting for the guys in her life to rescue her. There's plenty of steel in Kate, as can be seen in her firm treatment of a former student and her repeated rejection of Smythe's lascivious advances.

As a director, Wright is patently drawn to quirky genre fare with a B-movie aesthetic and humour. With Robot Overlords, he finally tackles the genre holy grail of sci-fi, after exploring the supernatural in Tormented and alcohol-averse sea monsters in Grabbers. In made-on-the-cheap projects like this one, it's usually the special effects that let the side down. That's not the case here. The robots are obviously created on a meagre budget, but look largely decent for all that. What keeps the film from really soaring high is the fact that Wright takes a promisingly cheeky premise and removes most of the fun from it. The final result is inoffensive and mostly watchable - except for the robots' human avatar, which is a controversy waiting to happen - but there's hardly ever a sense of joy or triumph to proceedings. Surely, in a film bearing a title as flamboyant as this one, that's a crime of some sort.

This movie is not amazing. But then again, when was the last time you saw one that was?

Fantastic Four opened just before the the writing of this. With that film being a complete disaster, it saddens me that it gets just about a lower score than Robot Overlords, because the latter is far superior.

What to expect: Good but not incredible CGI (again, far more believable than FF'S The Thing...or anything else in it for that matter...) Good acting: Ben Kingsley and Gillian Anderson are great, and the kids are surprisingly good too. Good pacing: I didn't get bored at any point. That's quite rare nowadays. A cliché story, kept fresh by the fact that it's British. Personally, I enjoyed this more than The World's End; darn it - I actually felt a little bit invested.

Nothing more to say than that I guess. This is low-budget done right, and I enjoyed it. What more do you want? A cookie?