RESUME: "Last Man Standing" with robots. A lone stranger enters a post-apocalyptic 'town', where he takes advantage of the growing tensions between two 'gangs' of killing-machines, using their own inane appetite for destruction against themselves. They are a doomed race, we learn, being capable of nothing but destruction.
GOOD: The visual language is that of Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti westerns, where most of the time is spend building up tension in a psychological (positronic?) game of poker between the main characters, before the actual violence takes place in the blink of an eye. The scenes with our protagonist, Hauer, and the evil female robot, "Blackheart", are a visual, erotic intercourse, replacing menace for foreplay and death for climax! I can't help but wonder if the Wachowsky Brothers saw this movie while making "Matrix", since they totally borrowed the look and style off this movie!
BAD: Style aside, it is a sin to make a movie with such obvious potential for delving into the intricacies of being human/artificial and utterly ignoring it for the whole 90 minutes! Just a hint of Isaac Asimov or Phillip K. Dick would have done the deed!
UGLY?: No, actually quite a nice little b-movie that leaves you with a gnawing feeling of what it could have been with just a slightly better script.
GOOD: The visual language is that of Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti westerns, where most of the time is spend building up tension in a psychological (positronic?) game of poker between the main characters, before the actual violence takes place in the blink of an eye. The scenes with our protagonist, Hauer, and the evil female robot, "Blackheart", are a visual, erotic intercourse, replacing menace for foreplay and death for climax! I can't help but wonder if the Wachowsky Brothers saw this movie while making "Matrix", since they totally borrowed the look and style off this movie!
BAD: Style aside, it is a sin to make a movie with such obvious potential for delving into the intricacies of being human/artificial and utterly ignoring it for the whole 90 minutes! Just a hint of Isaac Asimov or Phillip K. Dick would have done the deed!
UGLY?: No, actually quite a nice little b-movie that leaves you with a gnawing feeling of what it could have been with just a slightly better script.