Monsters of Man 2020

Freakin' robots. It's always the freakin' robots. Things built to hunt and kill humans always seem to work even in the most adverse of climates and conditions. I have been watching these robots develop online since there was an Internet. What the movie shows is actually what I have seen in action already so the movie is as real as today's technology.

I have been warning about these kind of robots for more than a decade as well. They are not made to do dangerous human work. They are made to kill other dangerous creatures, human or robot, whatever is thrown against them. We always say that we can control these robots but that never occurs because they can't be controlled.

They also have a habit of going really off their nuts at the worst time possible which usually means when foreign medical students are in the area. Add to that one faulty robot among the four and three techs with a conscience vs an evil weapons manufacturer and you have a pretty good genre film.

We start with a fairly large caste so a lot of time is spent waiting for the killer robots to get to our actors and kill them in interesting ways. Of course there is also a rogue Navy SEAL who happens to be living in the same village selection for the test of the weaponized robot soldiers, who themselves are a nice piece of CGI.

The deaths can be gruesome as one robot learns all he can about humanity the old fashion way, by taking one apart. But for me it's the one guy with the broken leg that freaked me out the most. Protruding bones are the worst for me. Like broken fingers. I would rather watch a guy's face get peeled off.

Of course the survivors are soon losing their shit, the creators are losing their shit, and the robots are losing their shit or becoming self aware. 

Then it got fun in a horrific kind of tense way. Children crying over dead parents kind of horrific.

The final battle is full of the kind of heroics and philosophical discussions about the nature of man that are why you watch a movie like this in the first place. I watch so I know exactly how to defeat such robots when they arrive in the future.

This film plays long and I took a break before the final act which is almost an entirely different film.

The movie could have been tightened up by at least a good half hour to forty five minutes and really been something terrifying but in the end it all seemed to just drag, despite the subject matter and all the elements such a film needs. 

A Predator-like film of man vs machine was what they were going for but it never quite gels for the audience. The movie wants to be too many things and explore too many ideas, to limited success.

None of the emotional moments pay off and in fact are totally unnecessary. Even the robot/human conversations come out of left field as do the robot's confessions and feelings of ennui about being a robot. Again, where the fuck did THAT come from?

Monsters of Man won't change the world but it was an okay diversion for as long as it lasted.