I've been looking at YouTube early Sunday mornings, searching of science fiction movies, and every week there seems to be some fairly current SF films up to look at. I almost watched Jurassic World but the picture was so shitty I gave up after a minute or so. I settled for Robot Overlords. I see from the IMDb that it opened in the US 2 days ago but it's been playing other places since January. The film is just a tiny bit crooked, it was caused by the person filming it being imperfectly centered in the theater. I remember the days when you had to buy a poorly filmed movie on VHS. The future is better. Unless you're in one of these two alien invasion films.
Robot Overlords is a 2014 British film that was directed by Jon Wright with a script by Mark Stay and Jon. I'd seen Jon's previous film Grabbers and found it entertaining. In this film alien robots have landed and put the humans under house arrest while they harvest knowledge from their brains. Gillian Anderson is a mom with two boys who don't know where their father is. Ben Kingsley is a collaborator, he liaises between the humans in an area and the their robot overlords, and he tells them that their dad is dead. He's lying but he has designs on Gillian. They call him a collaborator, and worse.
One of Gillian's kids figures out who to turn off the implant that the robots use keep an eye on the humans. If you go out on the street they will spot you and blast you, after they give you a minute or so to get back inside. The kids sneak out and find a group of people living in a hotel. They teach them the technique and leave, with Gillian, to go find a camp of survivors riding in a rock quarry. Their dad is there.
Eventually the robots follow but by that time the oldest of Gillian's sons figures out how to control the robots with his magical mental powers. He commandeers a robot flying vehicle and crashes it into one of the big square flying cubes the robots use. It ends with the rest of the cubes taking off and exploding. Everyone rejoices while the son looks oddly at the sky. I had no idea what they meant by that and at that point I didn't care that much. It's not got much of a story and there isn't anything much new or exciting about it. I wouldn't need to see it again.
Alien Uprising is another British alien invasion film that originally was titled U.F.O. when it came out in 2012. It got retitled to Alien Uprising the following year. It's written and directed by Dominic Burns who's previous film was Cockneys Vs Zombies. That was a much better film but still only about average.
In this movie the aliens show up overnight and infiltrate society with human shaped androids. Their ships appear the next day and there are short inserts of people explaining what the aliens are doing. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sean Pertwee have small parts.
The people we meet try to survive but they don't have much luck with that. The human's turn on each other or the spies turn on them. Near the end of the film some different aliens turn up and start shooting the first invaders. More people die while the sky is filled with flame. Then the movie was over and everyone is dead. It's poorly explained so I don't know what happened. I was disappointed by the whole mess.
The effects aren't as good as in Robot Overlords and neither are the production values, script or actors. A lot of it filmed at night or in dark rooms and many of the action scenes are filmed with a vast number of cuts that are only made less watchable by the addition of a liberal dose of shakycam. It gets a 3.2 on the IMDb for a good reason and someone should get punched for making the film. I think Dominic should take one for the team. Don't bother watching it, you can find something better to watch. Statistically two thirds of all films are better than this film, so you've got plenty of choice.
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