The Machine is a sad science fiction film from 2013. It's set in a secret experimental base. It's a place with little light and plenty of dark corners to hide scary things in. I guess with all the money they spend on technology the lights were left out of the budget. This is such a common practice I have begun to dislike it. There's a scientist named Ava, played by Caity Lotz, who goes to work for Toby Stephens. They both work for Denis Lawson who's the head of a project that adds brain implants to brain damaged soldiers. There's a brain scanning device and some AI research tossed into there. The soldiers are not very happy to be experimented on. There are secret things going on. Ava is warned off them so she digs around and Denis has her killed when she gets too snoopy for his liking. He's an evil creep who comes to a bad end later in the film. Ava's brain had been scanned and Toby uses that as the basis for an Ava looking cyborg that he calls Machine. During a test after Machine comes online a scientist is killed. Toby tells Ava that she shouldn't kill people. Denis tries to get Machine to kill the man who killed Ava but she won't, at least as first. When offered a choice between killing him and being killed herself Machine kills the man. Toby's daughter dies and he's despondent. Denis is afraid Machine's AI and wants the consciousness removed. Things get worse and worse as more unrealistic story decisions are made. There is a bit of a happy ending as Machine and Toby escape and go off into the real world. There's no humor, just sadness, it's all pretty familiar and only so interesting. The real interesting thing was the first name of the writer-director, Caradog W. James, but that was only good for a few seconds of my attention. This is his second feature and he did ok for the $1.5 million he had to work with. I just didn't care that much for the story. I wouldn't bother with it again.
Speckles the Tarbosaurus is a Korean animated film about a dinosaur named Speckles. He narrates the movie which starts when he's only a year old. It's one long chomp fest as the family hunts for food amongst the other lesser aggressive dinosaurs. There's plenty of death in this one, though not much gore. A T-Rex makes an appearance causing chaos. That event kills Speckles' family, they all fall off a cliff. Speckles has to grow up on his own but he soon finds a pal. About a third of the way it jumps to him being 5 years old, then a few minutes later it skips to him being 10. There's plenty of dino lore and quite a variety of critters. The animation is fairly good CGI. I'm putting it in the not sorry I've seen it but wouldn't need to see it again category.
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