Upgrade (2018)

RMIT Melbourne film school success story, Leigh Whannell keeps his high-octane revenge thriller, an exceedingly violent sci-fi, surprisingly fresh for a movie that simply rehashes Robocop with Tom Hardy lookalike, Logan Marshall-Green, playing the victim of brutal violence that leaves his girlfriend dead and him a quadriplegic...until he is upgraded by a Venom-like technology implant.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Westworld (1973)

In this 1973 Michael Crichton written and directed scifi thriller, the author's first directorial effort, Isla Nubla is an immersive theme park and the dinosaurs are robots built to interact with and accommodate the high-paying tourists' every holiday whim, and while especially shallow (the plot is three-quarters peculiar robot glitches that perturb the theme park scientists but not enough to progress the plot, and one quarter sudden showdown (in which mildly perturbed scientists flip their lids and turn suddenly into shrieking there's-no-stopping-them, robots-will-kill-us-all nihilists) it is a ripping sci-fi tale full of Planet Of The Apes/Soylent Green era kitsch and quite prescient future-imagining, with amusing performances from Richard "The 70s? I'm in everything" Benjamin, Josh "Am I twenty or seventy?" Brolin, and a 1973 version of the T-800, a sinister, sparkly-eyed Yul Brynner.

★★★★☆

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I Am Mother (2019)

A girl (Clara Rugaard-Larsen) raised by a robot in a Human Re-population Facility has her solitary life of dance and psychometric testing interrupted by the arrival from outside the facility of a woman (Hilary Swank) who suggests the girl's robot 'mother' is incapable of feelings for the girl, is lying when it says the air outside the facility is toxic, and is a droid just like the ones outside who have decimated the Earth, in this better than usual Netflix original movie, a scifi thriller that really only errs in how quickly the girl proves willing to question everything she has ever known.

★★★☆☆

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The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)

It is hard to know where the homage to pulpy science fiction of the paranoid cold war era ends and where this starts simply being an over- or badly acted and largely logic-free Hollywood bastardisation of a 1951 sci-fi classic, but somehow this is enjoyable, albeit in an immediately forgettable way, perhaps because Keanu Reeves dons his suit and is supposed to be wooden as he plays a visitor from outerspace whose appearance on Earth heralds the arrival of enormous robot machines and nano-sized (robot?) insects that seem to be hellbent on taking over or destroying the planet.

★★☆☆☆

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Robo Geisha (ロボゲイシャ) (2009)

Japanophiles, students of the Japanese language, lovers of female-on-female wrestling, and robotics nerds - not even these people will enjoy sitting through this tripe about a troupe of geisha assassins under the employ of an uncharismatic Mr Kengan.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS