Reviews

This movie tries too hard...

Tries to be deep and thought-provoking but I had trouble suspending disbelief. It's like an indie video game passing itself off as a Triple A game and falling flat on its face as it fails. I've been watching a recent run of really bad sci fi, but this one was slightly more intelligent than the rest of the bad batch I've been laughing at.

The SFX was nice. Not much there, but it looked nice. Giant living sparkle-spaceship looked nice. Not original, I've seen organic-looking ships like that many times before, but I'll give this an extra star.

It appeared the spaceships themselves were the aliens (LoL, where have I seen THAT before!). Abductees have been taken from different time periods. Some characters were far more annoying than others. There was something about a "digitised alien artificial intelligence in stasis". There was a plot device about "nanite spores". Interesting concept. I never thought microscopic machines could be like "plant spores". Maybe the ship decided to implant these in its newly-abducted biofuel so they would make better pilots. Who knows. Ship's limited AI would kill off various characters for no reason. Maybe it thought they didn't make good enough pilots? Wouldn't it screen them first before abducting them or maybe it was too dumb to do this right too?

The ship AI makes a huge effort just to get its food/biofuel. Its obvious its biological systems and ours are incompatible but it's gone to all that trouble to get the fuel (emotions!) out of the human pilots who are unknowingly controlling this giant vessel. They haven't figured out yet how to pilot the spaceship between dimensions/star systems/galaxies whatever. It looks like the spaceship was trapped in orbit around Earth, unable to go anywhere, so its been trying to genetically enhance with nanites its fuel for what seems to be hundreds of years so it can "go home" - which, BTW, is mentioned multiple times in this flick.

There's exposition, jumping back and forth in time, people stuck in one gooey, tentacle-filled room, characters dying for no reason, black slime, the Oracle from The Matrix, a "human-alien spaceship-nanite-hybrid", something about Roswell and "reverse-engineered alien technology".

When the other spaceships arrive (must be all that's left of their species!) I rolled my eyes. Siiiiigh. Not another prequel to a sequel...

Gosh, those spaceships must need new pilots too!

I tried to like this movie, because it reminded me of Short Circuit, another military/war machine/police-robot-with-sentience plot line. Chappie's like Johnny Five, naive and innocent and charming, and Sharlto Copley's South African accent is hilarious coming out of that robot. The actor's mannerisms and quirks are in him too so instead of seeing a robot I see Sharlto Copley playing as the robot. The CGI is great! It beautifully captures the actor's movements and portrays them perfectly to the CGI robot. It's just about as good as Andy Sirkis/Gollum's animation!

But this is ruined by that gangsta rap South African band... the way they're portrayed it's as though viewers the world over are expected to "just know" who these weirdo's are. The only thing I've learned is that they cannot act. They look like feral mutts... they look weird, talk weird, commit a bunch of crimes that epic fail badly until Chappie comes along... if they really are supposed to be gangstas they are the most inept gangstas on Earth. Turning an assault rifle sideways while you fire it does not make you a badass gangsta... it just makes you miss your target with pretty much the same ineptitude of the average Imperial Stormtrooper. Sigh.

These lowlife weirdo wannabe's teach the robot how to beat up, stab and shoot people and we the audience is supposed to find this cute and charming. The plot is all over the place. Hugh Jackman builds a BFG killer robot and Chappie beats up Wolverine (yeah... right!). Lucky for him Wolverine has a beer gut, wears a too-small safari outfit and is out of shape. The haphazard plot, bad pacing and unlikable characters just turns this movie into a complete mess. I was so disappointed with its outcome!

Chappie is overshadowed by that wannabe gangsta band... they get too much dialogue, too much screen time, too much action scenes and their motivation is beyond a joke. If they were removed and replaced with more sympathetic characters this movie would've worked.

This movie is BAD. It is a cringe-inducing, plotless, retcon of a flick that actually succeeds in terminating itself, if that's even possible.

Installs unicorn/My Little Pony drapes in little girls' bedrooms? A F..king Terminator??? Who has adopted a "wife and a kid"... and wifey's relationship with the big dumb lunk is not "physical"? That's because he hasn't got the (hint hint!) "necessary equipment?" So she conveniently doesn;t figure out he's really a ruthless, emotionless killing machine? Has a house in the woods, a pet dog (that doesn't bark at the sight of that nasty Terminator), a Curtain Work Van, pays taxes... and who gives nice cold beers to his Guests when they turn up on his doorstep for a visit.

HA HA HA HA HA HA.... (ad-infinitum ad-nauseam)

WHY did they kill off John Connor in the first five minutes of this movie. There is no Terminator movie without John! He is the face of the human resistance, not some random Mexican chick I never heard of, not in these movies or the expanded universe... OK so the movie before this one was actually worse. And they pretty much killed his character in that movie by turning him into the dumbest Nano-Terminator villain ever seen in a Terminator flick. If this retcon of the franchise was to destroy the previous two movies, it worked! And it killed the first two movies as well! Hahahahaha... whut?

One of the best sci-fi action movies ever made Terminator 1 and 2... destroyed by the crap story of this numbnut flick. Arnie's Terminator... ruined. Some augmented, Master Chief androgynous girl-boy "super solder" tougher and harder than him until she gets a fever and ends up unconscious from working out too hard. Sarah Connor turned into a cranky old lady with a boring cliche attitude. The Mexican chick who is the same age in the future war and the same age in the present day. Who does nothing spectacular.

Action scenes were completely over the top unbelievable. Far too much reliance on CGI. Terminator that splits into 2 terminators. Terminators with Doc Ock's tentacles. Human Terminators running around on all fours like dogs. "Legion". Terminator develops a conscience because he "killed John Connor". Married With Children Terminator. Girl/boy Captain America super soldier who can beat up a Terminator just by using her big muscly arms. Yee-ikes.

I liked Rogue One, it was better than the horrid trilogy of Star Wars flicks Disney has been busily shunting down the production line. I made the mistake of expecting similar output for this SW spin off, but waited for it to come out on Netflix first. I am glad I got to watch it free of charge. It wasn't worth paying money to see this at a theatre.

That actor playing Han Solo is no Harrison Ford. He was more like the actor from Valerian, a pasty-skinned, skinny, doe-eyed wanna-be, the only thing going for him his youthful pretty-boy looks. A Mouseketeer trying his hardest to channel into Harrison Ford. His GF was the same, another Mouseketeer trying hard to act like Carrie Fisher's young stand-in, but the only thing going for her was her pretty Princess looks.

The robot was annoying and irritating. It has got to be the worst sidekick I have ever seen in a Star Wars movie. It had the worst personality, the worst dialogue, it was worse than Jar Jar Binks and not many Star Wars sidekicks get any worse than THAT. It looked stupid, mismatching eyes in an asymmetrical face that you can't focus on, which would've been okay if it didn't have soooo much cringe-inducing lines of "dialogue". Lando Calrissian's relationship with the robot didn't make sense either... sort of close and creepy and intimate. YUUUUK. What on Earth was Disney thinking????

Stuff happens in this flick, but it's boring and forgettable. There's a train robbery scene that reminded me of Disney's The Lone Ranger (the one with Johnny Depp in it), a giant space kraken, a double-crossing villain passing off as Mentor (yawn), and an air car chase scene through a city (triple yawn). A reliance on a lot of overused CGI, and I mean a LOT. Nope, nothing much here.

Not really too sure what to make of this flick. I watched it on the Netflix sci fi movie list and it had good production values plus the effects weren't too bad at all. The main character had the weirdest role ever - Blade Runner without the gun and the authority to go with it.

Robots follow Asimov's 2 laws of robotics in this flick (instead of the usual 3). They were built by a robotics corporation who knew their constructs would, for some reason, transcend into higher lifeforms/god/UrSkeks (Dark Crystal ha!). They hire various Mafia goons, mooks and street kids to do their dirty work for them, blowing away humans who have access to/seen/heard of a God Robot data/microchip/circuit motherboard thing that will make the robots evolve.

Some robots run away and plod slowly through the desert for a hundred miles. I thought they were heading for a robot utopia but no, just some garage in the middle of nowhere. Stuff happens. The mafia thugs with shotguns chase after them and gleefully put holes through humans and robots galore. Apparently these humans are the selected survivors of a natural holocaust. What you see are beggars and homeless humans getting shot through the head by other humans with guns.

At no real point were robots treated badly... well at least no more badly than the humans. Robots talk about stuff that robots shouldn't know anything about (living and surviving). A doctor is killed by a street kid with a gun because she talked too much about robots learning stuff that took humans hundreds of thousands of years to learn.

By the end of the flick I still wasn't convinced that the robots were ascending into higher life forms, far surpassing the entirety of human evolution. Except for that weird little robo-dog-insect thing. It was kinda cute, in a creepy, adorable way. Mmmkay.

This movie was boring. Just plain, old boring. There was no discernible story that I could make out of all that loud noise, epilepsy-inducing flash flash bang bang. The quality of the film looked terrible... when i pay $20 AUD Disney, to watch YOUR MOVIE, I EXPECT the film quality to look better than the grainy, washed out, 90's style I just watched.

The entire story sucked, from the first flick in this trilogy to this one. It stuck firmly to a well traveled, well overused cliche formula, pretty much killing any enjoyment and suspension of disbelief I would've had sitting through this.

Somehow Palpatine comes back to life. How? Why? He's got kids and a grandkid now. By the age of her parents, they looked to be 25-30. But Palpatine was 80, 90 years old at the time of Return of the Jedi. According to this logic, after he was killed in RotJ, he survived, had a child... who then went on to have his grandkid... who he now wants to take his place as the new Princess Palpatine. Facepalm.

Rey has become the Ultimate Mary Sue... able to heal angry hungry monsters and fatally wounded humans, stop spaceships escaping, blow up spaceships with her Force Lightning, Force Project objects to people anywhere in the galaxy and single-handedly kill Palpatine... all trained by THE Jedi Master... Leia. WTF?

An entire fleet of thousands of Star Destroyers... ready to be deployed in just sixteen hours. Just sits there and waits to get blown up. But they each have a giant gun mounted to them that can blow up a whole planet! No need for a Death Star now! Every one of these ships crewed by 37,000 people! Where'd all these people come from? Where did the resources come from to build these ships?

Finn and Friend get rescued off the command ship while clinging to the outside of its hull as its nosediving into the dirt. There was no possible way these two clinging to the Titanic going down would ever have been found in time before BIG BOOMBOOM. But no, in true Disney fashion, they simply step off the nosediving Titanic, onto the casually waiting Falcon hovering there for them, never mind all the debris and wreckage thundering past. Whatever Disney. Whatever.

How can Rey possibly kill Palpatine, after Jedi far more powerful than her failed to do so. How can she possibly use the Force to bring someone back to life... who then does it to her when she mysteriously falls over and "dies". If that's the case, why doesn;t she just use the Force to bring the original characters back to life, who have now all been killed in this insipid trilogy of boring flicks?

I've noticed the trend with these flicks is the young attractive heroes survive the completely unsurvivable time after time after time... while those stodgy old fogy original characters die a variety of deaths so pathetic it has to be seen to be believed. Also, what is with Disney's infatuation with pretty young girl Princesses?

Had serious misgivings at Disney taking over from Mr Lucas, and oh dear... my misgivings were sadly, disappointingly, proven correct with this flick.

1) Pursuing spaceships at sublight speed and running out of fuel, causing the ships to slow down. But, wouldn't said spaceships keep moving at the same speed indefinitely, regardless of how much fuel they had? Space has no atmosphere to slow them down in the first place. They'd keep moving forward indefinitely... until a black hole got in their way (this movie's plot)

2) The entire sequence on the Casino planet was a complete waste of celluloid. But at least the little ship can travel at light speed to get there...

3) The floppy eared horse-things. Can crash through solid walls, flatten air cars, crash through more walls - all while the heroes stay firmly anchored on their back. Suspension of disbelief much? NOPE!

4) The Epic Mary Poppins scene. But I thought Leia could only sense the Force, not use it like a Jedi Master!!!

5) Mary Sue Rey. Now among the most annoying of Star Wars characters... along with that actor from Game of Thrones "Ben Solo". The extreme close up shots of his face start to grate on one's nerves after two hours of sitting and watching this "movie"...

6) Snoke and Phasma's utterly pathetic deaths

7) Luke Skywalker's utterly pathetic death

8) Luke Skywalker squeezing the nipples on a giant, alien, walrus-thing

9) Crystal foxes, porgs, horse-things and multi-nippled walruses, oh my!!!

10) Why did Disney thoroughly ruin Luke Skywalker's character? It's like Disney had no idea who Luke Skywalker was, so they just made up stuff on the fly as they filmed the scenes for this disappointing flick.

The CGI was nice, so it gets an extra point. But Disney should've known by now - no amount of brightly coloured, headache inducing, eye-gouging CGI will ever hide a terrible story.

I was disappointed with this movie. I stupidly expected a better story. It had an okay twist but there are a few things, once said twist was revealed, that makes absolutely no sense.

1. why do the robot children cry and scream and act terrified. They are robots. They don't have human emotions. At all.

2. What is the purpose of these robot children. The robots don't procreate, eat, breathe or defacate.

3. Why the robots hide the memory of their murdering all the human civilians on earth, drive the human survivors offworld to Mars then conveniently forget about that little bit of major intel, except in dreams (when said robot is actually in dormancy mode - robots don;t need to sleep, do they?) Plus this exposition stuff happened like, fifty, sixty years ago and the robots never age or change.

4. Why the heck a human soldier from Mars bothers to help bring a nearly dead robot back to life. Its not a human, its a machine. That got your grandparents exiled to Mars. Get with the program, brutha!

5. Robots lying around everywhere in pools of car engine coolant? Oil? Blood? Blood coloured car engine oil coolant?

6. A robot that behaves like an angsty, angry, tween brat complete with headphones and bratty mall rat clothes. For FIFTY YEARS.

7. WHY the stupid humans constantly make robots look exactly like humans. In every friggin sci fi movie. I get the God Creator made robot servitor in His Image, but c'mon. Enough with this cliche already.

8. The awful CGI. That bridge end scene is so bad, it makes a 90's video game look like major Hollywood movie SFX

9. Actually now that I think about it, the train was the only vehicle I saw the robots operating. That entire city was utterly lifeless - bad CGI aside - well no wonder, robots aren't technically "alive" are they?

10. I just watched the exact same movie yesterday - on NETFLIX - Automata. The same robot-want-freedom-from-troll-human storyline. Siiigh. FACEPALM.

Saw this movie on Netflix... this would've still failed even if it went straight to video. Absolutely the worst sci fi movie I've ever seen... and i've seen a lot of bad sci fi movies.

Those spec ops soldiers look like a bunch of inept civilians running around in the woods playing paint ball... that scene with the Middle Eastern Terrorists was an utter waste of time. This made for easy suspension of disbelief... not.

The sets were terrible. They couldn;t even show them landing in a helicopter or whatever outside that so-called "top secret facility". You know, to set the scene. Yeah, right!

Acting was abysmal. Dialogue even worse. The storyline was a complete joke.

Aliens were a laugh in those unbelievably bad Halloween costumes. My response to seeing this for the first time was... what the hell... seriously?

Special effects were a joke. I mean, that gun the dude in charge was firing... Didn't fire any bullets. Just flash flash flash bang bang bang. I know its just a paint ball gun, but c'mon! Try to make stuff look realistic!

CGI was mostly horrible and cheap looking, except for maybe a scene or two.

Would not recommend this flick. 1/10

I have not seen the earlier Halo episodes, but I have played the games so I know the basics of the Halo universe. This movie started off interesting, but my goodness, it sure tried my patience after half an hour. After an hour of sitting there my butt went numb with boredom.

This had to be one of the worst sci-fi tele-movies I've ever sat through.

1) You can easily outsmart a energy-sword wielding Elite just by jumping over him and shutting a flimsy door in his face. When you open the door he will be conveniently gone.

2) If you jump on an 8-foot tall Dino-Toad in full battle armour and shoot a couple shots into his helmet with your pistol, he not only doesn't fight back he quickly falls to his knees in defeat and then throws himself over the hand rail to his death.

3) This huge armoured alien can wander around in a human shopping mall unseen but in full view. He doesn't even bother to activate his active-camouflage, because well, humans are blind.

4) Lekgolo worms will not attempt to make themselves into a Hunter form. They just swarm together in giant masses big enough and powerful enough to bring down Pelican drop-ships.

5) If however, you turn your ship off, the Lekgolo worms will completely ignore your ship. Oh, and use pack-horses to transport your smuggled whatever-the-hell you're smuggling. Also, wear peasant clothes, because the Lekgolo worms will still attack as they can detect you whether or not you're using your i-OxgyenMask, or your i-Phone, or your i-Pad... or your feet walking on a solid i-Surface...

6) Even though you're a trained soldier, trained by ONI or UNSC or whatever, make triple sure to kill those peasant civilian-smuggler types who are unarmed and have no way of fighting back against you.

7) Spend the entire flick wandering around a boring quarry, trudging along the same paths. Just show em from different angles so the (hopefully) tiny-minded audience doesn't figure out this all looks the same.

8) Spend 80% of a made-for-TV-movie based on a science fiction first-person-shooter video game sitting around talking. Because the demographic this flick is aimed at wants to watch people sitting and talking. Especially when the acting, story and special effects are sub-par.

9) Wonder at the revelation that every Halo game you've ever played involved you running and gunning down alien covenant soldiers, space-zombies, huge ape-like alien warriors and flying super-advanced killer machines built by an extinct super-race.

10) After the hero and the token female survivor escape the deadliest red worms in the Universe in the stolen smuggler ship, grab the DVD disc and sigh with satisfaction as you snap the thing in half.

This still goes to show that movies based on video games do NOT work! Boooo 343 Industries! I wasted my $$$ hiring this turd from Video Ezy!! 0 out of 10!