Robot Wars.

This time the film is actually under the Full Moon Features banner, enjoy!

Robot Wars is one of the two (that I know of) Full Moon films marketed as a Robot Jox sequel, despite having nothing to do with that film - thank God for that.

Robot Wars, despite the title, is largely about one robot - a big scorpion zoid thing which acts as both North Hemi's greatest military asset...and a tour bus. If you think that sounds beyond stupid, you are right. The MRAS-2 takes its passengers on a trip to the tourist destination Crystal Vista, a ghost town which preserves 1993, just what everyone wants... only one of the passengers, Leda, wants to prove the ghost town is a fake...for some reason and that they are hiding something beneath it - however before she can truly find out what is going on, she is captured by the Centros. As it turns out there was a whole other giant robot under the city, which apparently everyone forgot about. Logic holds no place in this film! The MRAS-2 was formerly piloted by ace pilot Drake, only Drake was sure the Eastern Alliance was going to betray North Hemi, however they fire him for suggesting this because a business deal with the Eastern Alliance will make or break the country and they don't want anything to fuck this up. Although of course, Drake was right all along. So of course he has to sober up, save the day and get the girl!

Hey everyone, remember the great toxic gas scare of 1993? Me either! Or the Tri-World Arms Reduction treaty of 2012? Nope? This film sure loves to make itself feel really dated...

Despite coming out four years after Robot Jox, Robot Wars manages to look even crappier somehow, and that isn't an easy feat considering how cheap and shitty everything looked in Robot Jox. I honestly never thought I'd miss CGI. Admittedly it did get a lot more enjoyable in the last twenty or so minutes, but that is because practically nothing actionwise happens for the majority of those first fifty minutes. I never knew a film with a name like 'Robot Wars' could be so boring... hell there are no Robot Wars, just one robot fight in the last five minutes of the film. In the films defence, the robot fight in this one doesn't look great, but it looks considerably better than any of the robot fights in Robot Jox did. Not that I can recommend a film on the last five or ten minutes, you may as well just Youtube the fight if you're interested, rather than sit through the whole thing, of course, that is if it's been uploaded. 

Surprisingly, once you get used to the fact that most of the acting here is very amateurish  it really isn't that bad, especially for a film like this. The bigger problem is with the characters themselves or larger than that, the films chauvinism. Drake, our central character, is practically the dictionary definition for a chauvinistic pig only they never really make a...thing of it. Like characters like this normally at least get a line to justify that it isn't okay, 'you're a relic, man!' or whatever else and we as an audience enjoy it ironically. But I honestly think we're supposed to actually like Drake and think him a hero, think him cool and aspire to be like him and just sort of laugh off all his dickmoves like 'oh he's such a hothead!' but no! He is an asshole, and not in an entertaining way and he is also so fucking creepy. Ew, I hate this guy. Worse still is our two central female characters Annie and Leda basically spend the movie fawning over him and spending their alone time talking about him with no real justification for this reaction other than 'duh, he's awesome because we say so'. So of course Drake gets the girl at the end and apparently he is the guy all the girls want already, why do girls always want the disgusting douchebag types? I give it five years before Leda has two black eyes, one broken nose, one fat lip, eight children and a husband off down the bar looking for other, younger women to trap in his apparently alluring web. Domestic abuse ladies, nothing sexier, just ask all of Chris Brown's fans.

Admittedly the idea of a 1990's ghost town is really quite obvious, but still pretty clever. I mean how many people alive today really remember a life before the internet, iPad's, smartphones and flatscreen TV's? It's scary to think, but we already practically live in the futures these cheap sci-fi films create, if anything our worlds are even more crazy and fantastical, only on smaller scale than say...giant robots. If I managed to recreate a late 80's town, wouldn't you be fascinated by the primitive world of thirty years ago? I mean I know it's only 2012, but with the long way we've come in the last decade, the 90's which I grew up in is already starting to feel like an alien yesteryear that I can't be quite sure I ever lived in, if it ever happened, was there a really a time without all this crap? How did people live?

So do I recommend it? It is hard to enjoy a movie when you hate the central character but honestly Robot Wars was a mixed bag anyway. There are some really cool ideas and some really dumb ones. What definitely works in the films favour is that despite having a narrative just as heavy and dark as Robot Jox was, it doesn't take itself nearly as seriously. But honestly, the biggest offence is that for a film called Robot Wars...there aren't a lot of robots...or wars...or really anything, it's just a bit boring really, it's an hour and ten minutes long and still manages to overstay its welcome, if you're going to trim down your running time to the point where it isn't that far away from a TV episode, give us more action, not less. We came for giant robots, not any of the other crap and one great giant robot fight at the end doesn't stop the film being otherwise incredibly boring.

Think About It!

-Locke