Automata (2014)
By William Pattison
For Horror Bob’s Blog
This time I’m reviewing the science fiction film, Automata.
2044. The climate change and a series of solar storms have
turned in a desert the surface of the planet and annihilated to the 99.7 % of
Earth's population, leaving alive 21 million people across the world in a
single city covered by mechanical clouds (zeppelins anchored to the city) to
make rain. Trying to rebuild the world again, a robot company named ROC
Corporation create Automata Pilgrim 7000 with two security protocols: 1st, a
robot cannot harm human beings, and 2nd, a robot cannot alter itself or another
robot. But this situation changes when police officer Sean Wallace shoots and
destroys a robot claiming that it was altering itself. With the company worried
by the possible implications if the case were known by the people, insurance
agent Jacq Vaucan is chosen to investigate the happened, while Vaucan tries to
convince his boss, friend and brother-in-law Robert Bold to transfer him and
his pregnant wife Rachel to the coast, with Bold accepting the request if
Vaucan solves the case. Going with Wallace to a brothel, they meets a robot in
blue wig named Cleo, who is shot by Wallace in the belief that Cleo will be
sent for repairs by mysterious repairperson that Vaucan calls The Clocksmith.
However, Cleo is sent to mechanical workshop ran by Dr. Susan Dupré, who informs Vaucan about a
terrible possibility: that the robots can alter their second protocol
themselves to acquire self awareness, implying a non-human intelligence that
easily it should overpass the human brain after a test where she mixed a biocore
from the Wallace's shot robot with Cleo's own biocore. Vaucan reports secretly
to Bold about it, but ROC's chairman intercepts the message. When Dr. Dupré is
killed in front of Vaucan by a ROC's squad group, amusingly a couple of children, he and Cleo run from the
assassins, ending outside the city, lost in the white desert that surrounds the
city. Forced to meet ROC's chairman,
Bold is informed about the secret
of the two protocols: that the Pilgrim 7000's prototype was created without the
protocols, and due to its unlimited intelligence and learning, it overcame to
its human owners just eight days later. After all the next Pilgrims were
created with the protocols to limit their capacity in order to have them under
control. Fearing the extinction of human race if all the Pilgrims evolve beyond
the protocols, ROC's chairman blames Vaucan of Dupré's assassination and the
alteration of the robots to cover up to the public, and Wallace is hired to
find Cleo and Vaucan and kill them.
Vaucan, Cleo, and three robots travel across the desert to the forbidden
and radioactive zone to meet The Clocksmith. Arriving Vaucan finds himself witness to something that would change the
world.
This film is pure science fiction. There are no ray guns or
spaceships. It is a morality tale that deals with humanity and how it deals
with technology and a non-human intelligence. It is more akin to the Robot
Chronicles that were written my Doctor Issac Asimov. The robots in this film
have firm rules about how they deal with humans, it is the humans in the film that
show their inhumanity when it comes to the robots and their fellow humans.
This film feature a royally distopian vision of the future. It
also features excellent performance s. Also the robot designs look perfectly
industrial.
All in all this is an outstanding sci fi film that will resinate
will true sci Fi fans, but I don’t know
about casual film audiences. So, though I found this film awesometacular it
won’t be a film for the kiddies or the
uninitiated in serious science fiction. I guess that is why I just happened to
discover this film on Tubi TV.
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