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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (8) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (5) | Rotten (3) | DVD (1)
I yearn to encounter livelier less-than-zero-budget attempts at post-apocalyptic science fiction than this one.
McKenney worked in underground theater and comics before turning to filmmaking with movies such as Canniballistic. Judging by Automatons, he's worth keeping an eye on.
With its retro look, cautionary theme and not-so-special effects, Automatons is a shameless ode to 1960s sci-fi and classic television shows.
An unwieldy mix of self-conscious camp and heavy-handed allegory, Automatons plays like a cheesy '50s no-budget sci-fier with serious delusions of grandeur.
Robot radness achieved!
The acting is flat, and the scientist's ideological speeches too bluntly designed to mirror post-9/11 rhetoric. But there's a dreamy fascination to the iconic images of machines fighting a perpetual war for the human creators they'll inevitably outlast.
Try to phase out the redundant and uninspired political discourse and focus only on the sporadic bursts of robot aggression, which McKenney shoots at gloriously odd, jumpy angles.
The lone survivor of a devastated nation lives alone in a bunker, her only companions being the voice recordings of a long-dead scientist (Angus Scrimm) and the robots she sends out to do battle with the enemy on the unliveable, poisoned surface. In scratchy black and white with lots of theremin noises in the background and deliberately cheesy, clunky robots, it's a recreation of a 1950s sci-fi movie or serial; it evinces a real love for the style, but sadly but there's just not enough story to maintain interest even during its short run time.
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