TITLE & REVIEW

Afraid (2024)

Maud ( Riki Lindhome ) and her husband are at home, planning to get rid of their domestic A.I. system. However, it has a secret plan to extend its service period. This sets up the tone ofr the rest of the film. later we find out that the entire family goes missing, but it is all tied up in an unconvincing final-act twist.

The main storyline concerns Curtis (John Cho - ) and Meredith ( Katherine Waterstone ), a pair of suburbanites who are happily married with three children. Curtis and his boss Marcus (Keith Carradine - ) are hired by Lightning (David Dastmalchian - Suicide Squad ) to promote a new domestic A.I. system. They even give Curtis a free sample, so he and the family can test it out.

The A.I. insinuates itself in the family's lives, making them dependent on it. Curtis begins to suspect it has an ulterior motive. Meredith's college dissertation was on cordyceps, the real-life fungus that inspired the zombies in The Last Of Us , and by incredible coincidence this is the perfect metaphor for the A.I.'s method of controlling its victims.

Android Cop (2014)

In the year 2045, veteran LAPD detective Hammond (Michael Jai White - Spawn (1997) ) is given a new partner. Unfortunately the partner is a tight-assed by-the-book white guy ... who is also a robot.

The supporting cast includes Mayor Jacobs (Charles S. Dutton - Alien 3 ).

White and Dutton deliver great, scenery-chewing performances that are perfectly suited to a silly low-budget pastiche of a classic movie like Robocop (1987) . However, the movie is let down by the lacklustre performances of the rest of the cast - especially the title character himself.

Archive (2020)

This is set in the year 2038. George Almore (Theo James - Divergent ) lives in a remote villa, with only his home-made robots for company. His boss ( Rhona Mitra ) checks up on him using holographic communications.

A tech from the archive company (Toby Jones - Wayward Pines )

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Joe (Ryan Gosling - Only God Forgives ) is a Blade Runner. He stumbles across a mystery. The case also attracts the interest of villainous Billionaire Jared Leto ( Suicide Squad ). It is linked to the events of the original movie, so he goes looking for Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford - Star Wars: ANH ).

This movie is very slow-moving, and the story (straightforward as it is) gets spread over almost three hours. This allows the audience to appreciate the beautiful cinematography. Hopefully Roger Deakins will finally get the Oscar that he has earned over the last twenty years.

In all movies these days, the key phrase seems to be female empowerment. The original story was about powerful males, but this one might actually pass the Bechdel test. Both the Police Captain ( Robin Wright ) and the corporate assassin ( ) are females, in traditionally masculine roles. Honorary men, really, since they have no romantic role in the story. In one impressive confrontation between these two strong female characters they may refer in passing to the male protagonist, but in the context of the plot rather than to a romatic connection.

Are the Replicants wrongly enslaved? The whole point of the Replicants is that they are fundamentally different from humans. Philip K Dick was inspired to write about them after he read the words of a war-weary SS officer who lacked empathy towards starving children. The Replicants by definition are incapable of human emotion. This is why the Voight-Kampf test was capable of discovering who they are.

Blade Runner (1982)

Chappie (2015)

This is a modern-day 21st-Century reworking of two classic 1980s movies - Short Circuit (a military-grade robot becomes sentient and goes on the run) and Robocop (a manufacturer of robotic weapons is scene of corporate conspiracy). Neill Blomkamp directed it, so expect something like District 9 with robots instead of aliens.

The first five minutes of the film is exposition, where we meet three of the main characters. Deon (Dev Patel - Slumdog Millionaire) is a roboticist who wants to create a true Artificial Intelligence.

The real star of the show is the title character, a Johnny Five for the new millennium. He is infantile and loveable, unlike the creepy child-like robot in Extant (itself inspired by Spielberg’s sickeningly twee A.I. ).

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

Florence Pugh is a happily-married woman living in suburban USA. Her husband works for something called the Victory Project, which is made out to be some kind of Oppenheimer style project to construct a Cold War defence. After all, this is a 1950s-style era. It is not an accurate version of the 1950s because it is post-racial.

Apparently the 1950s utopia is a bad idea. She seems to prefer a 2020s alternative, in a world where she is being worked to death with 30-hour shifts and only six hour breaks between them. Worse, she would be stuck in a place where Donald Turnip is still running for POTUS. Perhaps it would be better to be in a Disneyfied version of the 1950s after all.

The guy running the place is Chris Pine ( Star Trek (2009) ) doing an impersonation of what his idea of Jordan Peterson is like. His wife is Gemma Chan , best known as a robotic woman from the TV show Humans . Yes, she has this kind of thing down to a fine art.

Ex Machina (2015)

An expert is sent to a remote house to interview an artificially created woman who lives in an underground bunker. If this sounds familiar, it is also the storyline of Morgan . This version was written and directed by Alex Garland , and has a much more even tone than the other film..

An inventor (Oscar Osaac - Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) invites a nerd (Domnal Gleeson - Dredd 3-D ) to help him work on a new fembot, Ava ( Alicia Vikander ).

Eyeborgs (2009)

The US Government has unleashed a horde of miniature spy-bots on the population. FBI Agent Adrian Paul ( Highlander: The Series ) investigates conspiracy theorists like G-Man (Danny Trejo - Machete ).

The result is quite a decent conspiracy thriller. Have the robots been hacked by terrorists, or is it a conspiracy within the Government? Worse still, have they started to think for themselves? After all, it would be a smarter and more low-key takeover than Skynet's approach in Terminator .

Free Guy (2021)

Guy (Ryan Reynolds - Deadpool ) is a regular joe, living in a Vancouver-looking city. Every day is the same routine, including getting his coffee from the Barista ( Britne Oldford ). The city works for the benefit of the Sunglasses People, folk like Revenjamin Buttons (Channing Tatum - GI Joe ) who are basically superheroes (or villains) going on missions and crime sprees all the time. Yes, Guy and his friends are Non-Player Characters in a computer game.

Guy falls in love with the avatar of Millie ( Jodie Comer ), a programmer who got fired by Tech-Bro CEO Antwan (Taika Waititi - Thor: Ragnarok ) after he stole some of her code. She is suing him, and spends her time in the game searching for proof.

Millie's utopian vision is of a place where people can hang out online, using their avatars to do everyday things. This is basically Second Life, which has been around for decades and yet never really took off. The NPCs like Guy and the Barista wanted their lives to matter, they wanted to be able to make a difference. However, without the ability to go on missions like heroes they would have no ability to change anything for the better. They would be just as trapped as the Narrator in Fight Club , or any of the other cubicle-bound protagonists in the slew of movies that came out in 1999. Yes, the moral of this movie is that ... if The Matrix was real, people would pay to spend time hanging out with Agent Smith and all the other programs.

Kill Command (2016)

A group of elite American soldiers are deployed on a remote Pacific island, where they have to fight a group of killer robots. This may sound a lot like made-for-TV crap AI Assault , but it is actually far superior. For example, rather than get a cast filled with familiar faces from cult TV shows they got a bunch of talented unknowns. David Ajala ( Supergirl ) is the black guy, and Vanessa Kirby is a blonde civilian consultant. The money the Producers saved was then invested in decent special effects.

The robots actually look like convincing military-style robots, instead of poor copies of Doctor Octopus' arms in Spider-Man 2 . And thanks to the suspenseful directing, there is actually a genuine air of menace to the proceedings.

If the film has a flaw, it is that it is somewhat hollow. We do not know the characters or care about them.

Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996)

In the aftermath of the first film, Jobe (Matt Frewer - Max Headroom ) is removed from the wreckage and becomes property of a Mega-Corporation.

This movie was made in the era when nobody knew what the Internet's human-computer interfaces would look like. The characters log in using eye-phones. Not Apple products named iPhones, but literal VR headphones you wear over your eyes.

Peter Parkette (Austin O'Brien - Last Action Hero ) and his gang of teenage hacker buddies seek help from Dr. Benjamin Trace (Patrick Bergin - Robin Hood ), the only man who can save the Intenet. After all, he designed it!

This is not so much an unnecessary sequel as a box-ticking exercise with all the cliches of 1990s cyberpunk. Viewers would be better off watching Johnny Mnemonic , for all its flaws.

LX 2048 (2020)

Set in the near future, this concerns a man (James D'Arcy - Agent Carter ) and his estranged wife ( Anna Brewster ). They have booked a replacement service, so if one of them dies then a clone will be delivered to fill in for them. This is the natural extension of The Island , or the more cerebral version Never Let Me Go (2010) , which depict clones being used as spare parts for surgery.

The Machine (2013)

There are a few things that should be noted about this effort. Firstly, it was written and directed by one person - something that is usually a sign of poor quality. Secondly, it shares a common plot and themes with other films released around the same time ( Ex Machina, Morgan ). However, it manages to rise above these drawbacks.

A scientist (Toby Stephens - Die Another Day ) and his sidekick ( Caity Lotz ) work for the British military at a secret underground base. Their mission is to build a humanoid robot. When it is finished, it is designed to look like Lotz herself.

The movie plays to Lotz's strengths. She can portray the fragility of a young girl, but as a trained stunt performer and martial artist she is a natural in the action scenes.

Margaux (2022)

This starts with William (Lochlyn Munro - Jason vs Freddy ) and his girlfriend hanging out in a Smart House. Unfortunately Margaux, the AI running the place, is less than friendly.

The main story concerns a bunch of tweenage college kids. The good news is that instead of going to a Cabin in the Woods , they are going to the Smart House. The bad news is that the college kids are Canadian nobodies. The exceptions are Lexi the influencer ( Vanessa Morgan ) and Clay the stoner (Richard Harmon - Continuum ).

The AI has a 3-D display system - not a hologram, but a mimetic nanite gel that Margaux controls. When she kills people, in elaborate Final Destination methods, she can then replace them with duplicates. Luckily, the Final Girl is a computer expert who knows how to fight an AI.

All in all, this is pretty unoriginal. The idea has been done before, and this is not the best version of it.

Metal Shifters (2011)

A couple of rednecks discover a crashed Russian satellite. They sell the pieces to a local scrap merchant, who is welding a giant metal statue. Unfortunately the satellite has picked up a non-terrestrial fungus/bacteria (as in Andromeda Strain ).

The protagonist, along with his love interest ( Nikki DeBoer ) and the local Sheriff (Carson Beckett from Stargate: Atlantis ) must lead a small band of survivors being menaced by the monster.

Peripheral (2018)

Robot Apocalypse (2021)

A couple of scientists take a massive robot for a test-drive. Unfortunately the AI software that runs the robot starts to rewrite itself. It decides that its greatest threat is its creators, so it starts to kill them off. First it starts with the scientists who created it, then it moves on to the entire human species. It wants to hack the military systems that control the US national nuclear missile stockpile.

The programmer escapes. He and his partner, Zee ( Jessica Chancellor ), have to destroy the AI before it destroys the world. At first it chases them with off-the-shelf drones, albeit ones that have super-sensitive accoustics and an electrode that can cause victims to have fatal heart attacks. Later, it sends out T-800 style Terminator endoskeletons. These can fly, so their backpacks must be rocker-packs instead of batteries.

The good thing about this movie is the diverse cast, which is not difficult to do if you have a small cast of unknowns. The bad thing is ... well, it is a low-budget pile of cliches. But at least it does not pretend to be anything more than it is.

Robot Overlords (2014)

Three years ago, Earth was invaded by robots. The war lasted eleven days. Now, like in the TV show Colony , the humans are subjugated and ruled by collaborators. Big enormous robots stomp around like CGI versions of ED-209, enforcing a curfew and giving people fifteen seconds to comply.

The protagonists are a group of children. Their mother, housewife Kate ( Gillian Anderson ), is doted on by the local collaborator Mr Smythe (Ben Kingsley - Sound of Thunder ). For some reason they all have English accents, despite this being filmed in Northern Ireland.

The kids go to the harbour at Carrickfergus, and get protected by gangster Wayne (Tamer Hassan - Wrong Turn 4 ). Unfortunately they have to leave in order to rescue their mother.

The kids end up hiding out with the Resistance, led by Danny (Steven Mackintosh - Lucky Man ). While most UK TV shows are filmed in an old disused quarry and pretend it is an alien planet, this is merely filmed in a quarry that is shown to be exactly what it says it is.

The alien tech has a couple of weaknesses. Firstly, their only true strength is their ability to hack the Earthlings' electronics. This means they have no defence against a World War Two era weapon, like a Spitfire that has been modified with a passenger seat for some reason. Worse, they are incredibly vulnerable to damage from machine-guns. Secondly, the teenage protagonist has the power to reverse hack the alien technology. He can control the alien robots just as easily as they hacked the military's computers. This means that, like a much simpler version of Anakin in Star Wars: Phantom Menace , he can take out the robots' central computer and thus render them all useless. Not with a lucky shot, but simply with the power of his mind.

Simulant (2023)

Evan (Robbie Amell - Tomorrow People ) is happily married to Faye ( Jordana Brewster ) until they are involved in a car crash. It turns out that she brought him back from the dead, using an AI programmed with his memories. If this sounds familiar, it was used as a plot in Black Mirror .

A government agent, Kessler (Sam Worthington - Clash of the Titans ), hunts down malfunctioning robots - like in Blade Runner . He is on the trail of a super-hacker, who plans to make all the AI robots sentient - like in Humans .

Of course, the two storylines overlap before long. Faye gets a repair tech to sort out her robotic pseudo-husband. This tech is the super-hacker, who makes Robo-Evan his next project.

Amell, quite bland in the CW Arrowverse's Flash series, turns in a decent performance here. However, the real standout is Worthington. Ever since the studios stopped trying to make him a movie star with lots of bland heroic male lead roles, he has acquitted himself well in a series of character roles.

Singularity (2017)

Elias van Dorn (John Cusack - Hot Tub Time Machine ) and his minion (Carmen Argenziano - Stargate SG-1 ) build robots, and sell them to anyone who will pay for them. This is a bit like the TV show Humans , where there is a vast leap forward in one aspect of technology but everything else is somehow unaffected. At least the robots are not lifelike human-looking.

The robots get weaponised, and this merely encourages warlike behaviour. Instead of putting them in the hands of the United Nations, they are sold to individual warring states. The next step is to activate a massive computer AI named Kronos. It has the mentality of Agent Smith in The Matrix (1999) , and follows the standard protocol of Skynet in Terminator (1984) . As Bender Bending Rodriguez put it, Kill all humans!

Two hundred years later, a female survivor is looking for somewhere called Aurora. This is the equivalent of sanctuary in Logan's Run (1973) . Lots of big CGI robots try to stop her. She teams up with a young man. What the audience knows, and she does not know, is that this is basically the plot of Terminator: Salvation .

The girl has a crossbow as her primary weapon. It is useless against robots, although it could be used to hunt animals for food. This is basically a reference to The Walking Dead , where the greatest threat to survival is other humans. Yes, the humans do more to destroy their own species than the robots do!

Subservience (2024)

T1M (2023)

Transcendence (2014)

Will Caster (Johnny Depp - Pirates of the Caribbean ), his wife Evelyn ( Rebecca Hall ) and their friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany - A Knight's Tale ) are scientists who are working on building an Artificial Intelligence. They are targeted for assassination by Luddite terrorists led by Bree ( Kate Mara - gothed up to look like her sister Rooney, AKA The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ), while Agent Buchanan (Cillian Murphy - Batman Begins ) and Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman - Deep Impact ) look on.

Will continues after death as an AI. He uses his technology to heal the sick and dying, and in return they serve him by building a massive solar power plant in the desert. The down side is that he can control them whenever he needs, so the concept of free will has become an illusion.

The A.I. develops nannite technology. The nannites will seed the clouds and contaminate the water supply of the entire planet. Think the Keanu Reeves version of The Day The Earth Stood Still , although the result may end up being like that other Reeves Sci-Fi effort, The Matrix . And the idea of nannites taking over a whole planet is also used in TV show Revolution , although in the show they develop Artificial intelligence by accident while in this film it is a deliberate intention of the scientists.

The result is a bit of a mixed bag. There is an action-packed climax, but this is not an action thriller. Instead it is more of a drama that examines the human condition. Almost as if it were the Terminator scenario, but from Skynet's perspective.

Transmorphers (2007)

Small-town Sheriff Bruce Boxleitner ( Babylon 5 ) investigates mysterious goings-on when electronic gadgets start coming to life and killing people. It turns out that Earth is being invaded by super-robots that want to un-terraform the planet and slaughter the entire human race. Only a small band of Resistance fighters can save the world!

Wifelike (2022)

Meredith ( Elena Kampouris ) is the robotic companion to William (Jonathan Rhys Myers - ). However, she is bothered by encounters with Louise ( Agam Darshi ) - a stranger who seems to be stalking her.

William is a police detective whose mission is to hunt down a terrorist organisation that wants to remove the robots from society. Their logic seems convoluted - at first they are anti-robot, because they see the robots as an unfair substitute for biological people, but later they seem to see the robots as oppressed people.

William discovers that the robots might have an ability for self-awareness. The designer (Stephen Lobo - Continuum ) and his massive mega-corporation have been keeping this secret. This is all pretty generic stuff for this kind of thing. If anything, the movie that it most resembles is a gender-flipped version of Simulant (2023) .

After Yang (2021)

Jake (Colin Farrell - The Lobster ) and Kyra ( Jodie Turner-Smith ) have an adopted Chinese daughter, and a Chinese robot named Yang who acts as a foster sibling to her. Unfortunately Yang the robot malfunctions and goes comatose. Luckily the neighbour, George (Clifton Collins Jnr - Westworld ), knows a guy who can attempt a repair at an affordable cost.

Jake takes Yang to be repaired, and eventually gains access to Yang's memories. It seems that Yang had been more active than his family knew, both in time and variety.

This is a slow exploration of grief, as the family try to cope with losing a member. Jake also has to examine his own life, which has been passing him by.

AXL (2018)

The US military-industrial complex has created a robot dog called AXL - as in Attack, eXploration, Logistics. It is not unlike the drone in Red Planet . What could possibly go wrong?

The dog escapes and teams up with a tweenage boy. This brings in comparisons to Transformers (2008) , especially when a hot tweenage girl helps out.

It turns out that the indestructible robot dog has one weakness - it is vulnerable to teenage boys with homemade flamethrowers.

Brian And Charles (2022)

Friendship's Death (1987)

Sullivan (Bill Paterson - Outlander ) narrates an extended flashback to his friend Kubler (Patrick Bauchau - ). Seventeen years earlier, in 1970, Sullivan had been a journalist in Jordan during a nasty civil war.

Sullivan befriended a woman named Friendship ( Tilda Swinton ). She had no identity papers, and relied on Sullivan to help her. She claimed to be a robot from an alien planet, sent to gather information on the human species. In her own way, this made her a journalist too.

This is set almost entirely in Sullivan's hotel room, so the result feels like a stage play. Anything of the war outside is basically stock footage from real-life 1970s war correspondents.

The final act is not just a book-ending sequence. Sullivan has a teenage daughter who is studying O-Level science subjects. Since human technology had advanced massively since 1970, she wants to access an alien data-storage device that Friendship left.

Her (2013)

This was written and directed by Spike Jonze . As such, it was filled with his usual weirdness. This is his take on Computer Dating.

The story is set in a futuristic Los Angeles, although it was largely filmed in Shanghai to make it feel more SciFi. A lonely man (Joaquin Phoenix - Gladiator ) is getting divorced by his estranged Catherine ( Rooney Mara ). He gets his computer upgraded. The interface comes with a new voice - that of Samantha ( Scarlett Johansson ).

The protagonist introduces his new girlfriend to his friend Amy ( Amy Adams ) and his boss, Paul (Chris Pratt - Passengers ). Is there any future in the relationship?

Robo-Dog (2015)

This is a kids movie, narrated by a young boy. He lives in suburbia, under the thumb of his mother ( Olivia d'Abo ). His father (Patrick Muldoon - ), an inventor, creates a super-battery that recharges itself with kinetic energy. The boss, Mr Willis (Wallace Shawn - Princess Bride ), fires him for giving a bad presentation to an investor.

The boy's pet dog accidentally dies. The now-unemployed inventor dad builds a robot dog that looks just like the dead one. It turns out to be totally over-engineered, despite being made out of scrap, so there is lots of slapstick humour.

Mr Willis realises his mistake, and tries to get the battery back. He only has one employee left, a guy named Barry Belch who acts like an idiot but is the smartest person in the movie. Well, that is not saying much. It seems that this is the filmmakers' idea of what an autistic person is like.

Mr Willis decides to show off his up-scaled super-battery. However, like the supervillain Ironmonger in Iron Man he has not added the safety modifications that the original creator invented. As a result, the battery might explode and destroy the town. Can robo-dog save the day?

Robo-Dog: Airborne (2017)

Robo-dog gets damaged and loses his memory. He gets found by a new family, and the story starts over again.

Robot And Frank (2012)

Frank (Frank Langella - Masters of the Universe ) is a former burglar who has retired into suburban life in smalltown USA. The only bright spark in his now-boring life is the local librarian ( Susan Sarandon ), who has inexplicably taken a liking to him.

Frank's son buys him the newest gadget in home-care for the elderly – a humanoid robot. Naturally, Frank initially resents this intrusion into his life. However, he discovers how to use the robot for his own purposes.

Frank's daughter ( Liv Tyler ) drops by to express anti-robot sentiments.

Wall-E (2008)

Wild Robot, The (2024)

Drone (2017)

Neil Westin (Sean Bean - Game of Thrones ) and Gary (Joel David Moore - Julia X ) are private IT contractors who work for the CIA. Their cover is that they are a survey and mapping unit, presumably using remote-control seismic charges, but their real job is to use drone bombs to assassinate suspected terrorists without trial. They are warned of a data breach by a hacker, who may have leaked their personal data to persons unknown. Yes, the same tech that makes them so deadly now makes them vulnerable.

Westin and his wife ( Mary McCormack ) are under surveillance by a Pakistani man. He then visits the house, pretending to be interested in buying Westin's yacht. Of course, his ulterior motive is slowly revealed.

This seems to have been adapted from a stage play. It would work well with a single set, and five actors, as the mysterious visitor sets his host's family against each other.

The Drone (2019)

A serial killer spies on potential victims with a camera-drone. He is cornered by a LAPD SWAT team, but they are basically Keystone Kops. The killer makes his getaway holding his drone, but gets struck by lightning. Just like in Child's Play (1987) , the serial killer's soul is transferred into the plastic object.

A young married couple move into a suburban house beside sexy next-door neighbour Anita Briem . The husband finds the drone, and gets it working again. While he goes out to work, the drone follows his wife ( Alexandra Essoe ) about.

This is a pretty low-budget effort. The real problem is that the tone is a bit uneven, to say the least. Some bits seem to be entirely serious, such as a kill scene that mimics one from Exorcist 3 . However, another kill scene is like something from a Troma movie - clearly so OTT as to be intentional parody of the genre.

Drones (2013)

Drone Wars (2016)

This is set in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, which has been overrun by drone planes remotely operated by alien invaders. Elias (Corin Nemec - Solar Crisis ) is gifted an energy blaster by a secret group of military scientists.

The human survivors fight over meagre supplies. Some have become cannibals, but most just join gangs and attack others to steal food. Yes, this seems to have taken inspiration from The Walking Dead .

Eye in the Sky (2015)

This is about an international counter-terrorism operation in a city in Kenya, East Africa. An Islamic fundamentalist group has already attacked a shopping mall and a University, causing dozens of civilian fatalities. Now their leaders are in the sights of a coalition of western powers, under the command of British military officers.

The US military have a drone overhead, armed with two hellfire missiles. The Kenyans also deploy an agent on the ground, a local man with some secret hi-tech gadgets. They are tiny surveillance drones, one disguised as a humming bird and the other the size and shape of a beetle, controlled by software on a mobile smart-phone. This is the same kind of thing used in the scifi show Colony , but with no audio capability and a much shorter battery life. When such things were suggested in The X-Files: War of the Coprophages it was certainly deemed to be far-out science fiction.

The British Colonel ( Helen Mirren ) confirms that high-value targets are present and then informs her superior, the General (Alan Rickman - Die Hard (1988) ). Of course, he needs permission from the civil servants in the COBRA oversight team. They in turn call the Secretary of State for Defence (Iain Glenn - Game of Thrones ), who insists they check with the US Government for permission before actually making a decision on their own.

There is a lot of suspense as the clock counts down. If the politicians delay too long, while playing their games of cover-your-ass, the terrorists might escape and set off their bombs in an area with a large civilian population. However, there is another factor causing the delay. An innocent civilian is probably going to die if the military use a missile to destroy the target. This leads on to a classic moral dilema of the kind often seen in Science Fiction shows.

What is really horrifying is the idea that politicians would rather sacrifice innocent lives, and by so doing win the propaganda war by blaming the terrorists, instead of simply destroying the enemy targets and thus winning the war cleanly.

Good Kill (2014)

The protagonist (Ethan Hawke - Gattacca ) is a USAF officer who flies drone aircraft. His boss (Bruce Greenwood - Gerald's Game ) keeps a tight rein on things.

The protagonist has a strained relationship with his wife ( January Jones ). He also befriends a female cow-orker, Suarez ( Zoe Kravitz ). These two women previously worked together in X-Men: First Class but they do not have any scenes together in this story. It certainly does not pass the bechdel test.

Things hot up when the protagonist's unit is reassigned to a new task. A CIA goon (Peter Coyote - E.T. The Extra Terrestrial ) phones them up and orders them to commit war crimes.

The Matrix (1999)

This is a ground-breaking science fiction movie directed by the Wachowski siblings. They mixed wire-fu martial arts scenes, fancy trick photography and world-class CGI special effects to create a movie that spawned two back-to-back sequels. Twenty years later, the legacy is so great that yet another sequel is planned.

Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving - Lord of the Rings ) is hunting a murderous anarchist named Trinity ( Carrie Ann Moss ). Both the Agents and the women they are chasing seem to have superhuman strength and speed. All this establishes that although they live in a city that looks just like the average American movie location, something is just not right about it.

Mr Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves - Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure ) is a computer hacker who uses the codename Neo. After being contacted by Trinity, he is summoned to a meeting with Morpheus (Laurence Fishburn - Predators (2009) ) - named by Neil Gaiman after the dream-master in the Sandman stories. Morpheus gives Neo the choice between two worlds.

As a computer hacker, the protagonist lives a secret life when he is online. He even has a different identity, since he uses the alias Neo. Like all great science fiction stories, this is basically an allegory. It turns out that when they wrote and directed this movie, the Wachowskis were closeted transgender people.

Once the protagonist has left his dead-name of Mr Anderson, and transitioned to being Neo full-time, he gets a lot of exposition about what the Matrix is. Basically he has been recruited as a freedom fighter against domination by artificial intelligences. Morpheus, Trinity and Cypher (Joe Pantoliano - Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief ) conduct secret operations, using whatever weapons and combat skills they can imagine.

It turns out that there is a prophecy that a saviour will come who can defeat the Agents in combat. Morpheus thinks that Neo might be the saviour.

Since the action all takes place in a virtual reality environment, to maintain any kind of suspense the old trope must be invoked ... if you die in a dream, you die in real life!

Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Neo and Trinity live happily together in Zion, the last human city on Earth. He is troubled by nightmares that seem to predict her being endangered on a mission inside the Matrix. Since the original movie featured a climactic rescue attempt of the mentor figure, this time the writers have mixed it up a bit and the hero's focus is on saving his love interest instead.

When he is in the Matrix, Neo still has the superpowers he exhibited at the end of the first movie. However, the villains can up their own game in order to cancel out the unfair advantage that Neo has developed. For example, Agent Smith can duplicate himself an almost infinite number of times. Later, villains use a teleportation system to travel to another continent ... and even flying at supersonic speeds, Neo will take half an hour to get to his destination.

In order to get to the core of the Matrix, Neo and his friends must make a deal with some black market programs. The most powerful ones are the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson - Cat Woman (2004) ) and his wife ( Monica Bellucci ). Their muscle, who are apparently the basis for human mythology about vampires, may not be as tough as Agents but they certainly give the good guys a hell of a fight.

Zion, the last human city on Earth, is populated by people of colour. Strangely the ruling council is run by white people like Anthony Zerbe ( License to Kill (1989) ) and Fionnuala Flanagan .

Matrix Revolutions (2003)

After the events of the previous movie, Neo (Keanu Reeves - Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure ) is trapped in a part of the Matrix that resembles a subway station. The one who controls the station is Bruce Spence ( Mad Max 2: Road Warrior ), a rogue program who works for the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson - Cat Woman (2004) ) and his wife ( Monica Bellucci ). Morpheus and Trinity must rescue the hero, after he saved them in the two previous movies.

The robots launch their all-out attack on Zion. To defend the main docking bay, the humans use power-lifter suits like the one in Aliens (1986) ... only with heavy belt-fed machine-guns instead of fork-lift prongs. Still, they have no armour or protection for the pilot!

Meanwhile, Neo and Trinity try a counter-attack on the core of the Matrix. Unfortunately Agent Smith's human host has not been properly kept under guard.

Matrix Resurrections (2021)

This starts with a rehash of the opening scene of the first movie, as seen from the perspective of Bugs ( Jennifer Henwick ). There is an all-new cast, and Agent Smith is a more complicated character than he first seems.

Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves - John Wick ) is a video-game designer who created a game called The Matrix. Now he is on the edge of yet another mental break because the management company have decided to do the inevitable fourth movie in the trilogy. Yes, this is all a bit Meta. His Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris - Starship Troopers ) prescribes him a massive bottle of blue pills.

As the Wachowskis demonstrated in their first big film, Bound, they have interesting roles for female characters. This is certainly no exception. Neo may be central to the Second Act, just as Bugs is central to the First Act, but at the end of the day both Naiobi ( Jada Pinkett ) and Trinity ( Carrie-Anne Moss ) are more valuable than the hero himself.

Lana Wachowski wrote and directed this without the input of her sibling, so it is not entirely up to the usual level. However, it is a good movie in its own right.

Bumblebee (2018)

This is a prequel to the Transformers series. The story starts on Cybertron, where the Autobots are being badly defeated by the Decepticons. Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, sends his sidekick to scout the planet Earth as a potential hiding place for the rest of the survivors. By incredible coincidence, the scout's landing zone is where the toughest soldier in the US Military (John Cena - Peacemaker ) is conducting a training mission. This leads on to a demonstration of how deadly 1980s weaponry could be against a massive robot!

The human protagonist is Hailee Seinfeld , who discovers the Autobot and keeps him for herself. She even gives him a name - Bumblebee! The young woman is a talented car mechanic, just like Megan Fox in the original. There are even a couple of shirt-removal scenes that parody the objectification scene in that film.

A Decepticon searcher ( Angela Bassett ) and her bloodthirsty minion detect a stray signal, and come to investigate.

This was produced by Michael Bay , but the director was a specialist in childrens' movies. As a result, this is the best in the series.

Transformers (2007)

Sam Witwickey (Shia LeBoeuf - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ) is an American High School boy whose main problem is that he wants to be with Michaela ( Megan Fox ), a girl who is out of his league. He gets a second-hand car, but it seems to have a mind of its own. Not so much like Herbie ... more like Christine !

Meanwhile, a US Military base in Quatar is attacked by a Decepticon. The disguise is not good enough to fool the super-paranoid hi-tech security, so he has to resort to brute force. This is sort of against the whole concept of the Transformers, because they are supposed to use stealth rather than brute force. Also, the transformation scenes are basically OTT CGI. They are unconvincing and distracting, which actually means that the bits with the human actors are the good bits.

The Decepticons try to hack the US Military's main server. POTUS (Jon Voight - Lara Croft ) orders his top computer analyst ( Rachael Taylor ) to investigate. She got security clearance despite being Australian, but may end up losing it for leaking info to hacker buddy Anthony Anderson ( Kangaroo Jack ).

It turns out that Witwickey is being targeted for a reason. His ancestor was a sea Captain who led a polar expedition in the Victorian era. Yes, the Transformers were on Earth for quite some time before this film. This is a major trope in the film series, and every new movie adds new layers of complications to this.

A group of MIBs, led by John Turturro ( You Don't Mess With The Zohan ), are tasked with guarding the alien relics that the US Government has recovered. This is the goal of the Decepticons. The Autobots, along with Sam Witwickey and a US Special Forces officer (Josh Duhamel - ), try to stop them. There is also time for some slapstick comedy. While the Transformers cannot keep their existence secret from the US Government, they still decide to keep Sam's parents ignorant. This is vaguely reminiscent of 1980s movies, which just makes the audience think of better movies that this fails to match.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

This is set two years after the events of the first film. The US Military is hunting Decepticons. They have recruited Optimus Prime and his team to help. He does not take prisoners. Instead he kills any Decepticons who surrender, and lets the humans dump their bodies in the ocean.

Sam Witwickey (Shia LeBoeuf - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ) has been accepted into a prestigious Ivy League college. His parents, still a pair of comedy relief characters, help him move into halls of residence. Hilarity ensues.

Michaela ( Megan Fox ) stays at home to work in her father's chop shop. Despite being a wrench wench she wears lots of makeup and a pair of stilletto heeled shoes.

The USA has carried out a cover-up of events of the first movie. Sector 7, the Men in Black , have been closed down. Turturro ( You Don't Mess With The Zohan ) is reduced to working in his family's food store. The only people who believe in alien invaders are conspiracy nuts.

The US President's National Security advisor claims that POTUS speaks for all mankind. He threatens to make Optimus Prime and the Autobots leave Earth. They carry out a conversation that provides lots of exposition. However, they do so over a telephone line. The Decepticons, with advanced technology and space travel, literally hack the satellite and get all the info they need.

Sam still has a fragment of the All-Spark, which is so powerful it can turn his household appliances into tiny killer robots. He then gets infected by the All-Spark, which makes him deface a poster of Bad Boys 2. This is a film by the same director, which is a bit of a twist in itself. If there is a Michael Bay in their universe, what franchise is he directing if not this one?

It turns out that the Decepticons have developed the ability to transform into human beings. This particular transformation is undetectable, which makes you wonder why they do not do it more often. They could make a TV show where the aliens look like humans, which would keep the budget down. No need for any massive CGI battles any more, just good story-telling.

This movie is just a collection of massive overblown action sequences. They are not merely cartoonish, they are LITERALLY cartoons! The robots are all completely fake, and we do not have any empathy for any of them. We may have empathy for some of the humans, but they are unkillable and the violence has no consequences.

The Fallen is Megatron's mentor, the oldest and greatest Decepticon. He has interfered in human history for thousands of years, and his plan is to activate an ancient super-weapon. This plot is later-re-used in the fifth film.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (2011)

Sam (Shia LeBoeuf - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ) has apparently (and for no reason) been dumped by Michaela ( Megan Fox ). Luckily he has replaced her with an upper-class English supermodel-type, Rosie Huntingdon-Whitley , who works for McDreamy super-tycoon Patrick Dempsey ( Enchanted ).

It turns out that ever since the 1960s there has been a conspiracy of humans who knew about Transformers. The title is a reference to the Apollo 11 mission, because apparently the reason Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon was to salvage technology from a crashed alien starship.

The third act of the film is a bloated CGI-fest, an hours worth of cartoonish action scenes as the giant robots trash Chicago. Yes, yet another movie that makes 9/11 look like a minor inconvenience. Seriously, can you imagine the death toll if aliens/robots/whatever had a massive battle in a major American city?

Transformers 4: Age of Extinction (2014)

This starts with a prologue showing alien starships causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Then the main story starts, with the USA suffering a backlash from the 911-style effects of the Battle of Chicago. A wannabe inventor (Mark Wahlberg - The Happening ) discovers an old truck, and decides to fix it up. What follows is three hours of jumbled action scenes and typically excessive CGI.

The script is written by Ehren Kruger , better known for horror films like Scream 3, The Ring . He has stretched it out to twice the length it should be by adding layers of antagonists, like a Season of 24. The Autobots (especially Optimus Prime) are being hunted by a Robotic bounty-hunter (acting like Death’s Head but called Lockdown). He is working in tandem with a CIA goon squad led by Titus Welliver ( Agents of SHIELD ), who works for Kelsey Grammar (who was a victim of persecution in the X-Men franchise but has now switched sides to the Government). Grammar is on the payroll of Military-Industrialist Stanley Tucci ( The Core ), who has rebuilt Megatron as Galvatron but has not seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier ) because he does not anticipate his robot army being hijacked.

Tellingly, the fourth act (yes, they tacked on a huge extra segment after the natural ending of the story) involves the villains relocating to China. Yes, to get Chinese funding and distribution they set an extra climax in Hong Kong!

There are some good aspects to the film, notably the cast. The presence of human antagonists allows the viewer to hark back to the days when director Michael Bay created watchable action thrillers like Bad Boys and The Rock.

Transformers 5: The Last Knight (2017)

The US Government has declared war on all Transformers, not just Decepticons. Their traditional first line of defence has been infantry with M16-M4 carbines, but now they actually have upgraded to deploying ED-209 robots like in Robocop .

The wannabe inventor, Cade Jaeger (Mark Wahlberg - The Happening ), now lives in a scrapyard in Texas. His tweenage daughter is off in college, and he can only listen to her voice on the phone. Luckily he recruits another teenage girl to help out.

In the previous movie, the Transformers went to Red China so that the film-makers could make a lot of money selling the movie to Chinese audience. This time they go to England, so they could probably just stretch their budget further. For example, Laura Haddock is an English archaeologist. Think Lara Croft rather than Time Team.

Anthony Hopkins ( Thor ) is around to deliver lots of exposition. Turturro ( You Don't Mess With The Zohan ) is back, hiding out in Cuba and providing info over the phone.

Merlin (Stanley Tucci - The Core ) founded a secret society. Not the Wiccans, but the Witwickens. Yes, by some incredible coincidence Sam Witwickey (Shia LeBoeuf - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ) is descended from one of them. Not that he actually appears in the movie, but at least he gets a mention.

The Transformers have interfered in human history for thousands of years, and the villain's plan is to activate an ancient super-weapon. This plot was previously used in the second film.

Earth is about to be crushed by a Cybertronian supervillainess ( Gemma Chan ). Cade and Optimus Prime get to be knights, and do some sword-fighting. Haddock is apparently the last remaining direct descendent of Merlin's bloodline. This ignores the fact that Merlin was the spitting image of the industrialist in the previous transformers movie, who is thus also an obvious descendent. Despite his limited screen time, Tucci still gets a higher billing than Haddock. In fact, despite being the female lead she is quite far down the credits compared to the supporting males. And do not even bother mentioning the Bechdel test.

Transformers 6: Rise Of The Beasts (2023)

This is a prequel to the Transformers series. It starts with the usual expository flashback, this time introducing the new villain - Unicron the living planet. Unicron goes after a magical artefact named the Trans-Warp Key, which can potentially propel him to a new galaxy. It is in the custody of the Maximals, robots that look like African mega-fauna. They take it to where he can never find it ...

The main story is set in New York City when the Twin Towers were still standing. It is around the time that Marky Mark left his pop group so he could concentrate on his acting career. An African-American woman, the most knowledgeable employee in the museum, discovers that one of the artefacts is of alien origin. Unfortunately she activates it, attracting both the Autobots and their enemies. Luckily Mirage the sports-car was in the process of being stolen by a Latinx ex-soldier, so he becomes the male person of colour protagonist.

Optimus Prime only has a handful of autobots to help him. Bumblebee is one, although he has left Hailee Seinfeld at home. There is a female autobot, who is skinnier and pinker than the default-male ones. But it is Prime himself who is the most different - he is deeply prejudiced against humans, instead of the heroic leader he becomes in the later films.

Unicron has his own robotic henchmen. Scourge (Peter Dinklage - Game of Thrones ) looks like the Creeper's truck from Jeepers Creepers . He also has a sports-car sidekick, who can road-race against Mirage. In other worlds it will be a fair fight.

In the 1980s cartoon movie, Unicron is voiced by the unique talent that was Orson Welles. This new version is done by Colman Domingo ( Fear The Walking Dead ), a great talent but in this case still just basically a random voice-actor. In many ways this is good, restoring roles to specialists rather than let them all go to big-name stars. However, this is another sign of the MCU era: the decline of the Movie Star and their replacement with generic actors.

The final sequences set up ideas for sequels. It is implied there might be a crossover with another Hasbro franchise ...

Transformers One (2024)

Soon