Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Singularity (2017)


I like a post-apocalyptic movie as much as the next guy.  Humanity has fallen.  There are a few survivors left, but they’re brave in the face of danger.  If done well, it could be a good movie.  Singularity, unfortunately, isn’t a good movie.  I can’t even say that it tries to be a good movie.  It would be more accurate to say that it’s trying to be other good movies.

VA Industries, led by Elias Van Dorne, has created all sorts of robots.  Their ultimate achievement is a line of robots to end all wars, and that’s what happens.  The robots end all wars by killing every human they can find.  Apparently, Elias has never read an Isaac Asimov novel nor has he seen The Terminator.  Maybe this is an alternate timeline where the laws of robotics don’t exist.  I don’t know.

Almost a century later and nearly all the humans are gone.  Calia Davis is one of the few left.  She and her family were looking for a place called Aurora.  It’s supposed to be the last human settlement.  She was separated from her family, but her father had a tracking device that only she can track.

Enter Andrew Davis, a nice boy who cares for his mother.  Only he was alive during the initial robotic attack.  Plus, he doesn’t seem to have any memory of what’s going on currently.  Plus, Elias and his fellow Matrix upload, Damien Walsh, are able to watch Andrew and Celia.

Yeah.  He’s a robot spy that’s so good that he doesn’t even know that he’s a spy.  So, Andrew and Celia run around, evading robots and fighting the bad humans, hoping to get to Aurora before it’s too late.  Elias and Damien watch, hoping to catch a glimpse of where Aurora is or how to get there.

From what Wikipedia says, the movie started without Elias or Damien.  Someone shot the scenes with John Cusack and Carmen Argenziano as additional material.  Through the magic of CGI, the movie was made whole.  I’m not sure it helped.

One big question, regardless of the whole new footage thing, is why someone couldn’t plant a tracker on Celia.  It would have been far easier to design a flying insect to catch up with Celia while she slept and inject her with a tracking device.  Problem solved.

It’s also odd that Celia doesn’t question the fact that Andrew doesn’t know current events.  For that matter, why did Elias use the memories of someone who died 100 years ago?  Why not find someone more contemporary?  You can’t tell me that Andrew was their only option.

It’s not a particularly great or original movie.  It’s like the movie was written by taking bits from other projects.  Take the plot of Terminator, insert a character from The Hunger Games, use a human-form Cylon as a spy, give them a lost city to go to and see if anyone notices.

To boot, it looked like Cusack wasn’t even trying.  He looks like someone who joined the project thinking it was something else, but had to finish it anyway due to the contractual obligation.  This one is definitely one to skip.




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