Every good robot story, from R.U.R. to Priority: Rannoch by way of TNG and Terminator, asks a question along the lines of “are robots human?” The Creator answers that more or less immediately with “of course they are, idiot,” which rather leaves you wondering what the point is of the rest of it.

I really wanted to like it. Gareth Edwards did Rogue One, which is either the second best or joint best Star Wars film; the excellent Monsters, and a Godzilla film that people who like Godzilla seemed to enjoy. But there’s a sort of gorgeous pointless emptiness that makes it hard to watch without declutching your brain: like Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium, it looks great but has nothing to say.

It does admittedly look really, really great. It’s large-scale, brightly-lit science fiction in the magnificent Chris Foss/Simon Stalenhag-esque style, colossal machines painted with big blue or orange construction stripes and letters, futuristic yachts with vertical metal sails skimming the sea in front of snow-capped mountains, all realised with staggeringly high production values. There’s an evil satellite which floats hazily around like the Death Star at the end of Rogue One (maybe just a bit too much). The setting of “New Asia” – while revelling in a sort of neo-orientalist, saffron-robed checklist of clichey visual shorthand – is just really well done, humming cities of tuktuks and skyscrapers, bamboo bridges and woven reed houses running up to the bases of huge hazy megastructures. It’s the perfect backdrop to a story that doesn’t matter and a prime, agonising example of just how much craft and creativity can go into the service of something that’s, well, overall quite disappointing. Quite early on, there’s a chaotic scene where screaming people are running through a field of tall grass while tracer bullets light up the smoke around them with flickering golden light. It’s visually amazing, but it makes absolutely no sense if you’re paying attention to where all the people who might be shooting those tracers are and what they’re doing. It feels much like the background parts of an action game where if your character stands still the gunfire and screams loop endlessly and pointlessly in the background unconnected to anything. The feeling of “it looks fantastic, yeah, but does this actually make the slightest bit of sense?” is a flaw that keeps recurring.

I keep coming back to the robots thing, and that, more than the overall plot (which is just pretty standard low-effort writing-room sci-fi; the US military archetype is cartoonishly evil, the multiethnic global south resistance archetype is noble, everyone with power is incompetent and stupid, and all the thrilling third act twists can be accurately guessed about ten minutes in) feels like the weakest point. There are hardly any good examples in modern media of the inhumanity of robots, which is by far the most interesting element of them.* Robots in games are given idle animations as if they need to breathe, as if the absolute stillness of a machine isn’t far more compelling. The Creator runs full pelt away from the very idea of exploring inhumanity, and its robots (boxy faceless obviously-robotic ones, who get shot more often, and “simulants” which are just people with a clickety cylinder thing through where the back of their skull should be) are all just humans. They fall asleep in hammocks and swear when they wake up, they are wrinkled monks and little old ladies staggering up mountain paths, the lasers on their guns waver as they run, they are slow and stupid enough to be outwitted by our protagonist like so many human henchmen.  They are just humans, so completely human that there is no point in making them robots. Someone drops in a mandatory line about “taking our jobs” but it’s not even slightly about the (suddenly topical in white-collar trades as well as blue-collar) automation issue. It’s not about global inequality or military adventurism. It’s not about love or fatherhood. It’s not about robots. It’s not really about anything.

 

^{* The best example I can think of is the Black Mirror episode with the horrible robot dogs, and that’s coming the other way from people overly zoomorphising the incredibly creepy Boston Dynamics machines.**}

^{** I genuinely, sincerely, no-cap, on-god regard anyone who looks at one of those awful things and goes “aww cute” as a potential fifth columnist for Skynet. Letting machines trick us into thinking they’re alive is how we are going to be replaced and destroyed by them. I’m serious as a heart attack here.}