Do you recall the opening scroll in The Phantom Menace? The one with the endless discussion on Taxation or Trade routes? Yes, that one! Well, the onscreen text at the beginning of Automota makes those sentences look like too short an introduction, as it is quite a number of sentences better than an opening statement. Seems there’s lots of explaining that needs to be done before we can get into the action, but mercifully it’s a bit more interesting than congressional debates and trade blockades. Thus we are given ’the full of footage of a computer-generated wastelands with a caption “American apocalypse in the year 2044.”’ Completing this statement, we have only one year 2044 read, where solar storms have turned the earth into a radioactive desert and left a few people, only 21m. Now about the contemporary setting in this text, it is appreciated by many respectful and modern people, however, due to regression some future technologies never surfaced. Yet having failed forward, some resources full of people and their terrible injustice create a robotic template. This corporation calls the Nanomachines the Automota Pilgrim 7000s, and they begin to construction the walls, and mechanical clouds where people were. The units are man-controlled as they contain security prints which limit them from harming any living thing, and practicing any form of self modification or body modification. we are talking about Automata movie here.
As the first speaker enters the room, that is precisely what the audience is told in the intro. Then we are presented with the world and it is a dark, dank, neon drenched hellscape that looks a lot like Ridley Scott’s blade runner and it wouldn’t be the last time such accusations can be leveled at the movie.
Even in that movie, Harrison Ford’s, Deckard, tracks and kills the replicants. In this film, Pullman’s Abu couldn’t just sit pretty as a husband but had to deal with the Automota’s activities as an ROC insurance investigator. A case must be closed, this Baur is being told by his hunter, to the horror of husband brass, who wants his wife on the beach with a child that has never seen light. But he is also being pressed by his principal to wrap up the case of a unit that has been modified, stuffed with illicit parts and was found without a second protocol.
His investigation now leads him out of the city and into a restricted zone where he observes – one of the most memorable moments in this film – a unit committing kamikaze by igniting itself. And there is more intrigue when an Automota specialist the reader is taken to is immediately assassinated, making Vaucan a fugitive with only the disgraced units as his allies. What ensues is a somewhat awkward blend of unoriginal action ‘Hollywood style,’ mystery, darkness that would pass for film noir and something that resembles a boring class on goldfish that Vaucan’s life and most likely at the investigation’s end, the entire human race is at risk of destruction.
The problem is, that the conspiracy that resides at the centre of the picture is somewhat muddled and misses the mark by a lot and, the antagonists of the narrative are not very effective, considering that there are just a few ‘clone’ characters who are bland and forgettable. Vaucan’s communication with the Automota was far more interesting. Despite their straightforward, low-tech appearance in accordance with the film’s retro aesthetic, these units are disturbing with their emotionless faces.
And speaking of the screenplay- amassed by Igor Legarreta, Javier Sanchez Donate and writer Gabe Ibanez- it deals with very interesting topics regarding the ideas of man and machine colliding as the units take their time to bring Vaucan from the dark to the light. Alas, this is not the case in some other spaces as the dialogue in somewhat clunky, especially in those parts where Vaucan is with his wife, all of whom do not register at all. The performances are also hit-or-miss – Banderas is more than serviceable as Vaucan and Forster is great in a supporting role but some smaller parts are done by horrible actors with bad accents which take you out of the film. And although there are a couple of quite interesting things going on in here, one cannot shake the feeling that such has been done more skillfully by other works from Blade Runner which Automota is most akin to, through RoboCop, A.I., and Elysium. Having said that, it should be noted that Ibanez rarely tackles such fantasy without compromising a budget, plus, if you are keen on cerebral sci-fi, then Automota is a decent enough effort that has sufficient content to justify sitting through it.
The Verdict
A scientific science fiction with a physical action element, Automota takes a turn towards film noir, giving Antonio Banderas a meaty role and in spite of some daft lines and some bad acting, the film manages to be a fun contemplative piece about man and machines and how prisons seem to be made of more and more technology.
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