Steven Gomez is a visual effects supervisor who has graduated to writing and directing his first full-length feature. It’s a sci-fi action thriller whose borrowings are very plain, but it’s decent and watchable nonetheless, with an interesting central character premise.
Reprising much of the style and hardware of Terminator and Robocop, Gomez gives us the story of some US Marines who in the future are ’coptered to a remote location for training. With them is a young civilian observer called Mills (Vanessa Kirby) who is part android, having been “cured” of paralysis as a child by a sinister corporation that implanted in her head new software and artificially created brain matter: this is the same tech that runs the battle drones she is there to inspect.
The exercise takes a terrible turn. The soldiers realise they themselves are lab rats in a combat experiment – and whose side is Mills on, anyway? Gamers will have a bit of deja vu watching this, but it is a well managed movie with some cool, controlled performances among the detonations.
