Review of Zone 414 (2021) by Dandy-Mr-D — 09 Apr 2022

I like AI powered robots, and I like cyber punk, so it should have been a low bar for this movie to entertain me. It didn't. It was boring, predictable, and all the characters were uninteresting. But what really upset me was how it choose to keep to the brain-dead trend of making robots EXACTLY like humans.

A lot of shows do this now. They make robots look and act exactly like humans to the point that, to use this movie as an example, they cry, they resent their place in life, they hate their jobs, and need a little "me" time to relax and get through the day.

Almost nothing seems to separate them from people or makes them different. I think this all lacks imagination and creativity when it comes to AI and robots. It's the lazy way out for science fiction movies as make up artists don't need to do anything drastic, actors don't need to imagine not being a human, and the story writers get to use the word "robot" for their story and call it "science fiction".

If we really want to push the concept, then I would ask, If we could design AI or the mechanical figure of it's body, why would we need to make them exactly like us? Why could they not think or look entirely different? Imagine an AI purposefully programmed to love a terrible day; the worse it is, the happier it gets.

Or maybe one is programmed to think what is considered ugly is beautiful and vice versa. We could also imagine it's body differently. Why must it have a body with two arms, two legs, and a head? Perhaps it could have 3 arms, 5 legs, the body of an ant, and the head of a cat (actually, don't make that.

That sounds creepy) The ideas are endless, and some good science fiction writers have come up with many good ones. The creators of Zone 414 did not and the movie falls into the heap of sci-fi that is labeled for the uninspired, and uncreative.