Movie Review: Cyborg X (2016)
Written and directed by Kevin King, and from Parking Garage Pictures, Cyborg X is about a future in which a company called “X-Corp” which has lost control of the operating system for its autonomous weaponized machines and they take over and kill most of mankind. It starts off with a news anchor telling everyone to stay indoors and then picks up a year later where most humans are dead, and… wait a minute… Yeah, pretty much the same premise as the Terminator films. Being that this is a low-budget film, it wasn’t surprising to see this kind of unoriginality, but the overall premise is almost exactly the same.
The story follows a small outpost of people, which a message on-screen notes as being one of the last remaining human encampments in the western hemisphere with a population of 11. There is a handful of military personnel and a couple of civilians. While one of the military group is out scouting, they come across a flying drone accompanied by a cyborg who is chasing a man and woman. They see the cyborg kill the woman and capture the man. The scout takes some photos of this, brings them back to the camp, and they believe it to be the founder of X-Corp who started it all. They know he was taken to a warehouse in the area, so they go out to see if they can locate and retrieve him. If you watched the Terminator films, you can already kind of see where this is going. There isn’t any time travel, but the rest of it is pretty in-line with that story.
Getting back to the writing, there are just a lot of things that don’t make sense in the film. This is somewhat par-for-the-course in low-budget films like this, but finding the founder of X-Corp in the desert after 99% of the world’s population was annihilated by autonomous killing machines was pretty lucky, Also, apparently, the robots don’t know about the camp and they can fire guns off there all the time but they put a boombox out in the open to draw one of the flying robots in and it just shows up. These are just a couple of examples of many things that will make anyone paying attention to scratch their head. It’s almost like there just wasn’t much proofreading of this script or thought put into contradictions like that.
The production itself is actually decent. The cinematography, sound, lighting are good, and even some of the digital special effects are ok in this film. There are even some scenes with some decent practical-effect gore. We’d almost say that the acting is bad in this, but these types of films can be misleading. In a lot of cases, the badly-written dialogue can make the acting appear bad when it isn’t and the acting is a victim of the script. This is one of those cases. The acting isn’t bad for what it is. Most of the cast had been in numerous other projects before this one. If the writing were better this could have possibly even been a good film. We will watch anything with Trejo in it. He is probably only in the film for less than 10 minutes in total, though. Overall, this movie wasn’t worth watching for the few minutes of Trejo.
