we're into familiar territory here with washed out colours and futuristic marines lacking in depth of personality (there's the leader, the nice one, the creepy one, and the one that gets scared and tries to run away). Some time in the near future a squad is sent out on a training exercise with a mysterious cyborg woman who's along to evaluate their performance and fuck around with their guns, or something. The problem here is that while we start off following her, her motivations for the majority of the film are foggy, and none of the secondary characters are really interesting enough to take over and become primary protagonists. It almost feels like we needed another character to be new to both the soldiering side and the tech person side of this world, for the viewer to really connect with. We have our colonial marines and we have our Bishop, but we don't have a Ripley. The one soldier that I did find half-way likeable actually dies before the first hour is over.
They get flown out to a remote training facility, but find that all the machines there have turned on their creators. Not particularly original, but it provides a limited mystery to drive the plot and keeps the action flowing. The design of the machines is pretty cool and feel like a natural evolution from where they are now (though honestly most of the robots seem about 20 years in the future while crazy cyborg lady is more like 100). The effects are fine too, and some of the battles are enjoyable and create tension. Their limitations aren't layed out to us at all though, the viewer doesn't fully understand the amount of control the leader robot has over the others for a good while, and it isn't until the final battle that we're told (in one of several chunks of awkward exposition from cyborg woman) that if they kill the leader robot the others all die too, or turn off, or something. The EMP comes out of nowhere too, and what about all those other leader bots in stasis? don't they all share information? So why not just wake up more than two others?
Not a total waste of time, but little more than a visually pleasing thoughtless sci-fi action romp. The kind of film I struggle to watch while doing anything else, but not the kind of film I'll likely remember in 6 months.
Kill Command: 36.3