A couple of months ago and on a website devoted to upcoming films I read about a low budget indie film that was about to be released called Kill Command.  Here is its trailer:

I don’t know about you, but I loved what I saw.

The movie was released to VOD and was made available for purchase and I had her on my list of films to see via Netflix.  Yesterday, I finally had a chance to see the film and…

Not bad.  Not bad at all.

To begin, the film is indeed a low budget affair but despite this, and as should be evident in the trailer above, the effects are nonetheless quite impressive…for the most part.  I won’t lie: There are times the effects aren’t as good and this is when the homicidal machines are on the move or being shot at (in general the effects for the creatures when they’re not moving all that quickly are quite good.  When they’re moving quickly…not so good).

So how’s the story?

Pretty engaging, at least until the very end (I’ll get to that in a moment).

In the near future, a group of soldiers are ordered to train against robotic machines on an isolated island.  Joining them in the group is Mills (Vanessa Kirby, who is quite good), a human with cyber “augmentations” which allows her to link up with machines.  The soldiers in the group generally don’t trust her and, once they arrive on the island, that trust is strained even more as outgoing and incoming radio communications are blocked.  The soldier group’s leader, Captain Bukes (Thure Lindhardt, also quite good), suspects something is up and is very weary of Mills’ presence.

For her part Mills tries to help the others out.  She “sees” robotic machinery deep in the woods and, eventually, scout ships fly in (sometimes very close) to watch over what the human soldiers are up to.

Eventually, the soldiers’ target, a group of robotic armed soldiers moving along a path in the island’s forest, is spotted.  The soldiers set up an ambush and quickly get to the business of dispatching these machines.  While they do, Mills notices something off in the distance and behind their group.  She goes to investigate and finds a larger, frightening looking robot fighting machine.  She links up with it and receives odd messages and images before blanking out…

When she recovers, the machine is gone.

She returns to the group and they continue their movements…until it becomes clear the hunters have become the hunted.

Kill Command is certainly not The-Most-Original-Movie-Ever-Created™.  Indeed, the trailer above offers a positive review which, quite correctly, states the movie is something of a mash up of Predator and The Terminator, which to me is far from a bad thing.

The actors take their roles seriously and the threat -and suspense- becomes quite real.  Kudos to director/writer Steven Gomez for infusing his film with this palpable sense of dread and managing to get some top effect-work out of what was, again, a very low budget.

If there is one flaw in the film, for me it was the movie’s conclusion (told you I’d get back to this).  Given that talking about it will reveal some rather big SPOILERS, I’ll get to that in a moment.

In the meantime, if the above trailer intrigues you, I recommend you give Kill Command a try.  Its a damn good sci-fi/suspenser which may not quite be up to the level of either Predator or the original Terminator but nonetheless acquits itself quite nicely before that aforementioned ending.

Still not sure you want to see it?  Here are the film’s first few minutes (though there are a couple of scenes, if memory serves, not shown and therefore it is not exactly accurate that this is the first eight minutes of the movie):

Anyway, what follows are…

SPOILERS

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!

If you’re still here, I hope you’ve given the film a try or are genuinely not interested in seeing it and curious about what bothered me about the film’s end.

Here goes.

As the soldiers are attacked by the machines, they are picked off one by one (a rather standard, even cliched concept that nonetheless ramps up the suspense nicely).  The big mystery of what the machines are up to isn’t such a big mystery in the end.  Basically, the “main machine” behind the others is becoming self-aware and, as it was programmed to be a war robot, it has turned the tables on the human soldiers and made its robotic army use the humans for training.

Mills tries to break into the machine and make it stand down at various stages of the film, but she is unsuccessful.

By the end of the movie, three soldiers and Mills are all that’s left alive.  They set up a final stand and the movie’s climax becomes a “siege”, with the overwhelming number of robots coming in for the kill.

However, Mills at this point has an Electromagnetic Pulse bomb (EMP) which she tells Captain Mills will wipe the mad machine’s internal programming and, therefore, end its threat.  Only problem is that to do this she has to lure it close to the EMP and that, in turn might wipe out Mills’ cybernetic memory as well.

Captain Bukes, who started the movie off very weary about Mills and her place in this training mission, nonetheless now doesn’t want her to sacrifice herself.  Nonetheless, circumstances eventually dictate that both Mills and the killer robot be far closer together than hoped for when the EMP is detonated.

Both machine and Mills suffer serious injury to their cybernetic cortex yet the fight continues.  Mills, facing memory shut down, manages to lure the homicidal robot up into a building and, using her control over a sniper rifle, shoots the creature through its “head”.

As the creature dies and Mills’ memory is wiped, we see that the creature has downloaded itself into the now “blank” memory banks within Mills.

The remaining soldiers, thankful they have survived the onslaught, take Mills with them to their awaiting transport, unaware that she may now be carrying the homicidal creature’s mind within her.  However, she is still a human and we must assume that not all her personality is carried within her programming.  Therefore we’re left to wonder: What will this programming do?  What will happen from here on?

And that, my friends, is the type of ending that drives me freaking nuts.

They might as well put a giant “THE END….?” or “TO BE CONTINUED” title after the final fade out.

Frankly, I’m tired of movies pulling this too-ambiguous crap.

Is it so damn hard to give audiences a story which features a complete beginning, middle, and ending while resisting the temptation to add sequel fare at the very end?

Worse, this ending is an inverse copy of David Cronenberg’s famous 1981 film Scanners.  In that film we follow good and bad telepaths and, at that movie’s climax, they face off and use their psychokinetic abilities against each other.  The good guy takes the worse of it and his body disintegrates.  However, before its completely gone his mind “jumps” into the bad-guy’s body and takes it over.  Thus we have the good guy “win” in the end even though audiences see the bad guy’s *body* left standing.

We don’t know where Kill Command goes from here because there’s too much ambiguity about this programming jump.  Clearly we’re supposed to suspect things might go very bad when Mills makes it back to the mainland.

But, again, why do this to us?  Why not give us an unambiguous ending and perhaps hint that the machine is still alive elsewhere and in another of the robotic units?  Why go this route?

Sorry for the rant, but it genuinely hurts me to see a film that, IMHO, is 98% good/decent which then stumbles during its final five minutes.