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Posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 3:32:39 GMT by: Ben Austwick
Posted under: movie review scifi
Year: 2009
Directors: Richard Clabaugh
Writers: Richard Clabaugh & Fran Clabaugh
IMDB: link
Trailer: link
Review by: Ben Austwick
Rating: 8 out of 10
The London Sci-Fi Film Festival opened in grand style with two Imperial Stormtroopers flanking the entrance to the lavish Piccadilly Circus Apollo, and trays of canapes and beverages doing the rounds while we reclined with Playstation 3s. But enough of the high life! It's films you're here for and films you'll get.
The festival opened with the world premier of Richard Clabaugh's “Eyeborgs”, a satirical sci-fi romp that tackles government surveillance, War on Terror paranoia and good old-fashioned technofear head-on. In a future USA where terrorist atrocities have ushered in autonomous, roaming surveillance robots with police powers – the titular eyeborgs - the President's unassuming rock singer nephew finds himself at the centre of a conspiracy that hinges on the evidence of the camera vs that of the human eye.
The only people who seem to know what's going on are conspiracy theorists – disbelieved and laughed at, they are picked off in clever ways the police have no choice but to put down to misadventure. That is until a Department of Homeland Security officer has his attention brought to inconsistencies in the film evidence this future society relies on, and sees that the reality of surveillance USA is much more complicated and frightening than it seems.
The story progresses through a handful of fairly plodding exposition sections – the film's only real flaw – and superb action sequences the likes of which I haven't seen in a long time. They really are spectacular, especially considering the tiny budget Clabaugh and his crew had to work with. Somehow the CGI is more realistic and effective than mega-budget Hollywood spectaculars like Transformers, and the editing is better by an order of magnitude, consistently coherent and punchy. There's no flab in these scenes - though they do leave you crying out for more.
The best sci-fi uses this sort of spectacle as a layer of sugar to coat a bitter pill of serious political thought, and Eyeborgs is no exception. The central theme of surveillance is tackled imaginatively, and while at first the story seems to linearly explore our doubts about government power it ends up taking us in a different and unexpected direction. This multi-layered film making reminded me of Verhoeven in his Robocop heyday, a comparison I don't think the director would disagree with – his use of multi-media in news reports and surveillance footage is an obvious homage, though perhaps better are some very ED209-like robots who cause chaos on a similar eye-popping scale.
Making this connection, it struck me that it's been a long time since we've seen this sort of proper sci-fi in the cinema: layers of action and humour dressing up serious political satire. Eyeborgs doesn't just do this, it does it with flare. It's a low-budget and in some ways unassuming little film that punches miles above its weight.
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