Battle Drone (2018)

Plot of Battle Drone: A group of highly skilled mercenaries are hired by the CIA to pick up an arms shipment from the location of the Chernobyl power station. They fly in in their own aircraft together with a number of what appear to be CIA observers clad in sort of combat gear. Almost as soon as they have landed in the area of the power station, in what appears to be an enormous abandoned  factory, they come under fire from some-one or something in an upper window. Several of the CIA people are killed. The mercenaries are sufficiently skilled to take the shooter on, who turns out to be a sort of robot, with a machine gun in one hand and a long knife in the other. It is controlled by an operator somewhere. The female sniper of the team has a rifle which will terminate the robots, but when she kills one, further mechanical men enter the fray and we learn that they are nothing more than a test for the ‘drones’, since in a secure location are the management of the operation, one of whom had set the whole thing up.

Content: No sex or nudity, and not much drinking or smoking, any form of relaxation limited to a scene at the beginning of the film when the mercenaries invade a party in Russia to kill one man and take another prisoner. The prisoner is handed over to two CIA agents who we will meet again in the main part of the film. They collectively arrive in the location of the arms shipment which looks as we might imagine the wrecked environment around the Chernobyl might look. Once the firefight starts it goes on more or less continuously until the end. Off screen one of the CIA people is tortured into revealing what the whole business of the drones is about. The CIA people have cameras on their helmets which provide film for the management of the operation to view. As it turns out they are not far away from the scene.

A View: I quite like robots so was anticipating some fun in this movie, but they were quite accurately described as drones. They were controlled by remote operators which made them vulnerable, even though they seemed to have a level of autonomy which allowed them to engage in hand to hand combat. This was a film which with a slightly different script and a bit of editing could have been quite good. The robots desperately needed to be fully AI capable so that they could work together, and unfortunately it was obvious that they were just a few big blokes in suits, walking about as if they had just pissed themselves.  And the denouement. I’ll go to the foot of our stairs!

Fun Fact: Dominique Swain, who was the female CIA agent, first appeared on film as Lolita in the controversial 1997 remake.