Mini Review - Debug

Aside the odd episode of Doctor who, I rarely delve into the Horror Genre. Whilst many spent October celebrating Halloween with scary movies, I didn’t even do a movie review. Yeah… I don’t like horror movies; I don’t really get them… I don’t watch a movie to be scared, I watch to be entertained and I don’t associate the two like some people do. If you do like scary movies, that’s fine, all power to you

But like Doctor Who, our movie here has science fiction elements incorporated with the horror aspects. Debug is the brainchild of David Hewlett who would write and direct this movie. He was apparently inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, I wish I could go into that but I haven’t seen it (feel free to deduct nerd points for that) and his initial pitch was to do a story from the perspective of Hal 9000, the villain of the story. His argument was that Hal 9000 wasn’t so much a villain but someone defending his right to exist. His pitch was deemed too artsy and it got rewritten into this film

I was originally intending to do this as either a rage issues or guilty pleasure review, but there really isn’t enough material for me to cover in the 82-minute runtime for that. In fact, whilst I am giving this movie a re-watch for the review, I’m reviewing this off my initial watch, using the second to solidify the points I’m making. With that said let’s take a look

To be honest, most of the stuff is standard base under siege from Doctor Who. You open with a character getting murdered and the main story is our ‘hero’ and others entering the base where they get killed off one by one.

The problems start pretty early on. You can tell from a very early point who’s going to die and survive, but let’s overview the plot. A bunch of teen hackers and their prison guard are sent aboard the ship to deactivate the rogue AI after the opening character was killed off.

Our supervisor. Capra, is your standard military jock type, so you know he’s getting killed off. Amongst the kids we have the dickhead ‘leader,’ Mel; The smug irritating joker, Samson; the sassy girl, Diondra; the other chick, Lara; and the shy newbie, James. We later also get the badass chick with possible history, Kaida

You can guess which one of them is going to be the survivor. Spoiler alert, it’s James. His survival is further cemented in a line of dialogue which confirms that James was innocent of the crimes he was arrested for and it was his naïve brother who committed them.

This could’ve been an interesting plot thread, especially since we discover the AI (played by Jason Momoa, is effectively eliminating prisoners. It could be that he deliberately ignores him, knowing he’s innocent. Or they could explore the relationship between him and his brother, which is sort of hand-waved off with a single conversation between the two and not really brought up again.

Production wise, it looks pretty good. OK, there are some issues, some of the CGI doesn’t look fantastic and each level looks exactly the same, most likely because it’s the same set being reused. But by and large the effects look really good. I’m particularly impressed by the hubs, a particularly decent bit of CG there.

There’s a lot of menace in our AI system: it sets up traps, baits our characters using psychological tricks and kills them off in some pretty inventive ways. The problem is it’s just not scary. I think part of that is just the imagery. Whilst there is a bit of gore and blood, nothing looks scary. The closest they ever get to scary is the supervisor being controlled.

I think they were trying for more psychological fear, fear of what the AI could do. And why I understand why the characters are scared of being downloaded into the world. I’m not scared here because I know that can’t happen to me. Jason Momoa is many things but he does not look scary

  

Ok… I stand corrected. But he’s not scary here. His voice is pretty monotone for someone who’s supposed to be the downloaded consciousness of everyone that was in the prison. Plus, there’s the means in which he is defeated. The consciousnesses of the digitised characters basically kill him… Yeah… That reduces his threat level for any eventual return.

This film is not very original in any capacity; I feel like the original idea of having it all from the AI’s point of view might’ve worked better. As it is, this is just not a good movie, but not an overly terrible one either.

Rating 60/100

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Images used in this review are from Debug/Batman vs Superman promotion and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.