Review Ten - Future War

    I love Mystery Science Theater 3000. I'll just say that right now. I also needed to cover a War topic for this blog. So, when I googled "Future War movie" last night for a blog topic, I was overjoyed with what I found: A terrible direct to video movie called Future War. And won't you know it, it just so happened that Mystery Science Theater 3000 covered it.Naturally, I chose to watch the movie with MST3K commentary. My point is that my view of Future War is going to be completely biased.

    Future War takes place in some relatively close future on Earth. That's the only clear thing about this movie, so strap in!

    Somewhere in space, there's an Earth - like planet ruled by cyborgs. The cyborgs came to Earth long ago and stole some humans to be their slaves. Those slaves repopulated leading to other generations of humans who have only known slavery. The slaves may occasionally try to rebel, but the cyborgs train reanimated dinosaurs to hunt and kill them. That has to be the most epic premise I've ever heard. Cyborgs, dinosaurs, and human slaves rolled into one film. Unfortunately, it was terribly executed and it seemed like a mesh of ten other movies (MST3K: "It's more like a movie loaf, a bunch of other movies chunked up and baked into one.").

    The movie starts when a human slave takes an escape pod from a cyborg star ship and lands somewhere in California. The human slave, referred to as "The Runaway", is found and taken in by a nun in training, formerly a drug dealer and prostitute. The Runaway had knowledge of his Earth ancestry, and believes that Earth is heaven from the Bible.

    However, the cyborgs send a bunch of dinosaurs, called "trackers", down to either kill or return The Runaway. Trackers wear explosive neak collars that explode once they die, "to erase their tracks" - I just think they did because they thought it would look cool. Keep in mind that these dinosaurs aren't expensive models; They're just essentially dolls held close to the camera in order to use forced perspective. Anyway, the runaway succeeds in killing a couple of trackers, forcing a cyborg, who looks suspiciously like Ron Jeremy in spandex, to come to Earth and find him.

    This action leads to "a war on Earth" - though not a big one. It's just the runaway, the nun, a some drug dealers fighting in a box factory against Ron Jeremy and his ridiculous forced perspective dolls. To make a long story short, The Runaway defeats Ron Jeremy by lighting him on fire from an explosive necklace.

    While the movie doesn't take place too far into the future, it still relates back to some of the central questions. The movie clearly defines that cyborgs are not human because of their lack of compassion or indifference toward human life. The Runaway is human from a biological standpoint and an emotional one.

    If this movie teaches us anything about today's society, it's that we shouldn't allow ourselves to be kidnapped by cyborgs and repopulate for them. Yeah, it's a pretty loose moral, but this movie isn't even tied together with string.