If Blade Runner and I, Robot gave birth to a new movie starring a bald Antonio Banderas, it would look just like Automata, the latest vision of our inevitably dystopian future. That future—or at least the way director Gabe Ibáñez has imagined it—also looks pretty dang awesome. Well, spectacular is probably a better word
The movie's plot line admittedly sounds a little familiar: In the future, there are robots, and those robots are starting to turn against us (maybe). There's surely some big man-versus-bot battle at the end that probably involves Antonio Banderas screaming. There are some interesting twists, though. The Antonio Banderas character is actually a robot insurance agent who investigates cases when humans manipulate robots. But when a mysterious robot starts manipulating other robots, things get interesting.
It would be disingenuous to judge a movie by its trailer. That set design, though, is fair game. That and what we can glean from the movie's art direction in what little we see of this imagined future is a spectacle of the best variety. I want to know everything about those giant hologram devices hanging out next to the skyscrapers, and I definitely want to know more about those robots—silly faces and all.
One more thing: Automata will open in theaters and On Demand simultaneously on October 10. So I don't even have to leave my house to enjoy this spectacle. Now that's what I call progress! [The Wrap]