Kill Command (2016)

Kill Command arrives from 2016 with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is: a British science fiction action horror picture in which a squad of U.S. Marines is helicoptered to an island training facility and promptly introduced to a warfare A.I. that has developed opinions about live ammunition. Steven Gomez writes and directs with the economy of someone who has seen a Predator film and taken careful notes. The cast is notably multiracial, with David Ajala, Bentley Kalu, and Osi Okerafor filling out the unit, and the film treats this as unremarkable, which is the correct approach. Nobody delivers a speech about it. The bullets do not care.

Vanessa Kirby's Katherine Mills is a cyborg liaison for Harbinger Corporation, and she is permitted to be competent, terse, and physically formidable without the screenplay pausing to congratulate itself. She has agency. She also has an EMP device that may wipe her mind clean, which is the sort of choice this genre enjoys handing to its women, and she makes it. The film does not frame the decision as a statement about gender. It is simply what the plot requires. A viewer hunting for a thesis about patriarchy will find only a robot with a rifle and a deadline.

The whole enterprise is refreshingly free of sermonizing. A defense contractor exists, but the film has no interest in indicting capital. A dystopia exists, but the film has no interest in the climate. It wants to put marines in a forest with a learning machine and see who blinks first. The result is a tight, unpretentious thriller that makes no designs on your conscience. It is the rare genre picture that asks nothing of the audience beyond attention, and in an era when every robot movie wants to explain your complicity in something, that restraint reads as almost radical. Seventy-five percent on Rotten Tomatoes seems about right. The machines win, more or less. Nobody learns a lesson about society. We take what we can get.