Rating: D+
Dir: Miao Jincang
Star: Li Yanan, Wang Lei, Hu Bo, Chen Sai Sai
a.k.a. Heavy Armor 4: Monster Attack
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. That’s my main takeaway after watching in this, because the humans are mostly a bit crap, and it’s up to the robots to save the day. Now, to be clear: I have not seen Heavy Mech/Armor 1-3. This fourth entry appears to be the only one to have made it out of China thus far, so I cannot say whether previous entries go along the same line of relentless propaganda for the pro-robot faction. This begins with a helicopter dropping off a party on a deserted island for a mission, only for them to be torn apart by an overly large crocodile and other creatures.
Two years later, a civilian rescue group decide the island will be just the place for a training exercise. They want to test out some humanoid robots which have become part of their resources. These are capable of going into places that would perilous for people, and are generally stronger, faster and – let’s be honest – more capable than us. Nothing much happens initially. Indeed, after the arrival of the training group, you get considerably more discussion about rescue protocols than the monster attacks promised by the title. In the first half, the closest is when one of the party, Yanzi (Chen) thinks she sees something. The captain in charge doesn’t exactly blow her off, but logic dictates there shouldn’t be anything larger than a turtle present on the island.
Logic, of course, turns out to be fallible, and things do perk up significantly after the mid-way point, with a slew of creatures showing up, albeit to sadly non-lethal effect. These aren’t just enlarged versions of your everyday fauna too, with some rather gnarly looking original creations (top), which appear to have arrived on day release from Resident Evil. They also encounter a survivor of the original party, who explains that what they were doing on the island was disposing of nuclear waste illegally in an underground bunker and… Well, I’m sure you can figure the rest out, leading to the survivor and the captain bravely volunteering to go down into the bunker and secure the facility.
The concept isn’t bad, and as noted, the design work is decent. Unfortunately, everything else falls into the poor to terrible categories. There’s rarely a sense of the monsters being on the same island as the human characters, with some laughably poor physics on view. Even when it’s the equally CGI robots who are fighting the monsters, the results are unconvincing. The script is little if any better, especially at the end, where everyone just kinda walks off screen to a helicopter that suddenly showed up. Very little effort seems to have gone into developing a story that is sensible, barely making it from Point A to Point B. I’ll be putting just as little effort into finding its predecessors, that’s for sure.
This review is part of our feature, When Chinese Animals Attack.