Director: Steven Gomez
Cast: Thure Lindhardt, Vanessa Kirby, David Ajala, Bentley Kalu

It's amazing to look at and ponder the various achievements in technology that have come in the past few decades, and how they have quickly become a major part of the public's lives. There is the Internet, of course - practically everyone in western countries now uses it to at least some degree every day in their lives, and the number of people in less developed countries using it is increasing every year. You could say basically the same thing about smart phones - anybody who is worth his or her salt has one, because they have made life so much easier in many different ways (my life too.) Then there is the more recent introduction of A.I. - artificial intelligence, in other words - to the mainstream public. The use of A.I. programs such as Chat GPT and Google Gemini is currently The Next Big Thing as of the writing of this review. And I certainly understand why. While I (currently) refuse to have a paid subscription to one of those AI services, since I only need the use for AI for the occasional query that doesn't need a long and complicated answer, I still find AI has been useful for me in many different ways. For example, one time I wanted to cook beef stew, but I had no idea of how to do it. So I asked an A.I. program to give me an easy-to-follow recipe for beef stew, and after waiting a few seconds, it gave me just that. I have also asked A.I. from time to time to give me answers to questions I thought it might not be possible to answer... and yet it did. One time I was pondering about a segment I watched over forty years ago on the reality television show Real People about an elderly woman who refused to sell her property to an organization that wanted to build a casino there; I always wanted to know what happened after that segment aired. So I wrote a question on an A.I. program giving all the details I remembered, having some doubts the A.I. program could come up with the answer... and it gave me a long and detailed answer as to what eventually happened with the woman and her property in the years afterwards. A decades-long nagging mystery solved in just a few seconds!

On the other hand, I could certainly agree to a degree with cynics who point out the current problems and obstacles with A.I.. For example, when I asked an A.I. program to tell me what it knew about me personally, one of the things it listed in its answer was that I had written nine screenplays. Poppycock - I have written over three dozen screenplays! Also, one time when I was in a playful mood and kept asking A.I. to write scripts for The Muppet Show with various guest stars, it outright refused to write scripts when the guest stars I selected were either O. J. Simpson or John Holmes... but for some reason, it had no problems writing scripts for the show when the guest stars were John Gotti, Vlad the Impaler, the Marquis de Sade, or Genghis Khan. Weird. But yes, there are definitely some potentially troubling things to consider with A.I. now becoming a big part of our society. One of the possibilities of something bad happening is with putting A.I. technology in the hands of the military. It's true that at first thought, there may be some benefits with using AI technology on the battlefield; A.I. can certainly think much faster than even the most quick-witted human, it can in milliseconds figure out the best strategies at hand in a particular situation, and unlike humans, it is not burdened with some of the traps of human thinking like stress and panic. On the other hand, just think back to the Terminator movie franchise, and you'll see the potential risks of putting weapons in the hands of A.I. technology. Plus, while A.I. is certainly free of some traps in regular human thinking, it is, at least at the time of this writing, missing some of the strengths of human thinking such as gut instincts and original creativity.

For now, I think the best way that the military could use A.I. technology is making sure there is always a human element to interact with it. An example of this can be seen at the financial institutions of your city; decades ago, they introduced ATMs, and there was initially a panic that tellers and other human banking personnel would be eliminated. But it was quickly illustrated to all that ATMs can fail or have various problems, so banks to this day keep bank tellers and other bank employees at hand to help out when a machine can't do it all. I don't know if the military in real life will follow this suggestion of mine, but I do have a gut instinct that what the military will ultimately decide to do in the next few years will have interesting results. In the meantime, we can all watch movies about AI being used in the military to give us interest, which is why when I found Kill Command while cruising around one of the streaming services I use, I thought it would be, well, interesting to watch. Kill Command is set in the near future, where in the beginning of the movie we learn there is now a huge tech business called the Harbinger Corporation, which provides various high-tech weapons and computer systems and programs for the military. One of Harbinger's employees, a woman named Katherine Mills (Vanessa Kirby, Mission Impossible: Fallout) who has cybernetic implants in her body, discovers during regular inspections that on an island owned by the Harbinger Corporation for the purpose of testing new military technology, an A.I. warfare computer is showing puzzling outputs. Subsequently, Katherine meets with Captain Burke (Thure Lindhardt, Fast And Furious 6), and it is arranged that Katherine travels with Captain Burke to the island, along with six other Marines under his command, in order to set things straight. Upon reaching the island, the team starts an operation to shut down the A.I. military technology on the island by any means necessary. It starts off well, but soon the team learns that the A.I. controlling the military tech on the island not only has the ability to learn from the humans' actions... it has the ability to fight back.

Knowing that Kill Command is a United Kingdom production may put some potential viewers in a panic, because as Michael Caine once put it, the UK tends to make movies that lean more towards radio-style dialogue sequences than make movies that are more "moving" in nature a la Hollywood. But the good news to report is that writer/director Steven Gomez makes this particular UK movie move a lot more than your average UK movie. Yes, there are times when the movie does slow down considerably for a few minutes, and often during those times there is a kind of "sterile" tone that's the opposite of a typical Hollywood tense and charged-up style. However, I have to admit some of the quieter moments do have some kick to them; for starters, you really do feel these characters are very isolated in the wilds and are very far from anyone who could help them. It's genuinely unnerving at times simply to witness these characters in these cold, stark, and dark wilds. Then when the bullets and projectiles start flying, it often pumps up this feeling that the characters are out of their element. While the action may not be up to the intensity of a Hollywood or Hong Kong film, there is a definite feeling of chaos and also unchoreographed and unexpected happenings by both the humans and the robots they are fighting, and that made me sit at attention to see just what would happen. This is especially true in the climax of the movie, where the remaining humans and robots have one last battle to see who will ultimately gain control; I had no idea what either side was exactly going to do, nor did I know which side would be victorious. The final battle, like the fighting that happened earlier in the movie, has unexpected moments mixed in with the expected yet well-done firepower and explosions, and it made for a very satisfying climax.

There were some minor quibbles I had with the action sequences, however. Unfortunately, this movie, like so many other action-oriented movies in recent years, more often than not uses CGI for bloody (and unbloody) bullet hits and explosions, which is never as good as old-fashioned and real squibs and explosives. Muzzle flashes, sparks, and fog clouds are sometimes CGI as well, and there are a few F/X shots where it's obvious the backdrops were added in post-production. Obviously, Kill Command didn't have the budget or resources to provide more convincing effects in moments like those, but I do have to admit that overall, the special effects look pretty good for a movie with as low a budget as it had. Oddly, the "big" CGI effects, from futuristic helicopters to the hulking A.I. robots, more often than not look much better than many of the "small" CGI effects. And to the movie's credit, the special effects team were able to build "real" robotic effects either as carefully used miniatures to full scale. The robots by themselves look pretty convincing and menacing; you really believe it when the human characters express fear whenever the robots get the upper hand. It also helps that the various actions the robots take throughout the movie come across as very convincing. Now, of course I can't say for sure that real A.I. robots in real like would make the same actions as these cinematic robots, but the way it's presented in this movie is believable. For example, there are two moments in the movie when the A.I. robots attack the humans in manners that are exact copies of tactics the humans did earlier while battling the robots. Perfectly logical, if you ask me, because it seems an artificial intelligence system either battling humans on a chess board or on the battlefield would have learned from what humans presented to it before.

Another way that these A.I. robots come off as being plausible is that they are not quite as sentient as, say, the A.I. robots in The Terminator films. They are just doing what their programs told them to do, to improve their skills and tactics. Even when they "talk", you don't feel a sense of human maliciousness or other human emotions. How do you then reason with these machines? That question helps make them a formidable opponent - and one reason why personally I found them more interesting than the human characters. We don't really learn much of anything about practically all these eight human characters. While it was refreshing to see that the Marines were a bit less stereotypical than usual - while they have some prejudices and vices, they clearly know it's in everybody's best interests to try to be professional on the job - we don't learn anything about their pasts and ambitions, and they are all pretty much alike. The most interesting character among the humans is Katherine, pretty much by default because she is a cyborg. She has a little backstory that's eventually revealed, but emphasis on the word "little" - it isn't much. And she does provide a plot twist midway through the movie, which is welcome because it finally clears up the murky beginning, where it's not clear what the problem is on the island that requires her and the Marines to visit the island. On the other hand, she isn't used to explain clearly why when on the island, it's determined that the Marines have to destroy the A.I. Machines when they initially seem to be harmless. Oh, and if you think you got a whiff of the plot of Aliens from what I've told you about the movie up to this point, I can definitely tell you that you are correct; it was clearly a significant influence on this movie. But while Aliens definitely would outdo Kill Command any day of the week, if you don't mind seeing the same basic elements again, and you are a fan of B movies that manage in many ways to punch above their low budget weight, this movie should fit the bill pretty well. And hey, it could have been a lot worse - everything from the script to the special effects could have been made by A.I. instead of humans.

(Posted September 15, 2025)