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The Age of Commercialism

Simply Perfect

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

In the year 2057, the government created the Omega cyborgs in order to subdue the people but the Omegas changed their programming, becoming rebel leaders. In response, the Prototype cyborgs were created with the sole purpose of eliminating the Omegas, which they eventually succeed. Twenty years later in the ruins of Los Angeles, wheelchair-bound war veteran Hawkins Coselaw volunteers for a revival of the Prototype program. Placed in a Prototype battlesuit, Hawkins uses his new powers to protect his girlfriend Chandra from thugs. But what they don't know is that the program's revival is intended to subjugate the surviving population – and that Chandra is the last of the Omegas.The early 1990s were a time when the DTV sci-fi action market blossomed to the point that it is now almost a genre in itself. With major blockbusters like TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY giving rise to the themes of deadly cyborgs, something that would be EXTREMELY popular during that decade, the industry would grow to the point that the DTV industry today is massive.One of the earliest killer cyborg films of the 1990s was 1992's Prototype X29A, a debut for one of the genre's biggest B-grade directors – Phillip J. Roth. Roth would form the UFO production company in the mid-1990s & make dozens of cheap sci-fi flicks. While the director's later works were watchable enough, Prototype X29A is far from perfect.The problem with a film like Prototype X29A is that nothing really happens in it. Roth is so intent on crafting a futuristic society in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that he forgets to add any real story to it. But once the film does pick up one, the lack of any real substance to it causes the film to collapse into empty visuals.That said, the film's greatest strength is that the depiction of the future society where technology is outlawed & a church where a priest plays videos to redeem the sinners & waves a gun around to scare off intruders is interesting. But it's a case of too little too late to add anything worthwhile to the genre.

Not long ago, I discovered there was one last old-fashioned video store in town, with an action/sci-fi section stocked heartily with tapes from the 80s/90s. I love robots, and going by the android-looking figure on the tape jacket and a vague promise of action, I rented this movie under its Canadian release title of "Prototype X29A". I mean, come on, I'm only 19. That just sounded cool! Watching it with my 14-year-old brother in tow, I was more hoping it would be so-bad-it's-good (like, think of Kickpuncher from Community), but not long into it, I was starting to wish I rented "No Man's Land" just to see young Charlie Sheen.My hopes were high during the opening scene, which takes place in the once far-off year of 2057, and has some really nice atmosphere and delightfully terrible fighting. Everything changes as soon as we cut to 20 years in the future, focusing on a colony of mostly old people and some punk-looking young adults. The story seems to focus more on a young woman (only clad in a weird bra-shirt for this film) who was a toddler during the opening scene, her teenage surrogate brother, and a guy in a wheelchair who looked like John Taylor. A priest was trying to kill the teenage boy for no reason, John Taylor was playing with an erotic sim game (at one point he clicks on an option that brings up a male partner, the one thing that actually provided amusement for me beyond the prologue), and a lady who looks a lot like Lara Croft is on a computer for most of the film. And some guy kept getting into fights, and breaking necks was his only move.It's boring, painfully so. I don't mind a lot of exposition, but here all essential information would display on a computer screen in a font that looked nifty and hi-tech in the late eighties. It bumbles around aimlessly, throwing handfuls of characters and bizarre events in your face (i.e. a card game in a saloon with a meth addict Tom Hiddleston lookalike). It even got borderline nasty at times, too, with one scene where our female lead is either prostituting to or about to be raped by four guys. The first assailant says to another, "USE MAH SKIN" and pulls off his used condom...yikes, the movie instantly was in bad favour with me. It tries to blend action, scientific themes, apocalyptic settings, eroticism and general sleaze into one package, and the result is as palatable as expired milk. (Mind you, I loved "Heavy Traffic". Violence and sleaze can be good when they're not slathered all over.)I didn't finish it. I feel really bad admitting this, but it was one of the few movies that were so unappealing I just had to stop. I'd give it one star, but the trashy opening and one laugh provided some entertainment. If you need to see something cheesy and 80s, I'd rather you looked up the Malofilm Video and Vidmark Entertainment indents, which displayed at the beginning of the Canadian release. They're adorably dated, but my point is, two home video indents should not be better than your whole film.

I honestly believe this is the worst movie I've ever seen. I am a B movie activist but this is the worst ever. Do not watch under penalty of law. You have been warned!Here are the questions you should ask yourself / points of interest for this movie.1. What happened to the cities and society that made the world this bad? They never tell you. 2. They never explain that Hawkins Coselow is Chandra Kerkorian's lover. They only way you would ever discover this is if you read the box. 3. From the box. "The experiment goes out of control and the prototype goes hunting for Chandra whom he is programmed to kill." If he is programmed to kill Chandra why would the experiment be going out of control when he begins to hunt her? 4. The explosive climax they promise on the box never happens ... why you ask? The prototypes were only made for one reason, to kill the omegas. Chandra is the last omega. Where does mankind's existence hang in the balance?Here is my personal title for this movie which is much more appropriate.HAWKINS GETS NEW LEGS

Throughout the movie, I kept on thinking to myself, "This movie would have been a lot better if it were an anime." It has all the features of an anime and could have been a pretty good one, but it's just that it didn't work out too well with live action. It was easy to notice that the director had some nice ideas, with the colors and all, but it just didn't work out for him. To date, the only movies I've seen that have successfully portrayed a good anime in live action form are "Romeo Must Die," "The Matrix," and "Pi."