Note: This is another review posted from my Epinions reviews. I am making a few modifications since it was written so long ago.
I actually bought Future War many years ago at the mall. It was $3. I figured that it was about the same price as renting. I should warn you that this movie was overpriced.
It starts with three people walking through these narrow corridors
looking for something, presumably to kill it. They find it, but one of
the three people trips and gets eaten. This marks the start of the
opening credits, which alternate between names on a black background and
scenes inside this empty ship. You get the impression that someone’s on
it, but you can’t actually see anyone. Finally, Runaway, played by
Daniel Bernhardt, washes up on shore. He’s a runaway slave (hence the
name) running, and running from something bad. If you want to know how
bad, remember that the writers didn’t bother to come up with a better
name than Runaway.
Killer cyborgs and their dinosaur trackers are
after him. The cyborgs look like the original concept was a vampire and
the makeup department couldn’t even get that right. The dinosaurs also
look like it was a real dollar-store effort. I’m not trying to demean
dollar stores, but you’d think that a movie could do a little better
than cheap puppets. That’s not even mentioning the point-of-view shots.
For the cyborgs, we see a shot with the colors distorted and some lines
framing the image. Dinosaurs only get a strong red tint.
For
the first 15 minutes of the movie, there’s no real dialogue, unless you
count the screams of innocent bystanders as dialogue. Apparently, the
dinosaurs aren’t too smart and the cyborgs don’t talk much, so the
dinosaurs will kill anything in their path until they eventually kill their
intended target. This includes a guy on the beach and some homeless guy. Runaway
manages to kill a dinosaur before he runs into a warehouse to hide
from the cyborg. When we finally do get to see the cyborg (it had been
point-of-view shots for a while) we get to see the epitome of bad
acting. Think of all of the zombies, androids, and other things that
walk stiffly. How it had managed to keep up is beyond me.
The
set design for the warehouse looked like it was done at the last minute
and/or with a microbudget. There were lots of empty cardboard boxes filled with
thing that, when they fall, make a cheap, broken-glass kind of sound. We
even get to see Runaway pull out some martial arts on the cyborg. There
was one scene that made me think of Jean-Claude Van Damme channeling
Bruce Lee. He dispatches it quickly and moves on.
He
eventually hooks up with a sister who’s on the verge of losing her faith
and has friends played by actors reading off of cue cards.
They can’t figure out why Runaway can’t speak English. (He does pick it
up eventually.) The movie takes off from there as they mobilize to take
on the threat from another killer cyborg and dinosaur, both of which
take a lot longer to kill than their predecessors. As is typical with a b
movie, the good guys win and the bad guys stand only enough of a chance
to get some good fight scenes into the movie.
The entire
movie wreaks of a low budget and is even confusing at times. As I
mentioned, the acting is sub par. The set for the church looks like the
movie rented out someone’s bedroom. Also, notice that when the reporter
from Channel 2 is doing his report, it looks like the microphone has
only a piece of paper with ׀” written on it. It’s pathetic to think that
someone doing a movie couldn’t bust out to have a fake microphone made up.
Now, there are a few things that I can’t figure out. We know that
there’s a ship in the area of Earth; I’m assuming that this is the one
that Runaway escaped from. However, did he steal the ship? Was it just
some ship that he was being transported on? Was it the cyborgs’ ship
sent to retrieve him?
About the cyborgs, it says that they
were sent from the future to retrieve Runaway, but there’s no mention of
time travel other than the text right after the opening credits. Also,
are cyborgs the masters who enslaved Runaway or are they simply sent out
as automatons? We know that the humans and dinosaurs are actually from
Earth. They even have Christianity as their religion. It’s odd that
Runaway could quote the Bible, even though it took him a while to figure
out spoken English.
This movie is what other bad movies aspire to be. At least it's good for a few laughs.
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