Black Road (2015)

The Good: The movie has a pretty good depiction of an AI enhanced soldier who is trying to find his place in life after the war. You can see the protagonist struggling with his dependence on his AI companion, hence the continuous removal of the device when it would probably be helpful. I thought it was comparable to the dependence of some soldiers when returning from war on PTSD medications. There was a strong similarity between the present and this hypothetical future which was both good and realistic. There are holograms Televisions and he rides around on what appears to be an electric motorcycle but otherwise it could be any west coast town today.The plot was fine, it was a basic film noir. This is very typical in science fiction novels, where the plot is there to provide a context in which to explore the interface between some new technology or idea and the present.The Bad: The pacing is a little off in the first third of the movie and then picks up by the halfway point. I thought the AI companion features should have been more thought out. It is hard to be able to see how this tech would have been useful on the battlefield unless it is hampered by the lack of signals intelligence. I imagine something like this would be good for integrating drone feeds and C3.The voodoo angle wasn't fully explored and should have been fleshed out better. There are a couple of references to breaching the mind/spirit barrier and its use as a weapon but an additional 30 seconds of dialog on that would have helped.

I'm the kind of guy who will just throw a movie on while I'm playing a video game or whatnot so I can live with a lot of bad things in a movie, but this one is so bad it hurt. I barely made it 15 minutes in before I had to stop it. The CG looks like terrible, flat and terrible renders. The acting is... well also flat and and inexpressive. The cinematography is perfect, as long as the scene is boring and there is nothing better to look at than an actor walking across the shot. Sound fx, sounds like it was grabbed off the internet - they somehow managed to fit 200 wildly applauding people into a shabby nightclub for example. Unless you're really bored and don't mind a very sub-par movie just don't bother with this one.

The people of Oregon seem to have overwhelmingly positive things to say about this budget flick, which was made in their backyard. However I, knowing none of the crew or cast personally, am afraid to say I found it a little wooden. I kept waiting for the action to ramp up, for the cyborg part of our protagonist's character to come into it's own and do something more than a monotone voice-over. But, sadly, for much of the time this 'supercomputer' implant was removed from his skull and left our hero confused and unable to solve a rather tedious "He did it!", "No, She did it!" argument. There was no clever 'Aha!' moment where the truth was deduced from minute details, no caught in the act reveal, just a slow decline into a humdrum ending.

The other reviewers with starry reviews probably got a dog in the fight, cause even a lobotomized zombie on crack will stay away from this stench of a movie. Acting is so bad that it made me cringe.Wanna be director just need to go to film school - i don't even say "go back to film school" cause he obviously he never attended one or missed a lot of courses. I've seen wedding videos less cheesy than than.I can't even say that CG are bad, they're just middle of the road, looking like some template from After Effects found on the net - it's just they're badly composited/integrated. I've seen amateurs on youTube doing way better than that with DV footage processed on a laptop.But the worst, definitely is the acting part, or its lack of, once you passed the point where this "Sci-Fi" thing looks really that it got shot in rural Oregon last summer, missing all nice landscapes and scenery though. Adding a blue light to a barn doesn't make it look techy, film boys. You got a lot to learn in front of you. First and foremost would be how not to bore to death your unfortunate audience.