Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Strong and Moving!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The movie kicks off with a tin-suited Prototype stalking amidst rubble and zapping anyone who stands in its way. Bullets just bounce off.We are in the middle of the 21st century when the powers-that-be try to get civilization going again with the aid of Omegas who are part computer but mainly human . But then, so the daft story goes, the authorities changed their mind and sent out robotic prototypes to obliterate the Omegas. Just a little girl survived who later would become a rebel leader. The characters are too low key to raise any interest, the plot is confusing. The direction is interesting though, and the effects are very good bearing in mind the clear poverty of the budget.

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 consider myself to be a major contender in the terms of low budget science fiction, i'm not one to brag but when I was a teenager, the movie clerk would say that I was keeping him in business by renting the obscure flicks that basically came and went without much of an impression. Prototype X29A (Which I guess is titled Prototype) is a movie that reminded me a lot like the equally dull Nemesis, in that it seems to labor to tell a story that has lots of heart and excitement but fails in most regards. Actually there are some okay moments that surface, for one of the characters is admittedly likable. The guy in a wheelchair has our sympathy, he wants to become a robot so he can have his true love but this is all abandoned for stupid quirkiness which add little to the story and nothing that is interesting. Plus the whole rebel underground subplot and the totalitarian government are clichés borrowed from Albert Pyun. I actually saw Prototype X29A in a double-bill with ROTOR, at least ROTOR (While admittedly far worse) was hilarious to watch. This one was just a decorated bore with little merit.*1/2 out of 4-(Poor)

I can say without reservation that this is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I was mesmerized in a certain way by the inane and nonsensical plot, the wooden acting, and the boring action sequences. To fully understand what happened in this film you would probably have to watch it more than once, which would be absolutely unbearable. If you really feel like seeing a bad movie, and not just a somewhat less than good movie, this is the one for you.