Automata Delivers A First Trailer Full Of Classic Sci-Fi Allusions
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Just the other day we got our first look at the bald, bloodied Antonio Banderas in Spanish director Gabe Ibáñez’s (Hierro) sophomore feature Automata. The posters were enough to get our attention—after all, if you scrawl the name of your film on the side of Antonio Banderas’ head, you mean business, right? But this fantastic new trailer definitely moves our anticipation meter up a few notches.
This footage has just about everything we ant out of movie. It’s the future, there are robots becoming sentient and spreading their consciousness to others, there’s action, social allegory, and striking imagery all around. And I ask you, when was the last time, if ever, Dylan McDermott looked this badass? I can’t think of a single example, can you?
Right away you notice some nods and references to other films. There are obvious aesthetic allusions to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, as well as I, Robot (both the book and the movie adaptation), and there is an overall feel that is very similar to what Neill Blomkamp does in movies like District 9, and Elysium. (The robots seriously look a lot like what we’ve seen from his Chappie.) You get a bit of futuristic dystopia mixed with a healthy dose of the post-apocalyptic, and when you throw in ideas like artificial intelligence and big themes like consciousness and what makes us human, you’ve got something very interesting going on.
Ibáñez is most known for his visual effects work, where he has teamed up with maverick filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia for movies like Dance With the Devil and The Day of the Beast.. Automata has been a long time coming, a poster came out all the way back in 2012 (though the new ones are way better), but if this trailer is any indication, it might just be worth the wait.
Banderas recently did a Reddit AMA about the film, where he not only talks about his passion for Automata, but addresses the obvious Isaac Asimov influence as well. He says:
Automata is, you know, my baby. And why I say that is because I produced the movie, besides being also the star of it. It’s actually an approach to science fiction in a very European way, in an independent way. It’s a movie about concept that is [a] philosophical, scientific concept called singularity, which is the time in which machines actually overcome the human mind. So it’s a very reflective philosophical science fiction, going back to the science fiction I love, like Isaac Asimov. That’s the type of movie we tried to do.
Millennium Entertainment will release Automata in theaters and On Demand on October 10.
