Roboshark
2015
(My entries are late this year. I watched them on time but have been both very sick and deferring to coursework. Please accept them now. Thanks.)
I demand these two hours of my life back.
Technically this was classified a Scifi movie because people think anything mentioning the word "alien" should be. This is too bad to label as anything other than low budget.
The story opens with an alien probe falling into the ocean, where it's eaten by a Great White and morphs into the titular beastie. It's hardly terrifying and quite dorky looking. However, we have to give sharks a bad name along with aliens, so it starts eating everything in sight. After a video of it attacking a biplane goes viral, Roboshark finds its way into the water and sewer lines, allowing it to wreak havoc ashore. This is where the human component comes in.
I can't even remember these peoples names...and not because I watched is so many weeks ago. It was that bad. I'm not even going to waste my time looking them up. The human portion of the story revolves around Roboshark's version of April O'Neil and her family. The mother is a "serious anchorwoman" wannabe married to a water and sewer department manager (?), and they have a teenager phone-addicted daughter. Once Roboshark becomes a reality to the populace, the mother, daughter and a news crew begin tracking the thing all over Seattle. Meanwhile the father is at work, under military (in this case, the Navy) supervision.
I get that it's a shark but I question bringing in the Navy considering all the damage was being done inland - they were seriously outmatched. Before long, the decision is made to bring in "someone with real power"...and we get Bill Glates.
Seriously.
The bespectacled billionaire and his bevy of Girl Fridays bring a drone to - I have know idea - pick up Roboshark's frequency and talk to it? I don't think I need to tell you how it ended. Several screams and a swim through an exploding poop tank later, the shark-hound gang find a way to track the shark using cellphone GPS and follow it in earnest. In the midst of this are a series of text messages that you are actually expected to read. Usually, a camera will zoom in on the phone screen whenever an audience is supposed to perform this feat. These geniuses decided to put the text in a pastel box that ran across the film. I guess no one tested how that would look on different viewing devices. Let's face it: this flick will mostly get watched outside of a theater, where this method rendered the text illegible while streaming to a TV. And it gets worse...
About 40 minutes into this dren, the film becomes an unbearable social media commercial. You are expected to read literally dozens of Youtube and Twitter comments, as well as keep up with news crew's expanding coverage views and followers. When Roboshark itself started following the daughter on Twitter I was done. By the way, this took place in a segment where they attempt to showcase the power of social media/technology by tweeting, texting or otherwise cyber-notifying people to vacate the area of a high school pool where the shark was set to invade. People still got eaten. Points denied.
After this I watched the movie in fast forward. The shark met it's end via the Space Needle. However, there may be a Robochihuahua sequel.
