Fans of sci-fi are definitely aware of 1990's Robot Jox, but modern audiences? Not so sure. Still, I wouldn't call it forgotten, just "not as known" perhaps.
Briefly for those who have no idea what Robot Jox is all about: It's a movie by Stuart Gordon (Reanimator, Dagon) taking place in the future where wars are outlawed after Nuclear War annihilated civilizations. If there's territorial dispute, it's settled through a sporting event: a country selects their best champion to pilot a nearly 120 ft tall robot to battle the champion of the rival country. USA's (called Market) jockey Achilles is scheduled to fight Soviet Union's (Confederation) Alexander for Alaska, however, things go wrong when spectators on the bleachers are accidentally killed during the duel by the falling robot. Achilles refuses the rematch and quits the sport. However, when he finds out that his love interest, Athena, is going to replace him in the battle, he tries to save her from certain death at the hands of maniacal Alexander and rushes to take her place. The story is basically a sci-fi take on Ancient Greek's Iliad according to the director (and common sense).
Robot Jox was Empire Picture's most expensive movie, however the company folded before it could be released. It was shot in 1986 but didn't get into the theaters until 1990! Imagine how ambitious this project was for the time when there was no CGI and the budget was still very limited ($10 Million). The most obvious option was stop motion, but they tried to minimize it and do it for real, on location (Mojave desert) with large scale models and full size sections of the Mechs
The movie did get at least some push. It appeared in highly popular Starlog magazine and the trailer for the VHS release was featured on the European Terminator 2: Judgment Day rental VHS, and that is where I found out about that movie.
I was watching Terminator 2 regularly, and on one occasion my cousin's husband was over at my house and saw me popping the Terminator 2 VHS and then bragged that he found a copy of Robot Jox and that the cover looks awesome and has some great effect. He tipped us which rental place has it (There was only one in the entire city, and luckily, one of the two closest to us). He was right about the cover: I've never seen anything like it before or since: the cover was made out of shiny, silvery, reflective material sort of like street signs and a bit like foil covers. And it was only released like this in Poland, where I grew up until the age of 16. Not only the cover alone is still one of the best sci-fi covers, but with that amazing effect, it was the coolest thing ever for me as a kid (along with Terminator 2 )
The movie became my second favorite movie ever right after Terminator 2, and I kept renting it at least once a month for what would seem like years. When I revisited the movie after over 20 years, I expected a cheesefest typical for low key movies like these of the 1980s, especially considering that most of my favorites that I rewatched weren't good at all and were ok at best (with few exceptions). But to my huge surprise, it was actually not a disaster I expected it to be. I was expecting to chuckle, roll my eyes or facepalm throughout it, and yet it was actually pretty decent.
The story doesn't have any great depth: it's very surface, and the movie goes by very fast, so don't expect anything other than what the synopsis for the movie says, but it's pretty good in what its doing and the character moments are interesting and engaging. The effects are good considering the times the movie was made in, and the movie actually builds an anticipation for the final fight very well. And the music by Frederick Talgorn is absolutely fantastic. It's such a grand, orchestral score with very lavish, grand and beautiful compositions. Absolutely great score
There was a lot of talent involved in the movie. The designs of the actual robots (sans the ones in the opening sequence) and some other futuristic things were done by legendary Ron Cobb, who designed the Nostromo spaceship in the original Alien, the colony in Aliens, DeLorean in Back To The Future and also did designs for the original Star Wars: A New Hope, Conan the Barbarian, Raiders of the Last Ark, and The Abyss among others. Elaborating on his designs was Steve Burg, who did design work for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Matrix and Interstellar among others. So talking about A list design team! And it shows: the robots do look very realistic and practical: the robots have no heads (even thought Alexander's has venting system that resembles one) and they look like heavy machinery. The director, Stuart Gordon, said they were approaching the robots like NASA
The sound design does wonders. The robots move slowly and you can sense their immense weight and the power required to raise their limbs. Their every movement is slow, heavy and accompanied by a sound of a heavy machinery, like freight elevator's. That makes them real, the most real giant robots in cinematic history, next to which Transformers and Pacific Rim robots look and move like video game or cartoon characters with no weight to them whatsoever. Robots in Robot Jox move like giant cranes, with the same speed and heaviness.
Also, the idea of the robots copying the pilot's movements through an interface originated in this movie, and was later used in Pacific Rim and Avatar among others.
The movie does have its silly moments, but it's almost unavoidable in older low budget scifi movies who tried to predict or show us some whacky future. And since the budget was eaten by the robot duels, there was nothing left for set design so its pretty sparse. They pretty much did the Japanese transparent paper screens of Shoji houses, which I guess is a good solution of how to show a future without any budget
The look of the movie is very clean, bright and sterile, but as the director said, it's mostly showing the environments of a Sport company, Sport players and trainees, not an actual world. But it does give the movie that overly clean, Star Trek look
The online "Professors" always get hung up on the idea that the war is outlawed in that universe and that the conflicts are settled via robot duel. "How do you outlaw a war? Does it stop a war when you make it illegal?". However, with little logical thinking and attention it's easy to answer. The voiceover in the prologue explains that its been 50 years after the Nuclear War. Just 50 years. The movie also shows us that the world is now mostly a desolate desert and there's very few people. Governments promote having children to repopulate the Earth. 50 years after a nuclear world annihilation is nothing, it's basically a start of rebuilding and repopulating. It doesn't take a genius to figure out there are neither armies nor arsenal or enough people left after the end of the world to have any armed conflict. Therefore this sport has been invented and every defense resource had been pumped into those giant mechs.
And that scenario (of single duel between two settling a larger conflict) happened several times throughout history. Some examples include conflict between Siam and Burma in 1593 involving a duel on war elephants and conflict between Rome and Elba Longa in the 7th century BC. A Roman general Nero Claudius Dusus challenged several German chieftains to single combat during his campaigns.
Some chuckle that the trainees for Jockeys have to climb a booby trapped jungle gym to get a shot at becoming a pilot, questioning how climbing a jungle gym helps in piloting a giant machine. Well, the director explained on the audio commentary that the reason behind it was simply to see who is the most determined to win, not to literally check or hon someone's piloting abilities.
It's not that I defend the movie or get worked up on its criticism. There IS stuff in it that makes no sense to the point that it’s unintentionally funny, mostly on the verge of second and third act. Its got its share of cheese in that area but far, far less than one would expect, and packaged much better. It's just that I have little tolerance for the internet "know it alls" who believe they should be teaching just about every movie director how to do things. However, those geniuses only show a complete lack of logical or deductive thinking by often pompously pointing at faults that aren't really faults or plotholes, as most of the time they are simply something that flew over the "genius'" head.
Is Robot Jox a great movie? It isn't a bad movie. Other than the silly future and some questionable plot choices, it's a movie that can just be described as "not a bad movie", if that makes sense. It's been mentioned a few times online that it's a kids movie because so many, including myself, loved it as a kid. But is it thought? Nudity, gore, not subtle at all sexual jokes: not a movie aimed for kids, but rather, a movie for adults that kids can enjoy.
There are shots I can't even post here because the post would be flagged, such as the victims of the accident from the bleachers and shower nudity. And the movie is rated PG! Go figure
This movie is not for everyone thought. If you like 80s movies and you like scifi, I think you'll enjoy it. And it's definitely heads and shoulders above most low budget scifi 80s films. But if you aren't a scifi buff, it may be just 'meh' for you, although I think the subplot of Achilles' journey is surprisingly quite engaging. It's not like you can't wait for the robot duel and anything in between is a filler you can't wait to get past. Not at all. Gary Graham creates a very likable character and his character's journey of despair and retirement is well done I believe, even if brief and very surface like. And the spy subplot adds a nice flavor to the whole thing. The intentional humor/comic relief is quite funny
***
Let's go back to early 1990s. So I rented Robot Jox about once a month for I don't know how long. But then one day, I come to get it and that angular logo catches my eye, but it's not in the sci-fi section. It's in the R rated section (some places separated R rated movies) and it was not a duplicate. It was Robot Jox 2: Crash and Burn.
You can guess that my heart nearly jumped out of my chest as I grabbed the tape and after few seconds of staring at it in shock, I took it to the counter and - I was denied it. Yup. "Rated R, you can't rent it". Have in mind, that was my second favorite movie of all time. I couldn't wait to come back with my father and I was bummed that a sequel to Robot Jox is laying there in the VHS rental place and I'm not watching it yet. I had a hard time falling asleep that night (Remember, I'm talking about a time when my age was still in single digits). Unfortunately, my dad said I had to wait for the weekend, as this is when we were renting movies for the entire weekend and this is when he made the trips to the rental place. So I had to wait all those days, extremely impatiently, trying to remember how the cover looks like and wonder what is it about. Saturday finally came and I pulled my dad straight to the section where I found Robot Jox 2: Crash and Burn at. It was there as I said it would be. So my dad puts it on the counter, and the owner, who pretty much knew everyone because at the time every family had their movie weekends, glanced at me, then back at my father and told him that this is really not a movie for kids. It's heavy R. While I started to plead to my dad, the owner spoke again, this time directly to me: "It's not like the first one at all, there aren't any robot battles in this one. You really don't want to see this, it's an adult movie". So we came out empty handed. Of course, you can imagine my crushing disappointment. I was barely containing tears. By that point I was a hardcore fan of RoboCop (1 & 2) and Terminator movies (1&2) and knew them by memory, so my parents weren't that strict about the rating as long as they could supervise it, but the VHS place owner never underlined the R rating so firmly before. The movie was a no-no for me. Obviously, it became my most desirable movie, and I even found a trailer for it on one of the movies my parents rented for themselves. I kept watching it over and over, and I don't know why it didn't make me wonder why the movie was seemingly completely unrelated to the first one. I think I just figured it's just happening in the same universe many years later.
I tried couple of times to rent it again, sometimes even renting two or three movies at once with Robot Jox 2: Crash and Burn trying to casually sneak it over but to no success. The movie was always picked up from the pile and I was met with a headshake and another explanation about how this is not a movie for kids. I finally gave up, wrote a note to my future self (ha!) to rent it when I'm gonna be 18 even if I don;t care by that point. Sort of, "my future self, please rent it for your past self's sake". Cute.
One day however, I noticed there's some new girl at the counter at the VHS place, and naturally, I had to try my luck. And lo and behold, I put the tape on the counter, took out the money, and was handed the movie. Yes! Bingo! I ran home as fast as I could (It was midday, might have been summer) and popped it right into the VHS player. I was crushed about 30 seconds into the movie when I realized what this is all about. This movie was not Robot Jox 2. It was not a sequel to Robot Jox. There was no Robot Jox 2 then and there's still no Robot Jox 2 today. Even thought the Polish cover said it was, the actual movie credits and title screen showed otherwise, and it all made sense. Now I knew why it had nothing to do with the first movie. The movie was actually titled Crash and Burn, and I sensed that the packaging was made by people not related to the movie. I was right. Many years later I found out that Poland, as the only country in the world for some reason, retitled Crash And Burn on VHS covers as Robot Jox 2: Crash and Burn. Things like that were done everywhere at the time though. Like for example, Troll 2 wasn't actually a sequel to Troll and didn't even had Trolls in it. It was an unrelated movie about Goblins that was suppose to be called Goblins, but since Troll was a mild success on VHS they slapped Troll 2 on as the movie title. I know nowadays it's a headscratcher for some, but that's how it was. Here's the funny thing about the Polish version of Crash and Burn though: The VHS cover said "Robot Jox 2: Crash and Burn", the title was actually just "Crash and Burn" and the movie title translated on the VHS was "Program: Destruction". I felt so cheated that I didn't even care for this movie, knowing it's not related to Robot Jox at all. I watched it till the end, but it clearly wasn't a movie for me, even thought it had sci-fi elements.
So what was the movie about? In short, it's a heavy R, scifi horror about a small group of people stranded on a desolated old TV station during a massive storm. One of them gets murdered and they discover that they must have a synthetic among them who will try to kill them all one by one. The movie draws ideas from multiple scifi and horror classics, mainly Blade Runner, The Terminator and The Thing.
They have the same exact blood test as in The Thing, because supposedly synthetic blood is much darker.
They only find out later that the synthetic pumped himself with a real blood prior to the test, smuggling the blood in the freon canisters.
It's a typical, low budget, sleazy, straight to video horror movie. Very gory (the synth rips the arm off one of the people stranded at the station) and heavy on nudity and sex. The synth disables the power and kills the victims one by one. The unique thing is, he is a very playful and sadistic. He likes to play with his victims.
The synth is played by Bill Moseley, who also played psychopath in gory Rob Zombie movies like The Devil's Rejects and House of 1000 Corpses.
Oh, and where's the big robot in that story? Oh yes, it's established in the beginning as lying in a junk pile. It's an old construction robot, like a crane. It's activated at the end of the movie for one minute to lift up a tower that fell and trapped one of the main characters. That's it
There are similarities with Robo Jox though. The director of Crash and Burn was one of the producers on Robot Jox. Also, the phrase "Crash and Burn" was a saying that Jockeys said to themselves in Robot Jox. However, here it's simply what the synthetic said about what he did with his morality chip. One last, and weird similarity, is that both movies start with the exact same music cue, although it isn't just copied and pasted from Robot Jox onto Crash and Burn. It's the same music cue, but played on harps in Robot Jox and I believe on acoustic guitar on Crash and Burn. And yes, both feature giant robots, although again, even though the giant robot is featured on the cover, it's in the movie only for about a minute and it's controlled through remote computer.
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