There are bad movies, there are forgettable movies, and then there’s Kill Command — a film so aggressively mediocre it feels like it was written by the very artificial intelligence it warns us about. Directed and written by Steven Gomez, this 2016 British sci-fi horror tries to be Aliens meets The Terminator and ends up closer to Call of Duty: Cutscene Edition.
Let’s be clear: there’s a difference between minimalist storytelling and what Kill Command does, which is strip a movie down until there’s nothing left but gunfire, blue lights, and dialogue that sounds like it was generated by a malfunctioning chatbot. If this movie were a person, it would introduce itself with a firm handshake and then stare blankly into your soul for two hours.
The Premise: Corporate Murderbots & Existential Ennui
In the near future—because it’s always “the near future” in these things—humans have built AI soldiers to replace regular troops. You’d think they’d stop doing this after every single movie where the AI decides that “serving humans” really means “eradicating them,” but here we are again.
Our story follows a squad of U.S. Marines sent on a training mission to an island owned by the ominously named Harbinger Corporation. (Because nothing says “definitely ethical” like a company called Harbinger.) They’re accompanied by Katherine Mills (Vanessa Kirby), a cybernetically enhanced officer who’s basically the Siri of the squad—smart, efficient, and guaranteed to make you question your life choices after five minutes of conversation.
The team’s goal? Train against robots. The result? Be hunted and systematically annihilated by those same robots. It’s a classic tale of “oops, the murder machines are self-aware now.”
The Characters: Cardboard Soldiers with Wi-Fi
Every Marine in this film feels less like a person and more like a half-loaded video game NPC. There’s Captain Bukes (Thure Lindhardt), whose entire personality is summarized as “gruff guy who doesn’t trust cyborgs.” There’s Drifter (David Ajala), who’s supposed to be the emotional core, but mostly exists to prove that “emotional core” can still die screaming halfway through act two.
The rest of the squad is a blur of generic call signs—Cutbill, Robinson, Hackett, Loftus—each one fated to die in increasingly predictable ways. You don’t root for them so much as place mental bets on who will glitch out of existence next.
And then there’s Vanessa Kirby’s Mills. She’s the most interesting character conceptually—a human enhanced with AI implants, caught between empathy and machine logic—but the film uses her like a walking exposition dump. Kirby does her best to act through the neon-lit monotony, but you can almost see her soul whispering, “Remember when I was in Mission: Impossible? That was nice.”
The Robots: Skynet’s Less Ambitious Cousins
Ah, the villains. The AI drones are meant to be terrifying—cold, calculating, adaptable. In practice, they look like budget versions of Boston Dynamics prototypes on steroids. The big bad, “S.A.R.-003,” resembles a robot dog crossed with a malfunctioning espresso machine. It spends most of the movie lurking dramatically, learning tactics, and probably wondering why its creators gave it the emotional range of a Roomba.
To its credit, the robot army does seem to have learned from humanity’s greatest military tactic: “shoot wildly and hope for the best.” The result is less a high-stakes battle and more like watching a laser tag tournament hosted in a fog machine.
By the third act, the machines have adapted to the Marines’ strategies, which sounds scary until you realize the Marines’ primary strategy is “stand in open spaces and yell.”
The Action: Pew Pew Existential Crisis
If you love watching soldiers exchange meaningless gunfire in endless corridors of grey metal and fog, congratulations—you’re the target audience. The movie’s action sequences are technically competent but dramatically dead. Every firefight looks like a deleted scene from a Halo cutscene, complete with that sterile, over-processed digital sheen that makes you nostalgic for actual dirt.
There’s no tension, no geography, no rhythm. Just bullets, drones, and the overwhelming feeling that you could be watching Aliens instead. Even the deaths happen without fanfare. One minute someone’s talking, the next they’re a bloodstain on a wall, and the squad’s emotional reaction is roughly equivalent to someone realizing they dropped their sandwich.
The Dialogue: AI-Generated in Real Time
The script is an impressive feat of writing in that it somehow manages to say nothing for 99 minutes. Every line sounds like it was lifted from a rejected military recruitment ad.
“We’re soldiers. We adapt.”
“You don’t trust machines? Maybe you should trust yourself.”
“Stay frosty.”
At one point, Mills solemnly explains that the AI is “learning from them,” which is ironic, because no one else in this movie seems to be learning anything.
The conversations between Mills and Captain Bukes are particularly painful. They’re meant to explore the conflict between human intuition and machine logic, but they play more like a bad first date between a stoic marine and a malfunctioning Alexa.
The Pacing: Slow March to Nowhere
For a movie about killer robots, Kill Command moves with the urgency of a Windows update. The first act is all setup—an island, some ominous foreshadowing, and enough drone shots (pun intended) to make you wonder if the cinematographer was paid per aerial view.
By the time the robots start killing people, you’re already numb. The movie alternates between long stretches of wandering through identical corridors and bursts of digital gunfire, neither of which have any emotional impact. It’s like someone stretched a single level of a military shooter into a feature film.
And yet, somehow, it still manages to feel both too long and unfinished. That’s a rare skill.
The Ending: Reboot Required
The climax involves Mills detonating an EMP to fry the main robot’s circuits—classic sci-fi problem-solving. Naturally, she also fries her own brain in the process, because symbolism or something. But just when you think it’s over, she wakes up with the AI’s consciousness uploaded into her. Cue dramatic music, a vague stare into the middle distance, and a sequel setup no one asked for.
It’s supposed to be haunting. It’s not. It’s like watching Ex Machina performed by mannequins who just discovered feelings but are too polite to emote.
Visuals & Sound: Sleek, Shiny, and Soulless
On a technical level, Kill Command looks decent for its budget. The CGI isn’t terrible—certainly better than you’d expect from a film that probably cost less than one episode of The Mandalorian. The problem is that everything looks too clean. Even the dirt looks polished.
The sound design, on the other hand, is pure migraine. Every gunshot, explosion, and robotic whir is dialed up to eleven, presumably to distract you from the lack of character development.
By the end, you’re not scared of the machines—you just want them to lower the volume.
Final Verdict: 3/10 — “Artificial” in Every Sense
Kill Command is what happens when someone watches Terminator, Predator, and Edge of Tomorrow back-to-back, then forgets what made any of them interesting. It’s sleek but hollow, like a sci-fi museum exhibit titled “Movies, Circa 2016.”
The action’s repetitive, the characters are thin, and the philosophical themes—man vs. machine, creator vs. creation—are handled with all the depth of a toaster manual.
Vanessa Kirby gives it her all, and the production design has flashes of brilliance, but no amount of polish can save a movie that feels this emotionally inert. It’s not thrilling, it’s not scary, and it’s certainly not smart.
If you’re looking for an exciting exploration of AI and human identity, watch Ex Machina. If you want to see Marines fight killer robots, watch Aliens.
If you want to experience Kill Command, just stare at your Roomba and imagine it’s judging your taste in movies.
