“Abe” starts with a woman gagged and tied to a
gurney in an abandoned factory with bloody plastic around her.Then a robot walks in.He talks about how he was built to love, and
he loved his family.But they stopped
loving him.So he tried to fix them, but
it didn’t work.All he wants is to be
loved, but he can tell by the way the woman looks at him, she doesn’t love
him.So he’ll have to fix her.He then picks up a saw and we hear screaming.
We then see the robot creepily watching another
woman and wishing he could stop falling in love.
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When Abe first shows up, he asks the woman if she’s
comfortable.My first thought was he had
lost his family and was trying to make a new one.Then he starts talking about human instinct for
survival and stuff and I got a little bored.But then what he was saying started sinking in, and it started getting
darker and darker.A robot with, bad
programming, sawing people apart just because he wanted to be loved could be
done bad in so many ways.But “Abe”
nails the creepy, disturbing aspects of a robot serial killer.
A prisoner wearing a mask is at his parole
hearing.They say he can remove the
mask, and he does and they are shocked.They then tell him he can put the mask back on.He is in prison for killing a bunch of
people, but because he works in the prison garden and due to overcrowding, he
is released.
Still wearing the mask, he gets a job in some
office.He tries to fit in, even trying
to work up the courage to talk to a cute girl on a park bench.
But after his boss sees him pretending to stab
people, he’s fired.He gets a bit angry
and wants to go back to his old ways.Grabbing a butcher’s knife he stands outside watching the girl from the
park.
But then he gets a job at a butcher shop – the owner
saying he’s a natural – and one of his first customers is the girl from the
park.
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The film is labeled a comedy, but it’s not a laugh
out loud kind.I was expecting more of a
dark comedy type of thing comparing the brutality of this serial killer with
that of an office job.So I was a bit
disappointed when it didn’t go that way.
According to the description on YouTube, this was
written, shot, and edited in a week.So
this is more than I could have done in a week, but I think I’d prefer the two
week version.
The movie follows this teenage girl and her father
who are on this inhospitable planet.They are there hunting for this substance I believe is called orlack,
which is this alien goo that is apparently some sort of energy source.They’ve collected a bunch of it, but need
just a bit more before going home.
The dad is constantly grilling her on how to get
back to their ship, how to fly it, what ships they can trust and which ones to
avoid, all kinds of things in case something happens to him.Then one day while she is out getting water,
he is attacked by a bandit who steals the orlack.Over the radio, he tells her to run to the
ship and take off because his leg is broken and he won’t be able to follow
her.Instead, the girl runs back to
their tent and sees the bandit shoot her father.He isn’t killed, his faceplate is just broken
and he’ll die from breathing the air.
The girl drags her dad into the tent and gets him
patched up a bit.He tells her to go to
the ship because other bandits have probably found it already.Instead she grabs a gun and goes out to find
the first bandit.She shoots him a few
times, and then takes off his faceplate and shoots him in the face.The girl then drags her dad through the
forest towards the ship, but then she sees it taking off in the distance.
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I only did a quick search for this movie, but it
seemed all the reviews I saw only talked about how great the location and
cinematography were.A few also
mentioned that it was made for X thousand dollars, some of which apparently
came from Kickstarter.None really
talked about the plot.
My thoughts are that while the location and
cinematography were great, the movie fell a little short.It feels like the flashback bits of another
movie of this girl trying to save her father and herself.It’s rather ironic for me to say that.I write short stories and I don’t know how
many times people have commented that they wanted more, they felt my story was
just the beginning of a longer story.My
feelings have always been that my stories deal with a specific thing, and are
long enough to just get that one point across.Doing more would dilute the point, or change it into something
else.So on one hand I can see how the
filmmakers could be annoyed by people telling them their movie should have been
longer, but on the other hand I’m not really seeing the point of their
movie.In my opinion, a movie showing
the girl trying to save her father and herself with the scenes from “Prospect”
as flashbacks would have been more interesting.
If for nothing else, you should still watch it to see
a good example of using locations.
