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Now, let’s hit PLAY.

As we established earlier, robots have taken over the earth. They say they want to study us, and then they’ll leave. Their one rule, for reasons that I am sure will in no way become significant, is “stay indoors.” This is something that the disabled, the mentally ill, functional alcoholics and gaming nerds would no doubt find easy to do. But for the rest of you (see what I did there?), this would be a fate worse than death. So just before the title card, we see what happens to those who defy the law. The robots, we learn, force all humans to wear cumbersome tracking devices on their necks. The devices light up rather conspicuously because in movies, the only way to be sure something is working is if it lights up.

You can see where this is leading, right? When the robots sense that you are outside, one of them will politely confront you with your mistake. Then it breaks out a rather genteel ED-209 impression and blasts you to pieces after a hasty countdown. This is what happens to the father of a young boy named Connor (Milo Parker). Connor himself is rescued by Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley), a human “collaborator” (they prefer the term “volunteer corps”) who acts as a liaison between the oppressed masses and their aforementioned Overlords.

Smythe places Connor in the care of Kate (Gillian Anderson, rocking a completely disarming British accent), who apparently has a kind of a Children of Disintegrated Parents/halfway house situation happening (conveniently, right across the street from Connor’s former home). Kate is the nurturing, maternal type, while her son Sean (Callan McAuliffe) is both the oldest male as well as a rebellious teen who lost his father in the “war”. But don’t tell him that his father’s not still alive, because Sean can FEEL it. Yeah. That’s right. Robot Overlords should have been subtitled Not Afraid to Lean on Convention.

There’s a method to this somewhat generic madness, though. One of the reasons those neck implants are so visible is because eventually, the children (plucky, imaginative things that children are) find a clever way to disable them. And now that the robots cannot track them, the kids decide to execute some good old-fashioned adolescent shenanigans. In time, this leads to bigger things: Sean begins to mature into the hero he was always meant to be, everyone starts to rediscover their humanity, battle lines are drawn, yadda yadda yadda.

You know the drill; if you’re old enough to read and comprehend this article, you have seen at least 6,000 movies that follow the same template.

For a while, though, Robot Overlords is slightly more than the sum of its parts (intended). It’s not really about the robots; they serve primarily as a plot device to drive the development arc of Kate and her brood of misfits - to whom Kingsley serves as a sort of incidental surrogate father. If Kingsley did not repeatedly vanish from the film for 20 minutes at a time, this could have reminded me of something Charles Dickens might have produced after being transported 150 years into the future, fed a tray of pot brownies and forced to watch Transformers 3 with James Cameron. It’s a strange-but-compelling mix of mild drama and well-worn sci-fi tropes.

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