Review of Robots (2005) by Commentspae — 19 Aug 2021

For a start; "timeless" is only relatively correct. Though this tries to refrain from associating with any pop culture at the time of 2005 and focuses more on political concepts like stocks, abuse of power, and poverty, in terms of production quality and execution of its concept, it shines, shines, shines as a late 2000s film and always will.

However, it being partially outdated doesn't mean it's a film of mediocrity. Rather, it is not worthy of being called mediocre. It is an original concept and it has an original manner of managing its themes, although those themes in question are generic, along with the characters associated with this theme. I know this film would be absolutely libeled if it were released in the 2010s and I know this because, people who use their nostalgia to excuse any sort of objective quality something they experienced in their formative years may actually present of itself only like it for that reason and that if it were released in current time, they would shower it in negativity and criticism, never giving it a chance to simply exist.

This is one of those films that should remain how it is. It should stay in 2005 and in peoples' formative years and stay in that perception only.

Now in terms of the film itself, for a start, the way that it introduces characters in general is the way fictional media of actual quality introduces its characters, completely skipping any sort of name-based introduction and going straight to introducing their characteristics to the viewer. This is due to it not wanting to waste time with long periods of absolutely nothing valuable and going straight into the action. For example, the first speaking character's first line is "Yahooo!" about becoming a father, of whom the son is the main protagonist, and there isn't the film equivalent of a cold open where the [secondary] villain narrates. It doesn't want to divert our attention away from the plot. Instead, it waits for the real villain to be introduced after the protagonist tries to visit his idol, and fails because the company was taken over, sending out new policies and whatnot.

The political messages can't make themselves anymore obvious, of course. Most of it is about the acceptance of intellectual ability among the social norms, the financial instability of the commoner, and the lengths a corporate conglomeration is willing to go to make a profit, of which is the equivalent of killing robots with no financial gains for their remaining parts. Eventually this ends with a final battle, of which lasts 5 minutes and the sidekick killing the main antagonist in their own furnace and the secondary antagonist causing himself to get into the same fate as his father, symbolically so. Though it may not seem like so, the political side of this film is dark compared to the comedic and characteristic side, as if it is not made obvious by the main antagonist, Madame Gasket, being a sadistic underground industrial dictator whose main assistants are the Sweepers, and eventually the Super Sweepers, patent pending from Ratchet. Typically, the main goal of the final battle for the main antagonist was to finish off the main characters and then set the Super Sweepers off into Robot City, of which was obviously a failure. Due to the in-universe urgency of this desire to set them all off, the battle between good and bad was basically forced into becoming 5 minutes long. Which is actually a rational decision on the director's behalf.