“If stupidity were a country, he’d be China.”

Justin’s rating: Does firing from the hip improve accuracy?

Justin’s review: The way I see it, movies are just as influenced by fads and trends as we tend to be. They shouldn’t, but they are and often descend into tropes and copycats because of it. We tend to get this at both ends of the budget spectrum, with the fattest payrolls not wanting to risk by doing anything original and the skimpiest coffers hoping to coast on someone else’s coattails to success.

It’s honestly why so many of these micro-budget flicks are straight-up clones of name-brand blockbusters. Digital Man isn’t on the screen for more than 15 minutes before you can tell that it’s going for the tired Terminator-and-Aliens combo that we’ve seen so many times. Tall European guy as an unstoppable cyborg? Gung-ho marines with giant hip-mounted cannons and motion sensors? A little healthy paranoia that some of them may be cyborgs as well?

And what’s even worse is that on top of all of this, Digital Man seizes upon CGI as its budgetary savior. Its use for vehicles, explosions, and some interiors is PlayStation 1-era fake and does this project no credit.

It feels like this is such a waste of everyone’s time. There’s a shocking number of recognizable faces here — Chase Masterson, Clint Howard, Adam Baldwin, and Paul Gleason, to name a few — and the composer was giving his all with a fascinating blend of synth and western tunes. But what’s the point when you’re inviting comparisons to vastly better scifi flicks?

As a humble movie reviewer, I have a piece of advice that I’d like to give any filmmakers operating with high ambition and low budgets. And that would be to abandon this copycat nonsense to work within your budget to give us something fresh and imaginative. Creativity can make up for a lot of deficiencies if it’s channeled in the right way, and we’ve seen some great examples of this over the years. Do you think Cube or They Live had huge budgets? Not at all, yet they gave us stories and settings we don’t typically see.

In any case, this movie might as well be called Emotionally Unstable Troops Walk Down Dusty Roads And Sometimes Shoot Wildly At Stuff. Everyone is emote-acting to a degree that makes them come off as nap-deprived toddlers instead of professional soldiers. And the Terminator guy looks absolutely wrong for the part, as if someone kidnapped Ryan Stiles, slapped on some plastic, and forced him to give his best RoboCop impersonation.

I took a four-day break between watching the first part of Digital Man and the second part, coming back only out of a tired obligation to get this thing done. But it wasn’t worth sticking it out to the end, and it’s not worth any of you putting yourself through this faint echo of scifi masterpieces.

Intermission!

• “Sci-Fi Productions” is the most generic name ever
• And now for an early 90s CGI cutscene
• Terrorists stole launch codes for 250 NUCLEAR MISSILES? Terrorists are having an unexpectedly good day, methinks.
• He blows a guy through a door, which seems reasonable considering the size of his gun
• Shooting a dead guy is threatening somehow?
• “Holographic memory system” doesn’t sound that secure
• Population Who Cares?
• I’m assuming those pieces of shoulder armor double as wings
• All highly trained soldiers bunch up while being hunted in the desert
• Satellite dishes are to be protected at all costs
• Spinning around and firing randomly is a sound tactic
• Slow-mo marching at each other and firing
• Haha he shot a neurolizer in that guy’s face