Directors: Peter Webber
Writers: Barry Hutchison, Alex Lane, Alexander Gordon Smith
AI is the hot topic, and it’s not going to change anytime soon. There’s already plenty of big-budget films hitting the tropics, and now here’s DRAGN, a film about a rogue drone. You can quickly predict where things will go in this one, but there’s some fun to be had with the kills, and the simplicity of a kill box setup means the film never strays too far.
A group of tech workers from around the globe are invited to a team-building exercise. It’s all a ruse to have them run into this AI drone weapon, however. There’s James, who’s brought along his family so we can see them and have a reason to care about him, while the rest are set up very quickly as fodder. A company man, two younger, mid-20s, and someone with longer tenure, worried about his position in the company.
I didn’t understand why they all agreed to this getaway, or what they were told the point was. And then they’re getting past a gated-off area with a skull on it and asking for translation — like that’s necessary — and the film quickly says, “he forgets about it, this doesn’t need to make much sense.” Most of it doesn’t. There’s a team introduced in the opening that is unloading the drone and being the most aggressive and unprofessional in a way that seems to trigger the drone’s now-human targeting nature, or maybe it was always going to go that way; I don’t know.
Thankfully, there is some excitement to be had in the ways the drone, which looks preety good for this lower-budget film, attacks and chases. It has an arsenal of weapons and a somewhat sadistic nature when it comes to finishing off its targets. Although it could use its firepower to kill them all, it resorts several times to malicious methods of finishing off, or of not finishing off, the humans it’s hunting. Including dropping them on metal objects, and imploring the use of a saw.
Dragn isn’t here to say anything about drones or AI other than it’s wild these technologies exist, and the drones like the one she has could be our extinction one day. Watch the crew being targeted and killed off, enjoy some bloody demises and oddly, be left on a super-odd cliffhanger for a sequel.
DRAGN is available now on VOD in America from Cineverse.
(Screener provided to Explosion Network.
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