UPRISING! (2020)

UPRISING! (2020)

Tagline: The world's best (and only) post-apocalyptic robot comedy.

(Sci-Fi, Comedy, Robots Acting Like Fools) [Short]

It’s like the robots are acting like gamers…which means they just entered the thunder dome of the one thing I’m good at. 

In this one, Bernie is stalking Carmen in a world where robots pretty much run every aspect of life. Bernie gets along well with an out-of-date robot trashcan named Terry and lets Terry know all about his daily struggles. It doesn’t take long before a faulty software update sends the world's robots into a murderous tirade complete with a lot of the same rude insane gestures and phrases gamers use. Now Bernie must awkwardly team up with Carmen the girl he is stalking and a couple of friends that are basically useless to fight off the robot hordes. 

First off, a much better tagline for this short would have been “All Is Fine”. It’s literally the first lines in the story and it would have fit perfectly with the humor level here. Secondly, the only semi-likable human character in this whole movie is Carmen and even she is probably selling herself short here. There are some really fun moments in this and the concept is awesome, but the dialog is embarrassingly terrible in some parts. Sorry – I wish I had better things to say on that front, but wow, it’s bad, even to the point of being Godophobic. 

Acting-wise, this is actually a decent outing for John Gemberling (Bob’s Burgers) who plays Bernie in this, even though I thought the character was basically a creeper. Meaghan Rath is fine in this as Carmen. She is best known for her role on the TV show Hawaii 5-O. Ramona Young is basically a throwaway character named Rhonda who gets about 20 seconds of screen time. She is most famous for her voice work in RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN. Rounding out the main cast we have Chris Witaske (THE BUBBLE) who plays Jeff in this. He is also pretty much a throwaway character. So oddly this movie had an issue of getting several decent cast members and under-utilizing them. Natalie Palamides (The Powerpuff Girls) is a massively accomplished voice actress who does the voice of Terry the Trashbot. I thought she did a great job. It just kind of sucks when you’re your favorite character in anything isn’t one of the humans. Thanks, Terry the Trashbot. You made this thing worth watching.

Score-wise this thing is pretty well done and the production is outstanding, especially for a short. It literally rivals major motion pictures. So this thing is aesthetically a blast to watch. Where this thing fails is in substance or really doing anything all that new. Granted, there probably are not a lot of robots taking over the world movies that are comedies, but there are probably 10 movies with robots taking over the world in my streaming queues right now. Not to mention the 100’s of shorts that probably cover the topic on DUST alone. If you are going for comedy, make the comedy funny, that is all I am asking here. 

This thing is only 12 minutes long so nailing the pacing wasn’t all that tough. I do wish it didn’t feel like the start of a TV series regarding the story though. I have seen enough shorts to know, you can pull off a full story in half the run time this one takes. 

Overall UPRISING! gets a 3 out of 7. A decent writer when it comes to comedy could have really fixed a lot of this thing. It sucks to see so much wonderful talent go into something that just kind of falls flat. 

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