User Reviews

Clearly, the cast & crew are all related. Definitely not a very bright bunch. The rave reviews are likely from their family as well.

When the movie began it was clear there was a serious lacking of IQ & common sense behind the writing & acting. It was like sending Farmer John into space alone without any training or common sense.

There is also very little dialog since there is only one actor. If there is something dumb which can be done, you can bet he will do it.

They send one lone astronaut into space when the ship is clearly built for multiple crew. Sleeps through arrival, then sits staring, stupefied (does this a lot) doing nothing until ship cannot recover. Does everything as slow as he can.

Abandons ship. Continues to breathe oxygen supply without checking planet air quality until supply was nearly gone. Clearly an earth type planet but claims to only have 5 days of water & food then promptly lays down the open water container & spills all of it. Upon finding more water & treating it, he sloppily spills down his front while drinking wastefully.

Then claims on his radio report the planet is barren with no intelligence as expected (without bothering to check the planet). What was that orbiting craft they sent doing? It should have provided an orbital overview of the planet.

Then the fool waves to something moving without first finding out who or what it was. Talk about an idiot. Farmer John wouldn't survive a night at Disneyland.

He doesn't bother to find out why his communications don't work. Puts his bag of supplies on a robot dog & nearly loses it several times. No concept of protecting his supplies. Totally ignorant in everything he does. Carelessly tosses his gear. He even beats up on a mummified body. I wouldn't trust this guy to mow my lawn.

The best part is the robot dog & the reason behind the planets condition. Duh! What did they expect when they sent that orbiter to another planet without asking? This family-made film was like having the Beverly Hillbillies write, direct & act in a film. Except slow-witted Scottish farmer style.

Very slow moving, & drawn out with very little dialog.

The concept was good. But in the wrong hands. Watchable if you have time to burn and a lot of patience.

SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT!

A well-meaning but VERY slow paced piece of SF which falls to bits about the half way mark by not playing fair: Half way through the movie the downed astronaut discovers a container "covered in alien writing" - it's a Jack Daniels bottle! DAH DAH DAH!!!!! The alien planet was Earth all along! (as if we hadn't seen that coming). The old 'it was earth all along' gag not in itself a show-stopper, a lot of films, books, comics have used that trick over the years and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. What makes it not work here and makes the watcher (well me at least) give up on the movie is the fact that in the opening sequence of the film the astronaut is surrounded by screens full of warnings and alerts - all in English. Come on! And it's not as if the film makers gave us a lot to distract us from joining those two dots either so it really sticks out.

Having said that I did watch it to the end. Some of the SFX were pretty good for the budget but there just wasn't enough material here for a feature. Even a (very long) 67 minute one. This was a 20 minute short stretched way beyond any credible limit.

Captain (Ian Rowe) is going to a Goldilocks planet 20 light years away which he called 581, most likely the one that circles around the star Gliese 581. A transporter was first sent there as this is going to be some type of wormhole thing. Captain gets there, but his ship crashes into a planet that looks like an area outside of Devon, England. Now Gliese is a red dwarf and its Goldilocks planet in question always faces the sun creating a habitable band in a twilight zone. That was not this planet. The early stages of the film looked promising with a padded room spaceship and neat looking screen effects...then he landed as we watched one guy stroll through the woods with a mechanical dog.

PLOT SPOILER: Captain encounters a drone battle going on with no life forms. It isn't hard to figure out what happened, even before he picks up an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. Yes there is even a slight twist on top of what is Captain Obvious. I liked the film better when it had simians in it.

Guide: 1 F-word. No sex or nudity. Being re-titled: "Reconnoiter" I am not sure how that DVD cover fits into the film.

I really wanted to like this movie, but it was a jumbled mess.

The high reviews are clearly from someone who worked on this thing, because this movie falls flat in so many ways.

I love smaller independent films, but the script, story, etc, are all lacking, some to the point where it's jut plain stupid.

Spoiler alert: Read no more if you don't want to ruin the already bad movie.

The first half hour of the film is stupidly boring, nothing happens, and the story doesn't move forward at all. I might as well have watched the dude eat toast for 30 minutes.

Our hero, an astronaut, lands on what he thinks is a mysterious planet. he then wanders around, and sleeps a lot. Why? Who knows. I guess he was tired.

Eventually he finds a Jack Daniels bottle, and somehow mistakes it for "alien writing". Apparently he can speak English, but can't read it.

Later, he finds a gun, but doesn't know how to use it and accidentally fires it. What astronaut doesn't know what a gun is????

Towards the end of the film, he finds an old underground bunker, with lots of dead people, and then he puts it all together that he ended up back on earth, but after a major nuclear war, and the only thing left alive are roaming robots still shooting at each other.

Bad story, acting was OK, not great. HORRIBLE editing. The movie constantly cut to black, and the screen remained black for a long time. Clearly the editor didn't know what he was doing, and decided, when in doubt, cut to black.

This could have been a GREAT film, but sadly, wasn't.

I saw A LOT of reviews dissing this movie before I decided to give it a try based on the few reviews that claimed it was actually a decent flick if you're willing to think a little when you watch it.

Thankfully they were right, although I wouldn't pay much for this as its basically a youtube short that's been stretched out to movie length. But a decent youtube short nonetheless.

Short Version: Don't watch this for the Movie cover, see the Trailer first and make sure you're actually into it before watching.

Long Version: First off a lot of people giving this movie terrible reviews were duped into watching because of a VERY misleading promotional cover that has nothing to do with what the film is about. Everyone else either couldn't figure out the reasoning for the lone astronaut's actions when applying their own enlightened "common sense" (seriously?), had no patience for even finishing the film or not being spoon fed the story or genuinely did not like the film despite "getting it" which I can understand completely as it's not a movie for everyone.

I'll begin to spoil much of this now to clear up a few things. First off, He's the Alien. He lands on earth. It's his planet's fault that World War 3 occurs there due to the machine they sent into Earths orbit to allow instantaneous travel between the two. His frequent need to use a nasal breathing device implies there is something wrong with the air quality that only allows the astronaut to breathe for short lengths of time before he needs to inhale his own supply of either oxygen or something else (keep in mind He's not from Earth).

I see the robot designs getting a little flak for being so boring and while that is true they are also pretty realistic; This really is as advanced as we would be in real life within the next decade or two. (We're a loooong way from ever building terminators kiddies and even longer from mass producing them on the cheap). The reason the machines on the earths surface are hostile is likely due to everyone having gone underground which at that point it can be presumed anyone left on the surface is an invading enemy force. It could also just be the default setting for these machines if they receive no commands from a human operator for a time (As hinted at in the bunker surveillance room). Dead man's switch?

Ending's not too hard to figure out early on but its always interesting to see just what the film is going to portray to lead us to that conclusion. I've enjoyed plenty of other youtube shorts, tales from the dark side, outer limits and early twilight zone episodes so I can appreciate this kind of movie. It's just a shame that people will rip on this so easily while a short about a robot dog and some kid in motocross can skate by with a 7.5.

My 4/10 score is perhaps inflated, due to my very low expectations going into watching this movie. With a title like "Robot World" and the goofy poster, I wasn't expecting anything more than a B movie to entertain me on a lazy Sunday. Setting the bar that low, the movie delivered better than expected; just not 1,000 times better.

First of all, there is only one human character in the entire plot of the movie if we don't count the radio voice and the found film. And, yes, there is a bit of "found footage" that too conveniently moves the story forward by leaps and bounds just about when the viewer is beginning to get restless.

The fact that the pilot seems to know how to operate the projector, but not the handgun during the found footage scene was one of many goofs throughout the film. For example, how is it that the two worlds have identical cultural customs for grooming, clothing, use of tools, interfaces, etc? How come none of the robots came to investigate the crash site? At one point, the pilot was walking over what was obviously a path then appeared shocked at finding evidence of intelligent life. Parachutes, combustion/fire, gravity, etc. all work too conveniently as expected and Earth-like for not ever having set foot on this planet before.

The premise of the story is the most interesting part, but so much more could have been done with it - I am sure, based on the resources evident on screen that there were budget limitations. The pace and some of the shots seem to attempt to pay homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, these are vague similarities. The story also seemed to have a Philip K Dick tone - which is more to say that it felt like a short story stretched into a movie with an attempt at a social/moral message.

Once I was committed to watching the film and started getting into the story, I kept praying that the story would not fall into the "all aliens speak English" category. It came dangerously close, but I credit the movie for twisting the premise around. There is one shot of a newspaper that is shown in a strange language and switches to English when the camera pans across it that is the only tell-tale indication that what the pilot sees and what we see is not in the same language. We learn later that the unfamiliar one was the pilot. This was reminiscent to The Hunt for Red October when Captain Ramius was speaking in Russian and switched to English mid-sentence as a device to allow the viewers to follow the story. Except that in the case of Reconnoiter, the device served as a plot device that some viewers might consider a cheap shot. Unfortunately, once the viewer catches on, the movie turns into a one trick pony and there is not enough plot left to carry it to the end.

The conclusion of the story and the ending of the film were extremely disappointing. Are we to believe that the arrival of the machine and the pilot triggered a religious war that ended up in the extermination of all humanity? Yet, that humanity capable of such high level of automation could not simply send a probe to check out the machine and make contact on their own? Without a better and more satisfying third act, the viewer just feels left hanging.

A complete waste of time ventured to this movie because of review "1000 Times yada yada. Also Surprisingly Excellent". Started interestingly. Please don't do what I did I missed the Beginning clues.(A Small Spoiler Only because it's the reason for the Review). When he has to abandoned his spaceship, the time it took. that's the main CLUE. The U.K. Reviewer was probably the producer and or has only been out of the house once or twice.

AND YES I Unfortunately Finished the movie. Bells and whistles in a movie are fine if the story needs them. I maybe a biased reviewer a good flick should be visually and mentally stimulating. But I know I can be an HONEST REVIEWER (I'm still ticked at MR. U.K.,1000 Times yada yada Doesn't know what a good movie is) He's eagerly awaiting Watching Grass Grow Part 2.

So I'm assuming the lead (Ha Ha You'll get it) was Mr. 1000 Times. The s t o r y is horribly stretched out and so v e r y s l o w. So the lead (Ha Ha have you got it yet) is an astronaut, and not a very smart one. Oh hell if you want to call this a good movie watch the first 10 min. and the last 10 min. but you will be still disappointed.

Robot world,

more like a handful of robots in England!!!

Very slow like all have said before.

Capt James somehow passed the astronaut selection board, how was this possible?

Carrying that damn grip/holdall made him look like he was going for a dirty weekend!

I recognised at once that he was back in old blighty(Dartmoor/Exmoor and the river Severn bridge)did he ever do any survival training!!

Very poor effort, at least he doesn't play Frech with the robot dog!

Forget about the promising cover, this movie is only interesting for 2 minutes, where they explain what they did with machine 1 and 2. A very rough animation. No explanation, how this may work, just that they did it. The rest is just like the original planet of apes without apes and anything else.

This whole story could be told in 2 minutes. The machines, fighting each other is absolutely useless, as nearly everything else in this movie.

An absolutely waste of time!

And the flaws are worse too... How can they transport machine 2 for 60 years and as it finally works, it's a time-machine, that's still in the earth-orbit? Imho the whole story is bullshit. But maybe i missed the point...

Didn't expect a lot from this movie and it delivered. The astronaut is well trained in napping. It's his go to move when trouble abounds. The title should be "guy travels 20 light years to nap on alien planet". I think there was a message about mankind destroying themselves. But what I got from it was how not to edit a movie. There are numerous black screen cuts (usually after one of the aforementioned naps) that destroy any continuity that the film may have had.

Also, for no reason at all, there's several baby sequences. Has nothing to do with the plot. Just a, hey we saw 2001 space odyssey! Now watch this guy take another nap.

He does make friends with a robot dog that has a luggage rack that takes him a while to figure out. The aliens also can figure out how to make autonomous robots but are still working with reel film. Not even VHS. But, on a positive note, their film can survive the gamma ray burst of a nuclear attack. So that's pretty sweet.

I went with 3 stars because it was a good laugh and left me confused. It was the only movie I've watched where I hoped the lead would commit suicide so it would end.

As an actor, in mostly indie movies myself, I can appreciate this. Making movies isn't easy. Let alone completing one. I actually really enjoyed this. Early on it had almost a 2001 A Space Odyssey feel to it. The robots were great. The directing was good, good acting (tho not much dialogue). And they had a nice camera. It looked good. I found it interesting almost everyone in the credits were "Rowe". I have to say tho, I did not like the ending.