Zone 414 Parent Guide

Reclusive and eccentric multi-billionaire Marlon Veidt (Travis Fimmel) made his fortune creating convincing androids, synthetic humans who have been given government approval to operate only in Zone 414. But he needs help: his daughter, Melissa (Holly Demaine), has disappeared inside the Zone. Marlon hires former detective David Carmichael (Guy Pearce) to go into the Zone and retrieve Melissa. Veidt can offer Carmichael little else besides the name of Jane (Matilda Lutz), an android with whom Melissa was friendly. And once David is in the Zone, he finds that things are far stranger and more complicated than Marlon led him to believe…

This movie wears its many influences on its sleeve. Mostly, it wants to be Blade Runner and its aspirations are so obvious I’m surprised the filmmakers weren’t sued by Ridley Scott. The fog-soaked cityscapes lit with bright neon are a staple of Scott’s iconic franchise. In this film, it’s more like a slightly cloudy industrial district with bad streetlights and one or two neon signs. I’m not sure if this is a budget issue or an art direction problem, but it’s not good. Surely, you’d think Netflix could afford to at least throw some digital effects on top to make it look more populated, but nope. It’s desolate warehouse after dismal loft after dingy apartment for the entirety of the runtime. If you’re going to set your movie a big cyberpunk cityscape, it helps if you can make it look even slightly interesting.

Zone 414 is also a deeply unpleasant movie to watch, primarily because of its laser focus on a grotesque bourgeois world of extreme sex and violence, frequently in combination. Androids are treated as objects, despite their clear intelligence and capacity for emotion, and are subjected to horrific treatment. Do you like seeing women tortured with a blowtorch? Or near-human beings crudely butchered and even more crudely reassembled? If you do, get some help.

There really isn’t a compelling reason to watch this movie. The cast is certainly giving a good effort, but they’re let down at every turn by an uninspired script. Well, most of the cast anyway. Travis Fimmel spends all of his screentime gnawing on the scenery like he’s Tim Curry on stimulants. It’s not even in “so-bad-it’s-good” territory. It’s just so bad it’s bad. It’s grimy, gross, and completely unnecessary. You want a good discussion about the comparative value of biological and synthetic life? Go watch Blade Runner. Or I, Robot. Or almost anything else.