The War of the Robots (1978)

Thanks for the memories!

Excellent but underrated film

Beautiful, moving film.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Everything in this film reeks of lifting many ideas from the original Star TREK TV series! The bridge with the big screen for viewing, personal quarters, the crew is from planet Earth, monitors on the ship for viewing communications with crew-mates, sliding doors, color coded uniforms, aliens holding hostages, etc... I kept expecting to see a rip-off of a Vulcan (Mr. Spock) walk onto the screen. The only Star Wars influence I really see here are the laser-swords and the end fighting where they seem to be mimicking Skywalker and the guys in X-wing fighters, plus Darth Empress saying something about "leave that one to me" (she wanted to get him like Vader did Luke) but mainly the film is borrowing heavily from Star TREK TV series.Story of this movie is OK, special effects fun, terrible acting, but the movie is kinda fun to watch, I'd rather watch Star Trek but this is not a downright awful film to view.5/10

Some people might wonder why Italian filmmakers, who have countless times in the past imitated popular American films and film genres, didn't cash in that many times after "Star Wars" was released. The obvious answer is that it takes considerable funds to make a space saga, funds that Italians didn't have in great numbers. But a few Italian filmmakers did try to cash in on "Star Wars" despite limited budgets, this being one of them. In fairness to the filmmakers behind "War Of The Robots", unlike other Italian space sagas, this one does its own thing for the most part and has very little material that one could say was imitating things from "Star Wars". But apart from that, it's hard to think of anything positive to say about this movie. The special effects and sets, while occasionally amusing, are for the most part really shoddy and pathetic. The characters are really thinly written - not one character stands out enough to make you remember him or her long after the movie is over. The story is really boring, really lacking regular action sequences. And the little action there is comes across as really boring, even the climatic space battle. There are occasional unintentional chuckles, but not enough to make it worthwhile to slog through this otherwise dismal enterprise.

For fans of terrible movies, this one has everything you could wish for:crazy plotawful acting (my favourites are the kissing scenes, where they look like they're trying to attack each others' faces, and the pathetic fight scenes)really stupid dialogue, like: "get em, guys!"unflattering futuristic outfits, including mini skirts over tights for the men.baddies in ridiculous blonde wigscool musiclow budget sets (I especially love the office chairs they sit on in the spaceship,and how they simulate accelerating by quickly leaning back in their chairs. Unfortunately, it's very hard to all do this at the same time! The best scene with the office chairs was when they were pretending there was turbulence by all wobbling about on the chairs in different directions!)If you love schlocky movies, you'll enjoy this one.

"If we maintain this velocity we'll catch up to them quite soon." "Have you notified the base?" "No, I haven't yet. Because I have a sort of strange presentment." "Is there something worrying you?" "Hmmm. I don't know, but I feel that my hands are tied." "In what way? How do you mean?" "As long as Lois is in their power, there's nothing I can do about it." "Obviously these damned aliens will take advantage of holding hostages to dictate terms." "If I were you, I wouldn't worry about that." "Let's just catch the spaceship and stop them."Repeat these lines slowly for about 90mins with a sci-fi throbbing sound effect in the background and you'll have saved yourself time, 36p and a bit of bother...