Featuring a sedate Guy Pearce, Andrew Baird’s directorial debut “Blade-Runner” -lite “Zone 414” wastes a compelling premise on an overly-long neo-noir that teases a post-technocratic society in which androids and humans are segregated and only interact within the titular Zone. While riffing off almost every film about androids that came before it — “A.I.,” “Ex Machina,” etc. — Baird’s film fails to add anything new to the sub-genre, creating a derivative pastiche of better works that often looks visually compelling but collapses under an underwritten script.
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Pearce stars as David, a creepy mercenary who takes a gig for the reclusive android developer Marion Veidt (Travis Fimmel, completely unrecognizable for better or worse). Tasked with finding Veidt’s missing daughter Melissa, David ventures into the zone, the only place where androids and humans can freely come together. Keen to watch his creations from a distance, Veidt’s Zone 414 has, of course, in practice, turned into a location where the rich come to live out their sexual fantasies. Eventually teaming up with the sex worker/android Jane (Matilda Lutz), who longs to escape her occupation, especially under the tyrannical rule of her boss Royale (Olwen Fouéré), the two begin to investigate the zone, uncovering an underground economy that uses the androids for nefarious ends.
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While ostensibly a detective story, the central mystery – Melissa’s disappearance – is often backgrounded in favor of a rotating cycle of scenes between Jane and David. Lutz, so good in Coralie Fargeat’s “Revenge,” is given only the bare bones of characterization. Instead, she is asked by Bryan Edward Hill’s borderline plagiaristic script to announce the overt themes of the film in particularly blunt fashion, at one point lamenting “I’m not supposed to feel emotions, but I’m terrified” and, in another, noting how she wants to become human. In contrast, Veidt’s daughter wants the opposite. In case it wasn’t obvious (hint: it is), the two women act as foils, juxtaposing each other in increasingly ridiculous ways.
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Pearce, who oscillates between prestige and B-movies more than any other actor, is in full-on Luc Besson “Lockout” mode, manifesting both action hero gruffness and profound disinterest in every single frame. After an introduction in which he brutally murders an android in a laughable Turing test, his interest and eventual protection of Jane is seemingly out of character for the mercenary. Besides a few flashbacks that hint at a previous relationship, he essentially is a cipher, never given enough backstory or traits to create a fully-rounded character.
Like Pearce and Lutz’s characters, the entire film seems undercooked, hoping that referentiality will keep the entire thing afloat. Instead, one is just reminded of the better films that “Zone 414” is taking from. Making the transition from music videos — including The Weeknd’s “Kiss Land”— to feature-length filmmaking, Baird has ported over a similar CCTV aesthetic, often oscillating between faux-security camera footage and traditional set-ups to showcase the surveillance prevalent within the zone. But, Baird cuts to these shots so frequently that the aesthetic choice becomes exasperating, cutting off any type of character development or even spatial awareness within locations. Instead, as David and Jane move throughout the locations, everything is rendered as flat and lifeless.
Buried within this feature is a short-film yearning to break free, as Hill’s script eschews momentum in favor of repetition, crafting interrogation after interrogation until the audience has seemingly witnessed the same scene play out, with little variation, more than a half-dozen times. Inert, and ultimately, as lifeless as Jane’s dialogue, “Zone 414” may be visually interesting, but the film can never shake the comparisons to the films that it is so obviously referencing. [C-]
