Soldiers and a scientist’s daughter try to take down an AI in 2024’s truly awful MUTANT: GENESIS, now on disc from Cleopatra.
The Film (Btw, not the Cole Hauser movie that just got a new disc from Vinegar Syndrome)
Woof. Out of the gate, I’m going to say wholly and easily to avoid Mutant, from writer-director Qilin Li. It might pop up without the Genesis uptitle and with years ranging from 2024 to 2026. But no matter how and where you find it (Prime or Fawesome, if you’re brave enough), I don’t suggest ever putting eyes on it. Even as a lover of bad films, and many of you are, Mutant is painful. I watched the whole thing, so I’m making this your problem. At least you’re just reading a few hundred words and can move on. I watched it, took notes, and am taking the time to write and publish this. I think I’m putting more work in than the filmmakers.
Are you familiar with Asylum films? That film company primarily focuses on mockbusters of whatever is popular right now. They don’t make good movies, although most are more than halfway decent, but there’s something about them that works, even if it’s shamelessly ripping off similar films. Take all the worst of them and toss them in a blender with a heaping pile of your least favorite food. Or AI. Although this film is anti-AI, I’m not convinced it wasn’t written by shoving the scripts for every Terminator, Star Wars, Transformers, Paul WS Anderson‘s Resident Evil, Matrix, and even a little monster movie into that AI generator blender for good measure. There’s no way a human wrote this script.
Said result? A scientist accidentally creates an AI that soon takes over the world, killing most humans and leaving the world covered with robots and ships that look copy-pasted from The Matrix and Terminator. The Resistance sends a group of soldiers to retrieve the scientist’s daughter, and after lots of shooting and running around green screens, the soldiers and the daughter battle their way through the world with awful dialogue and detail. It’s a pain, with the atrocious CG that would have looked back then like a straight-to-USA Jurassic Park rip-off in 1994. It’s become as headache-inducing in sheer volume. It’s not enough to merely use all CG but humans; it’s a FILL-THE-SCREEN method that overwhelms. Snip a creature out of the better movie, touch up, hit Ctrl-C, and then spam that Ctrl-V.
That wouldn’t be so bad, as a rip-off can be fun if they’re aware of it. Aslym is aware. Mutant isn’t. Between lightsabers, T-800s, a literal bullet-time sequence, and more, it becomes a slog; sigh of count the reference, but there’s no wink. There’s a feeling like “no one will know where I stole this from.”
Okay, I’m done ranting. It should be painfully clear Mutant is not a movie I recommend on every level. It pains me to write it, as I come into everything with “ready to enjoy” and honestly don’t like writing pans as fun as they can be. But as I noted in Paradise Bungalows, a film that wasn’t good but might work for others, I feel compelled to still give words to what doesn’t work.
Final thought: I’m not sure why this was called Mutant: Genesis anyway. It’s an AI/robots/computer flick. Maybe a translation thing. There is a monster with tentacles on the disc cover, and a Xenomorph egg. I don’t recall either in the movie. But maybe I blinked, or my brain went blank with the inanity of the movie. If it is there, I’m sorry if I misrepresented it, but it doesn’t matter anyway.
The Packaging
Cleopatra puts Mutant on a single-disc DVD. Yes, DVD with no Blu-ray. The image of a monster near the lead is on the disc and the slipcover.
The Presentation
Mutant Genesis is on DVD. As such, the poor, overwhelming CG becomes a fuzzy mess of grey. The audio has 4 options: Mandarin and English with 5.1 and 2.0. If you are going to ignore all my warnings and watch it, go with Chinese even if you prefer dubbed to subbed. For a movie that is Anti-AI, the English “dub” is, or sounds just like, AI. It’s that flat robotic voice when TikTok puts an auto-voice on captions. It’s awful and distracting. There are two male voices and one female voice, so it’s a mess.
The Features
Nada.
Final Thoughts
Don’t.