John Brennick (Christophe Lambert) and his wife Karen (Loryn Locklin) attempt to escape across the border to Canada. She is pregnant again after they lost their first child.
When the pregnancy is detected they make a run for it.
No good will come of this.
CW: weird creepy sex hostage stuff
So many potentially good ideas so badly done.
It's got whiffs of The Handmaid's Tale, commentary on eugenics and transhumanism, the commercialisation of the US prison system, crime and punishment in a panopticon society, the perils of artificial intelligence etc etc in something that sells itself as a 90s sci-fi prison movie then delivers none of them. It doesn't even deliver the prison movie as it was flirting with everything else.
I was expecting action and there's essentially none until the last twenty minutes. Even the prison fight scenes are terrible.
About halfway in it reveals Prison Director Poe (Kurtwood Smith) to be a posthuman being and gets into a weird creepy sex hostage thing between him and a very pregnant Karen Brennick. Then the AI arrests him for going off the company script.
There's computer hacking to trigger memories in dreams, weird almost borg-like killer drones, implanted torture devices to ensure compliance, dream surveillance (mostly used for titillating bedroom scene flashbacks), laser fences, mind wiping, computer controlled gun turrets and the whole thing is buried in the middle of the desert with Zed the AI in control. Which is finally disabled by a computer virus Jeffey Combs installs by typing "Install D-Day virus" then pressing enter dramatically after he's been machinegunned by a borg.
Then when you think it's all over another Zed AI tries to kill them with a truck under remote control.
It is absolute pish HOWEVER I can see its influence or more likely influence of its influences in countless other later and better things. The whole prison sequence of Andor for one thing, right down to red lines on the floor that kill.
Godawful 2/10 but those influences man!