Crew
Director/Screenplay/Photography – Justin Price, Producers – Justin Price & Franzi Schissler, Visual Effects Supervisors – Justine Filer & Gerald Jenk. Production Company – Baby Monster.
Cast
Franzi Schissler (Terra Vinco), Danny Trejo (Bob), Georgie Tadora (Voice of Q), Lela Gruber (Jess Vinco), Justin Price (Zero), Aylin Sahin (Sofi), Michelle Chavez (Katie), Ginger Dudley (Gia), Derek Dorman (Frank), Anna Mantell (Lisa), Tobias Eckert (Todd)
Plot
It is two years after the robots turned against humanity. Society has collapsed and the survivors live in small enclaves, scrabbling for supplies. Terra Vinco has joined one group, as well as found Q, an emotional support robot that is untouched by the signal that affected the other robots. Terra now receives a radio message from her sister Jess in another community saying that the robots are planning to launch a nuclear detonation. The only hope of stopping this is the core inside Q. And so Terra and Q must make a dangerous journey across open territory to Jess’s compound while avoiding the robotic Reapers that hunt the wilderness.
I ♥ Robots was a directorial debut for Justin Price. Price can also be seen on screen as the African American guy among of the duo of people that Franzi Schissler encounters and travels with on her journey. Subsequent to this, Price went on to direct other genre works such as Reapers (2025), Wawa: The Sandman’s Kingdom (2025) and Hard Matter (2026).
There has been a major upsurge of films about Artificial Intelligence revolution and Androids or Robots since the mid-2010s. These have included the likes of Her (2013), The Machine (2013), Automata (2014), Chappie (2015), Ex Machina (2015), Morgan (2016), tv’s Westworld (2016-22), A.I. Rising (2018), Tau (2018), Zoe (2018), Archive (2020), Finch (2021), Outside the Wire (2021), The Artifice Girl (2022), M3gan (2022), The Creator (2023), Companion (2025) and The Electric State (2025), among others.
I ♥ Robots feels barely one step above being an amateur film. It is one that has been shot with resources to hand and mostly around existing places (although at least the crew did manage to get a couple of scenes shot in Venice and Baden-Württemberg). The action scenes involving assorted shooting and running around is clearly being improvised by amateurs.
Some of the worst parts of the film are the scenes with Danny Trejo, the only name actor in the film, who gives the impression he has no idea what he is doing there – the dialogue he is given makes no real sense. The plot is one that gives Franzi Schissler a big quest to save the world, before an incredibly annoying reveal that her quest – something filled with dangers that could easily have killed her – was just a bogus one created by her sister.
What really kills the film is Franzi Schissler’s voiceover. Rather than a regular voiceover, which is supposed to be clearcut and imparting information to the audience, Schissler’s narration is annoyingly laidback and aimless. It is conversational in tone, diverting off to make asides and mostly delivered in an uninteresting monotone that sounds for all the world like a teenage girl you might be listening to at the next table in a cafe monologuing while aimlessly hopping from topic to topic. Sometimes this is just trying to be too cute for itself with ironically meta lines like “Well, normally, I’m not a big fan of flashbacks. I mean, what is this? Like the second, third, fourth? But you know what? Let’s just go with it.”
On the plus side, the one thing that Justin Price does very well is the robot effects. These appear to have been conducted by motion capture and digitally inserted. The effects are quite professional and look impressive in the way that they are seamlessly integrated into the live-action.
(Winner in this site’s Worst Films of 2024 list).
Trailer here