This movie opens with an alien mothership hurling a fiery soccer ball at the earth. It lands in the sea and is promptly swallowed by a Great White. The shark convulses and transforms into Roboshark, the sweetest little death machine you ever did see!
This is a straight-up comedy, folks. It takes every known cliche about Seattle and mashes it into a delicious croquette of E.T., Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a robust gravy of modern technology. (I shouldn’t write these blogs when I’m hungry.)
The film revolves around a family. The dad gets dragged around by the Navy and freaks out a lot. The mom is a weather reporter who ends up getting the scoop on Roboshark. The daughter is a typical teen who has weapons-grade social media skills and knows how to use them.
It all begins when Roboshark uses its teeth that can morph into an electric toothbrush to Sonicare its way into destroying a nuclear sub. I have to admit I instantly fell in love with Roboshark. The CGI ain’t bad. Its skeleton glows red and it processes what it sees like the Terminator’s brain but… adorable. Despite the eye-splitting cuteness of this shark bot, the Navy wants to destroy it. Sigh.
The mom sees a viral video of “Shark eats plane” and starts digging into the story, while Roboshark starts digging into the Seattle sewer system. The dad is a sewer engineer and the Navy forces him to help them track Roboshark. The mechanical beast attacks a coffee shop, causes a poop-apocalypse at the water treatment plant and then heads over to the local mall. The Navy’s puny efforts to kill Roboshark are in vain. However, the mom, daughter and cameraman get everything on film. The daughter uses her teenage superpowers to post her mom’s vids on social media. There is a fun little cutscene where you see the video go viral worldwide. Mom makes the mistake of reading the comments and quickly learns that you don’t ever engage with trolls.
The bumbling Navy general wants to nuke Roboshark into the stratosphere but much to his dismay, the most powerful man in the world comes in to save the day…Bill Glates. That is not a typo. The movie producers obviously didn’t want to get sued. Bill rigs a drone to communicate with Roboshark through math and music, which then will reverse engineer the bot’s system and corner the alien intelligence market. It does not end well for Bill.
Now, the clearly undestroyed Roboshark heads to the high school. The daughter realizes that Roboshark is following her…on Twitter. She begins tweeting with it. Roboshark sends two tweets back. One is just rocketship, fish and cry face emojis. The other is “Roboshark phone home”. He even lets her pet him and his red skeleton glow goes all green indicating, of course, that underneath it all, Roboshark is a total dollface.
By golly, the rambunctious little Roboshark just wants to go home. So off to the Space Needle it goes, to use it as an antenna to contact the mothership. It’s almost like the humans might be the real monsters in this movie. Shocking.
The climax is a ton of fun. The gags are a little stale but I admittedly found myself chortling quite often. I won’t give too much away here, folks, but if The Naked Gun had a love child with Titanic, you might get some idea of the ending. The very last scene takes it just one step too far but what the hell. This little movie had my heart the whole way so why should a stupid final shot erase all the good times we had together.
Did I mention that Roboshark is a cutie patootie muffin face? I want one.
See ya next time!
Director: Jeffery Lando
Where to watch: Amazon Prime