‘Outside the Wire’ Review: At War With the Robots
The director Mikael Hafstrom’s “Outside the Wire,” the latest Netflix combat film set in an exotic location, offers empty-calorie action in a less than fulfilling, Cold War-inspired robotic revolt narrative. The film’s redundant intertitles — several characters repeat the same information later — explain the outbreak of a civil war taking place in the year 2036 in Eastern Europe. U.S. troops, with the assistance of robotic soldiers called Gumps, serve as peacekeepers against the region’s ruthless criminal warlord Viktor Koval (Pilou Asbaek). Harp (Damson Idris), a dispassionate drone pilot, is ordered to the war zone as punishment after his cold calculation led to the deaths of two Marines. Paired with a top-secret android, Leo (Anthony Mackie), as his superior officer, he embarks on a mission to stop Koval from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Like several sentient-robot films (“The Terminator,” “Ex Machina”), “Outside the Wire” presents an android-as-slave metaphor, except this time with a Black actor. While the Gumps are physically and verbally abused by their human comrades, Leo is equally dismissed as “not one of us.” And Harp, a Black soldier without the discipline to say “sir” to his superiors, is assigned to what amounts to a robot overseer in Leo. While this metaphor serves as the thematic backbone to Leo and Harp’s mission, the incurious script by Rowan Athale and Rob Yescombe leaves the conventional subject threadbare.
