Da'ud Bob's Movie Review
for
August 2014

So there she was. Anna Sue. Gaily traipsing around that devil's den that is Amazon.com. Not a care in the world. Not a worry. No danger of being sucked into buying something that could possibly be dangerous. You know, like those pretty little jaguars in South America. Or those cute little grizzly bears in North America. Cute, right? Harmless, right? Oh, wait. And just like an alligator attacking its prey from its hiding place, she saw it. Ooh, pretty! Hmm, interesting. And, well, gosh, it's Shakespeare, so how bad could it possibly be? So of course she had to buy it. And have them send it to her home, where she could bring it inside, thinking, "what damage could it possibly do?" "I know, we could have Da'ud Bob review it." "And we should share the experience with some of our friends, too!" All the while little realizing just how many perfectly healthy brain cells were going to die an ugly death. All because she saw some harmless little thing out there on-line. But she did, and we did, and I did, and so it is that this month, Da'ud Bob reviews for you the Robot Shakespeare Company's presentation of The Tragedy of Macbeth.

\Or, as I prefer to think of it, Robot Macbeth.

With the voices of Miraid Booth-Ong, James Curcione, and Dan Gallagher, this is an animated version of "the Scottish play" in which all of the parts are played by robots. Green robots, red robots, blue robots. Male robots, female robots. Some with what appear to be light sabers. The plot, of course, should be so familiar to you that I needn't repeat it here. It is a study of how overweening ambition can lead to madness, and how you have to be careful to parse what a witch tells you very carefully, or it'll trip you up every time. And, of course, being a Shakespearean tragedy, nearly everyone dies at the end.

Good points: The soundtrack, mostly classical music: Beethoven, Holst, Dvorak, Grieg, Brahms, and Mussogorsky were the ones I could pick out. Stuff blows up. And it has a great closing shot.

Bad points: The screen that read "Those are two good weak spots." The use of a Star Trek Next Generation font on the screen readouts, with most of the words backwards, distracting you from the play as you try to read them. "Incoming Enemy Fleet." England is, apparently, in orbit around the Earth. It left us with the question, "What do robots drink?" 40 weight oil? Or if they're having the equivalent of a "light beer," 20 weight? The Dalek tower gun emplacements. I kept expecting them to start saying, "Exterminate! Exterminate!" But they didn't.

Zero breasts. (Well, they're robots.) Zero blood. (And not much oil.) Six dead bodies. Light saber fu. Light dagger fu. Star Wars-style laser pistols fu. Explosive sticky patches fired from pistols fu. Head rolls. Gratuitous laptop. Gratuitous hologram dagger. Gratuitous Iron Man chest lights. All of the male robots had gratuitous crotch lights. Why? Gratuitous Star Trek LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) screens. A 62 on the Vomit Meter. Two stars. Chad Bob says, "Watch your six, Banquo-bot." Da'ud Bob says, "The Robot Shakespeare Company is currently working on an edition of King Lear. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Check it out!"

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