In Netflix’s upcoming military science fiction thriller Outside the Wire, a robot masquerades as a human in a near-future war where people fight alongside machines.
Despite the familiarity of the summary, the film doesn’t look like it’s a reskinned version of The Terminator, but a neat take on the future of mechanical warfare.
Set in the nearish future, a disgraced drone pilot named Leo (Damson Idris) is brought in on an important mission: he has to help locate a doomsday device before a group of insurgents find it. Helping him is Captain Harp (Anthony Mackie), a soldier with a particular secret: he’s an android.
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The film is directed by (Escape Plan’s Mikael Håfström), and according to Polygon, is a story that he and writers Rob Yescombe and Rowan Athale used to imagine what the near future might look like right around the corner.
Going by the trailer, that near future includes plenty of action. Leo and Harp find themselves in a war-torn city where they’re working to “remove advanced weapons from beyond the wire”—helping their own side, along with their own robotic and human soldiers. Nobody knows that Harp is actually an android, and he’s got his own abilities: he’s super strong and fast, which allows him to go toe-to-toe with enemy bots.
The film hits Netflix on January 15th, 2021.
