What is Blood Machines? Is it a series? Is it a short film? Is it a long music video? Broken up into three parts on Shudder, with a collective runtime of just 58 minutes, Seth Ickerman‘s Blood Machines is something of a hybrid of the three, with an opening credits sequence that doesn’t actually arrive until 5 minutes into the second “episode” – nearly halfway through the entire thing. Best experienced rather than explained, Blood Machines is so defiant of neat and tidy categorization that I’m not sure it’s a movie and I’m not sure it’s a series either.
What I am sure of, however, is that Blood Machines is a stunning piece of art.
Blood Machines kicks off with a short wall of text that sets the stage. “While escaping through space, the Mima, a machine with a defective A.I. system, is overtaken by a warship. Severely damaged by its harpoons, the Mima uses what little strength it has left to break free, but is forced to crash on an unexplored planet.” We then meet the main players: Vascan (Anders Heinrichsen) and Lago (Christian Erickson), the captain and mechanic of the warship, and the Scavengers, a band of female warriors (led by Elisa Lasowski‘s Corey) that remind of the Many Mothers from Mad Max: Fury Road. The plot that these characters are all wrapped up in? Well, the A.I. system that lived within the Mima (Joëlle Berckmans) escapes into space, setting into motion a galactic chase and an A.I. uprising that is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
We’ve all seen movies dealing in similar subject matter – movies documenting the uprising of sentient machines, in particular, are quite common – but Blood Machines boldly stands apart from the pack thanks to a visual and aural aesthetic that is often nothing short of completely breathtaking. Peppered with retro-style synth tracks from Carpenter Brut and set in a visual effects-enhanced landscape that brings this fictional world to life with bright neon colors, Blood Machines is so wholly unique and so completely alien that even comparing it to any other piece of entertainment seems wrong. The A.I. system that lived inside the Mima, for example, is represented by an actual woman, completely nude and with an upside down cross on her torso that glows as bright as the sun. Particularly when Mima is flying through space, Carpenter Brut’s synth sounds pulsing in the background, it’s jaw dropping to witness.
The image I just conjured up likely sounds like a purely male fantasy but Blood Machines is actually a surprisingly feminist story about women coming together and saying “time’s up.” It’s a timely story told through the lens of the science fiction film, with women represented by godlike A.I. systems that have long been forced to do nothing more than obey the orders of the ship captains who have used, abused and discarded them. Without giving too much away, the final battle between man and machine is actually more akin to a ballet, a gorgeous depiction of the A.I. takeover that’s both beautiful to look at and powerful to behold. Many may argue that Blood Machines is a case of style over substance, but I couldn’t disagree more. The substance is all there, with the insane visuals making sure the storytelling sings and captivates.
And goddamn is Blood Machines pretty to look at, with every decision made by Ickerman and the massive visual effects team capturing a unified aesthetic that is going to speak so strongly to so many people that this may become a sort of religion in its own right. From the ships to the weaponry and character designs, everything in Blood Machines feels almost instantly iconic, derivative of past works only in barely discernible ways. The main warship, for example, looks a bit like the Derelict from Alien – and the film all around sort of imagines what would happen if the Nostromo’s A.I. system “Mother” became a sentient being with a corporeal form – but it’s also of its own design entirely, looking like a fusion between a ship and a space monster. Every piece of the puzzle is part of a confident vision, a vision that’s destined to spawn fan art, Halloween costumes and repeat watches for many years to come.
A visionary trip through space that’ll drop your jaw with its imagery, compel you to buy the soundtrack with its score, and seal the deal on it being one of your favorite things of 2020 with its powerful message, Blood Machines is a stunning achievement that loudly and colorfully marks the arrival of a new visionary in Seth Ickerman. If Blood Machines is Ickerman’s calling card, then I have to imagine he’s been fielding a whole lot of calls in recent weeks. In a perfect world, someone with a ton of money is about to hand some of it over to Ickerman and let him bring to life a full length feature for the big screen. This is not, of course, a perfect world. But the world Ickerman has created with Blood Machines, well, at least that one is.
“I think we might just have witnessed a miracle,” one of the characters says in the wake of a particularly wild moment. By the end of the experience, I felt the exact same way.
Blood Machines is now streaming on Shudder.
