For film studios, January is a time to release movies that you would consider to be less than stellar. The holidays are over and people are going back to work. They don’t have as much time to go to the movies, and if they do, they’re more likely to watch one of the big, buzzy Christmas movies they didn’t get a chance to see or one of the movies from the previous year that’s starting to get some Oscar buzz. So January has become the perfect spot on the calendar to release your more forgettable movies. It’s called a “dump month” and it’s were film studios and it’s where studios will put their movies that seem like they have limited commercial success, but might be contractually obligated to release.
Anyway, despite Netflix having an entirely different business strategy, with releasing movies directly to your living room, and not having to worry about the theater experience at all, it seems that the idea of January being a “dump month might have successfully made the jump from theatrical to streaming.
Outside The Wire is the kind of movie that perfectly sums up a January movie. It’s got an interesting idea, one that might get people to check it out, but it doesn’t ever seem to do anything with any of the ideas it presents. The movie takes place in a future where technology has advanced to the point where robots are playing a bigger part in our militaries, with six foot tall robot soldiers being deployed alongside human soldiers. The main character of the movie is Lt. Thomas Harp (Damson Idris) a drone pilot who has always done his fighting in a chair, behind a joystick, thousands of miles away from the real actions. The film is eager to point out Harp’s detachment to the battle he’s actively partaking in by having him earth a pack of gummy bears during the firefight.
When Harp disobeys a direct order and gets two soldiers killed (but saves thirty-eight as he points out) Harp is deployed to a post on the frontlines in Ukraine. There he meets his new Captain, Leo (Anthony Mackie) , the most advanced android soldier to date. The mission for Leo and Harp is to deliver a pack of vaccines to a hospital in exchange for information on an insurgent leader who is trying to gain access to an old cold war nuke.
Outside The Wire wants to be a movie that discusses the real dehumanization of war. With people launching drone strikes so far away from the action it all becomes a video game to them, what comes next? The “Wire” that is mentioned in the title is the safe zone that the Army exists in, and it’s going outside The Wire that forces Harp to come face to face with the reality of his actions as a soldier. But while the subtext of the film is heavy enough that it’s probably safe to refer to it as simply text, the movie doesn’t end up having a whole lot to say about the topic that it seems so keen to discuss.
Mackie’s role as the latest and greatest asset of military technology, is a set up to be a part of this discussion, but not much is done with that. The parallels between a drone pilot and a AI military captain are never drawn despite these two characters spending the most screen time together. There’s plenty of moments for Harp to stop and take in the “real world” of war that he’s been thrust into, but the presence of an android soldier doesn’t build on that idea at all. There are questions raised about the idea of robots doing the actual fighting, but the questions don’t seem to relate to the moral quandary that the movie is raising around the idea of drone warfare. The robots end up just being some set dressing to make sure you remember that the movie is set in the future and to set up a few sequences of robot warfare.
There are admittedly a few neat action sequences. One in particular springs to mind featuring a hostage situation with Army robot soldiers being confronted by a set of robot soldiers that the insurgents got their hands on. But these sequences are few and far between, with most of the movie’s runtime dedicated to ideas that even the movie itself doesn’t seem interesting enough to really build on past the initial setup.
