Robot Jox

In the distant future, the world has been divided into two opposing super powers. There is no longer any war. Instead, conflicts between these two super powers are resolved through single combat, with each side represented by a single champion. These champion fight by driving huge, heavily-armed robots into battle, all while the whole world watches.

Robot Jox is one of those movies that seemed to be in every video store that ever existed. Only on VHS, of course. Strangely though, despite my being both a movie head and huge nerd for this kind of stuff, I never actually saw it. I don’t know why either. No real specific reason. Maybe I couldn’t convince the people I was with to rent it, proabably because we were only getting one movie, and I was basically the only person within possibly hundreds of miles with any interest in watching this particular film. Maybe I was distracted by other sci-fi/fantasy offerings. Whatever the reason, I never got around to it, and eventually, the movie began to disappear from the video stores, most likely because DVDs were becoming a thing and they needed room on the shelves for movies that regular people would want to rent, and besides, nobody in Hollywood was going to pay actual money to have this piece of shit put on a DVD, because like I said, I was probably one of the few people in the world at this point who even bothered to think about this film either way.

In the end, I missed my chance.

After that, it was basically “out of sight, out of mind" for decades, especially after video stores disappeared. In the past few years, I’ve rarely thought about this film, and when I did, I’d think “I’ve got time. I think I’ll check it out finally," but when I’d go to look for it on streaming, no one would have it, or worse, they used to have it, but not any more. In a nutshell, any time I ever actually wanted to see this film, I wouldn't be able to. Eventually it became clear that, if I wanted to see it, I’d have to keep an eye out for it, and when it becomes available again, I’d have to watch it immediately, or risk missing my chance once again for who knows how long. And recently... it finally happened.

I finally watched Robot Jox.

Now, should the question ever come up again as to why nobody ever seems to talk about this film, an American-made Mecha movie by the well-known genre director, Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Space Truckers), I’ll finally know the answer…

It’s because it’s terrible.

One consistently "interesting" thing about a lot of the future-set sci-fi films of the ’80s and 90s is they almost all show us this terrible dystopian/day-after-tomorrow kind of future, and now, living here in 2025, watching these old films, it's clear that these fictional futures are basically just slightly-exaggerated-at-best versions of the world we actually live in right now. Great, right? Ha ha ha, very funny, Jon. Right? I know. But seriously, there's usually only one thing missing from our current reality that otherwise consistently appears in these fictionalized futures...

The nuclear apocalypse.

So we got that going for us, I guess, which is nice.

Otherwise, that this particular film takes place in a “fictional” dystopian future, one where a largely illiterate society lives in a pronatalist propaganda world, where real meat is too expensive and is reserved for special occasions, where fandoms are dangerous and entitled fanatics always ready to turn on the things they love, where fascist guards loiter on every corner, where the populace must wear n95 masks due to rampant disease, and hoods due to the harsh UV radiation of their deteriorating environment, and everyone is distracted from noticing the bars on their world by the pomp and circumstance of celebrity-sports bread and circuses… well, that’s certainly not an uncomfortable thing to have to sit with for a bit, huh?

Anyway…

50 years since the nuclear holocaust almost destroyed humanity…

Illiterate, and racist against test tube babies, Achilles is known as The Hero of the Market. He is the greatest of all the Robot Jox, an elite cadre of warriors who pilot giant robot warrior vehicles in defense of the homeland against the evil agenda of the Confederation.

Y’see, due to the horrors of the nuclear holocaust fifty years ago, war has been outlawed (By who, I have no idea. Plus, how do you "outlaw" war?) In its place, all disputes are now settled with a televised sporting event, a gladiator-style match between 80 foot tall, heavily armed, and armored robots, which, to be fair, sounds like a ridiculously awesome, and I will vote for anyone who makes this a part of their platform.

Achilles has won nine fights. If he wins one more, he can retire in glory.

And now, with the whole world watching, and supported by the genius robot designer and the chief armorer of their robots, "Doc" Matsumoto, and the former Robot Jox champion, the only one to ever survive ten fights, who's now retired and working as the Market’s chief strategist, Tex Conway, Achilles’ tenth fight is on the horizon, as the question of which superpower has claim to the sovereign state of Alaska looms.

The Confederation champion is a man named Alexander, a wild-eyed and even more wildly-accented Russian, he is a man drunk on blood lust, who has killed his last nine opponents, which was basically all of Achilles teammates. Alexander will be a fearsome opponent for Achilles. Although, there are some in the Market who are beginning to suspect that there’s a mole in their ranks, someone who is spilling the secrets of their new weapons and tactics to the Confederation.

In essence, this film is a classic Cold War tale of a good ol' American boy versus an evil Russian guy who cackles evilly.

Unfortunately, in their initial match, Alexander forces Achilles to stumble back into the crowd, crushing a section of the bleachers beneath him, killing hundreds of unwashed illiterate rabble dumb enough to mortgage their lives for court-side seats to a giant robot fight. The referees declare the match to be a draw, due to the mass squishing, and orders a rematch. However, Achilles, shaken by the sound of three hundred people being simultaneously squashed beneath him, declares that this was his contractual tenth match, and therefore he is now retired. This is not a popular decisions, and he is branded a traitor and a coward by the hoi polloi. He tries to lay low, moving in with his brother and his family, but the fans find him, and they end up getting tons of death threats over the phone, and this is pretty upsetting for their day-to-day family life.

"Is my refridgerator running?!?! Youg man, we are trying to eat dinner!"

Meanwhile, the Market must choose a new Robot Jox to face Alexander in the rematch or they'll have to forfeit their claim on Alaska and all the myriad resources it has available to pillage and consume. Unfortunately, since Alexander has killed every other Market pilot they had, except for Achilles, and due to how expensive it is to train up a new cadre, not to mention how long it takes, they turn to the ready cheaper alternative… test tube babies. Genetically engineered to be the best, these "Gen Jox“ are considered by some to be the future of Robot Jox-ing, much to the displeasure of many Robot Jox purists, who are all bigots, so they refer to the “Gen Jox” derisively as “Tubies”

Add to this bubbling stew of racism, the best Gen Jox of the bunch is a woman named Athena. If she is chosen, then not only would she be the first Gen Jox Robot Jox, she would also be the first female Robot Jox too. Same as it ever was, this only makes the dumb white guys even more pissed.

Achilles, meanwhile—disguising his misogyny and racism as legitimate worry, as well as the fact that he clearly really wants to fuck Athena—returns to the Market and agrees to fight Alexander again, shoving Athena aside from her earned spot as the new pilot. This understandably infuriates her. No one cares about her feelings though, they’re just relieved to have a white guy back in the cockpit.

And so, the day of the big fight dawns...

But will Achilles be ready? Will the mole be revealed? Will the righteous forces of the Market’s capitalism overcome the evil red spectre of the Confederation’s Soviet perversion, as God intended? Will Athena finally admit that Achilles was actually justified in doing what he did, and then ask him to make sweet, sweet love to her in a somewhat gently romantic, but also kind of rough and dominating style that is mostly done from behind, also as God intended?

Well… if you want to find out, you’ll have to wait until Robot Jox is once again available on streaming.

Or you could try searching the internet, of course, endlessly clicking on the dead-end links scrounged up by the now basically worthless Google search, riddled as it is with idiot GenAI bullshit like a terminal cancer patient wheezing in time with the slow beep of their monitors. Although, fair warning, if you do this, there's a high likelyhood you'll end up with some virus-soaked old Russian copy like it’s 2001 again and you’re burning CDs off Limewire.

OR... you could try to find a physical copy. But who has the time to search through their local dump, right?

Still, if you won't be dissuaded from your quest, if you're that desperate for the answers you seek, then you'll first need to get an old VCR off your local free-to-take Facebook page. If you don't wake up in a bathtub full of ice, because it was actually just a ruse to ambush you for one of your kidneys, then you’ll need to locate a 2nd-Hand Repair shop that is still in operation. To do this, drive to the forgotten end of town, and look for a dilapidated warehouse with a faded and unreadable sign, bars on the window, and a front door that might not be the front door (Are we supposed to go in here? Hello...? This door was unlocked...) Inside, it will be dim and dusty, and crowded from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling with strange clutter, with a smell of oil and must and the staticy crackle of talk radio lingering in the air.

Thread your way back between the teetering stacks until you find the old hermit hunched over his work, the one who will only answer your questions with truculent grunts. Patiently repeat "...excuse me? ...excuse me, sir?" until he sighs heavily and steps away from the old clock radio that he was hunched over, and get him to agree to repair your VCR. It should cost around $30. A steep price for a VCR, I know, as it is much more than the thing itself is worth, but you must pay it. He will need to order replacement parts too, of course. He'll try to tell you that no one makes them anymore, but simply assure him they can still be found on the dark web, or maybe in one of the darker back alley black markets of world, if you know the right kind of people, and you’ve got ready cash (which you do). Tell him to start in Jakarta, or Ciudad del Este, or maybe Dara Adam Khel, Bangkok too, if things start to look desperate, perhaps even Jacksonville Florida, as a last resort, obviously.

Then, of course, there’s the question of arranging proper transportation. This is important if you want your parts to arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. But it’s not just the logistics that'll be the problem–although arranging the various legs of the journey will be a problem, donkey trains march on their stomachs, after all–there’s the ever-present threat of pirates, as well as interference from the local warlords, not to mention a general lack of infrastructure due to near constant U.S. drone attacks. There's also the not-insubstantial cost of obtaining the necessary loyalty assurances from the smugglers themselves. You'll need to rely on them to pay off any number of nosy border guards along the way, and to be clever enough to avoid being "disappeared" by the psychotic ICE agents and having their precious cargo vanish once they reach America, as well as avoiding having to pay the Trump tariffs. Plus gas is like $4 a gallon now. And road snacks? Forget about it.

And while all that’s going on…

You‘ll need to devote a frankly inordinate amount of personal time to actually finding a VHS copy of the film yourself. And if not you, then you’ll need to hire a veritable army of professional pickers and flea market mercenaries, the type of untrustworthy dirt-merchants who are willing to brave the dangerous hinterlands of America, the filthy backwaters and wide spots in the road off the old highways, the places that decent folk just fly over, those long forgotten one-stoplight small towns that still have a sun-faded rack of VHS rentals in their gas station/video store/tanning salon/city hall, the kind of place that still has Hubba-Bubba on the shelves and Crystal Pepsi in the freezer, the kind of place that don't like strangers. You'll need them for their ability to safely stroll amongst the rabid yokels, so that they can take the time needed to properly browse their VHS rental selection, and to be smart enough NOT to mention that they have no intention of ever returning to this place with that VHS copy of Robot Jox, and all while the wall-eyed, wind-burned locals glare in a mixture of hatred and fear and confusion from behind the counter, stubby fingers caressing their AR-15s…

My point is, such terrible knowledge has a cost, my friends.

Are you prepared to pay its price?

Anyway...

While Robot Jox never comes anywhere close to actually being a “good” film, you can definitely see the point where maybe…possibly… a metaphor about the evils of capitalism and racism and misogyny, as well as the stagnation it brings to society, was upended, derailed, and yanked completely out of the Third Act. Because it is at this point that the film takes a hard left turn into absolute nonsense. The Third Act not only drags on and on and on, but even in such a poorly written film as this, its out-of-left-field redemption arc ending for the hero is shockingly unearned.

And that nonsense pales in comparison to Athena’s wildly careening “character arc,” which is so fucking weird… I mean, I can’t even begin to explain what they were trying to do there. It just makes no sense. The only possible explanation is that maybe it was a pro-feminist metaphor at some point, and some misogynistic asshole with script approval was like “No fucking way. Girls can’t drive robots.” And then they must have rewrote the script, and it’s extra terrible because bigots are dumb and make dumb stuff.

And then, on top of that weirdness, entire sequences often just make no sense. Why did the robots briefly fly up into space? I have no idea. What was the point of transforming the damaged robot into a robot tank thing? I also have no idea. Overall, the bottom line on this film is that it’s tonally uneven, poorly written, and features some truly ham-handed characters that I am being extremely charitable when I call them “inconsistent.”

I mean… god damn, no wonder this film is largely forgotten.

But to be fair, the Stop-Motion animation that they use for the robots is really great. I loved that. And it’s too bad that the effect was obviously too expensive for the film, and that they had to save it for the “big” moments, because I would have loved to see more of it.

And I won’t deny that this films was obviously also weirdly influential maybe too. Did the movie the Incredibles get the idea for defeating the giant sphere robot in their movie from the climax of Robot Jox? I think so, yeah. Did Guillermo del Toro watch this film and use parts of it in Pacific Rim? Also, yeah, I think so.

And that’s the worst part, right? It’s potentially interesting. While I won’t try to claim that Robot Jox is better than Pacific Rim, I do think it could’ve been, with more money, talent, and technology, of course... Obviously that’s a joke. I mean, we could all play in the NFL if we were bigger, stronger, and faster, right? And yes, I’ll admit it, I’m not a fan of Pacific Rim, so it’s easy for me to poo-poo that film, but my point is, the bones of this story is better than what they did in Pacific Rim. The world is more potentially interesting than the strange narrative gymnastics they pulled to set up the storyline in Pacific Rim. Plus, the basics of the robots and their pilots are not nearly as fucking stupid in this film as they are in Pacific Rim. Now, like I said, I’m not going to try to claim that Robot Jox is better than Pacific Rim, but I do wish we had been able to see this film on a more level playing field. In short, there's a lot of problems with this movie, but the main problem is simply that it was made long before the world was actually capable of creating it.

So on one hand, good on them for trying, I guess. But on the other hand, there’s no need for anyone to ever watch this movie.

Incorrect, guys. Thumbs down.