The Machine will be playing in the Somerville Theatre's micro-cinema in a couple of weeks - May 16th & 17th - and I would really appreciate it if anybody in the area would check it out during one of those four screenings.  Of all the genre films I saw at festivals last year - heck, all the films I saw last year - it may be my favorite.  I raved about it during Fantasia, recommended it for the festival, and personally put a bug in the ear of Subterranean Cinema programmer Chris Hallock's ear about it when I saw that it had US distribution but no Boston-area booking.  It's a big deal to me.

What is it?  A hard sci-fi movie set a couple decades in the future about a military project to create artificial intelligence and cybernetic brain implants for people who have sustained massive cranial trauma which leads to a new artificial life form (the "machine" of the title).  The action is great, the science is not dumbed down or otherwise ridiculous, and Caity Lotz (whom folks may know from Arrow) is pretty fantastic in the lead role.  Dennis Lawson, of Star Wars quasi-fame, makes a fantastic villain.

Again, highly worth your time, and maybe if these screenings do well, they'll book more like this.  Advance tickets are available at this link.

I can sort of understand reviews from folks who don't necessarily love the genre being less than great, in part because it is very much our crowd's movie - within a few scenes, they're conduction a Turing Test without a lot of exposition on what it is, and when things start getting weird, the movie doesn't necessarily go along "AI is uniformly dangerous and anything that might make things different Must Be Stopped!" lines.

Again, come see it.  It's pretty great.