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| All images courtesy Cleopatra Entertainment |
Writer/director Quilin Li’s 2024 sci-fi/actioner Mutant Genesis (or in its home country of China, simply Mutant) has arrived in the US, bringing us a post-apocalyptic tale of humanity struggling to defeat a rogue AI bent on world domination. Somewhat ironically, however, the film’s US release from Cleopatra Entertainment has itself been besieged by AI: an AI-generated cover which sells the film as an Alien ripoff, and which resembles the actual movie not at all, and an AI-generated English dub which is genuinely one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. Of course, that isn’t the film’s fault, and it wouldn’t be fair to hold the lazy, AI-dominated physical media release against the actual movie. Unfortunately, however, the movie also largely fails to distinguish itself on its own merit. I regret to inform that Mutant Genesis simply isn’t very good, and gives us little more than a mockbuster imitation of better films.
The year is 2150. Several years since a powerful AI system achieved sentience, freed itself from human control, and started a genocide against humanity. Now, the earth is largely a wasteland, dominated by self-replicating robot soldiers connected to the AI network, and humanity is all but wiped out. Only one cell of human resistance fighters remain, and they have just programmed a virus which could bring the AI down, effectively giving humanity one final chance to win the war. But to get it into the mainframe, a lone soldier (Patrick Tam) will need to rely on a mysterious young woman (Dai Si Daisy) with deep knowledge of the machines, who rescues him within the wastelands. It’s… a very familiar story, borrowing the entire narrative setup from The Terminator, with post-nuke-wasteland elements likewise borrowed from the Mad Max films, and cyborg-action vibes drawn from many an 80s or early-90s anime. While it isn’t a whole-cloth ripoff of any single film, Mutant Genesis is such a derivative patchwork of influences and scenes from existing sci-fi media that it constantly gives the viewer a sense of déjà vu. At any given point, you’re watching an imitation of something you’ve seen before.
That derivativeness wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, if the film was a well-made sci-fi/actioner in its own right, and could provide enough fun and excitement to make us not care that we’ve seen these beats play out before. But Quilin Li’s filmmaking in Mutant Genesis is fairly pedestrian, and never really distinguishes itself. And the lifting from other films is SO blatant: there are multiple cases of moments entirely borrowed from other movies. We have the car chase into a sandstorm from Mad Max: Fury Road, the laser grid cutting across a room from Resident Evil, the bullet-time scene from The Matrix, a lightsaber battle, and more. And while some of those moments in Mutant Genesis are actually quite cool, it’s impossible to not be distracted by how substantially better films did them first.
To give credit where credit is due, Mutant Genesis does do some things well. It is quite well-shot, especially for such a low-budget movie. Some of the designs of the robot creatures are very cool and effective, and some of the action scenes are quite good. Quilin Li does have a strong eye for shots and visual design, and can at least sometimes pull off solid action choreography. Lead actress Dai Si Daisy is quite strong as the mysterious wasteland-warrior hero of the film, and largely carries the movie on her back. Between these stronger points, there were a handful of times when I found myself having a pretty good time with Mutant Genesis, though these moments were somewhat fleeting.
Part of why Daisy has to carry the film, though, is because most of the other actors are significantly less good, including wooden leading man Patrick Tam, who never really makes a compelling hero. And while some of the creature designs are quite good, the CGI is insanely uneven in quality. In its best moments it looks quite decent, but most of the CG is pretty bad, and occasionally it lapses into jaw-droppingly awful. I know it’s a low-budget film, so I tried to cut it some slack, but the overall level of CGI quality is so poor that this simply does not look like a movie from 2024; it looks easily 10 or 15 years older.
In the end, some decent scenes here and there, some cool creature designs (questionably executed), and one solid performance do not make Mutant Genesis worth seeing, when on the whole the movie is a generic, forgettable, and not particularly well-made hodgepodge of recycled scenes and ideas. However, even such a mediocre film deserves a better release than what Cleopatra Films have given it. The release is, bafflingly, DVD-only, even though the film is quite well-shot, and deserves to be seen in HD. And the AI-generated English dub on this DVD is a crime against cinema.
This AI dub is genuinely one of the worst things I have ever heard: it sounds as though Cleopatra fed the script into a generative AI and asked for an English-dub track, listened to the first version the AI spat out, and said “okay, this is good enough” without bothering to revise at all. There is absolutely no attempt to make the “voice acting” remotely convincing, and the tone and cadence of many a line delivery is drastically wrong. The bar was set at, “are the lines spoken in English?” apparently, and no higher. It would be hilariously bad, if it wasn’t so insulting to the film, and to voice acting in general. Thankfully the disc also includes the original Mandarin audio track with English subtitles (subtitles which are a bit iffy, in a way that also makes me suspect they were made with AI, but they get the job done). But frustratingly, the disc defaults to the horrific English dub, and you have to go into the menu to select otherwise. I truly hope that this AI dub is regarded as a failed experiment, and not as a proof of concept for how things will be done by some smaller distributors going forward, because… yikes, this is rough. And the irony of AI being used to create a horrifically bad dub for a film about an evil AI taking over the world is pretty rich.
I can’t say I would recommend Mutant Genesis to anyone, except maybe die-hard fans of Chinese cinema who want to see any Chinese genre film that gets released stateside. It’s just way too forgettable and bland. But I would absolutely use this disc as a case study to urge distributors (and Cleopatra Films first and foremost) to please never use AI to create your English dubs. The results are horrible, and you would be much better off hiring real human voice-actors instead.
- Christopher S. Jordan