A.P.E.X. (1994)

(In French, On TV, October 2021) I’m not fond of low-budget films that go around stealing better ideas to mix up them and in fact, thirty minutes into A.P.E.X.,—as the film was stuck in a Terminator-inspired sequence with soldiers trying to gun down a killer robot,—I was this close to shutting down it down altogether. But instead of doing that, I resorted to my usual coping mechanism (i.e.: doing something else) and by the time I was paying attention again, writer-director Phillip J. Roth was doing slightly better. No, A.P.E.X. is not that smart of a film—the attempt at time-travel paradoxes is childish, and it doesn’t take a long time to come up with questions that the film can’t answer. But at least it gets out of the killer-robot thing, and even throws in a few acceptable ideas toward the end. (Hilariously enough, you can’t say that the end rips off Twelve Monkeys because Twelve Monkeys came out the following year.)  It still doesn’t make A.P.E.X. anything more than a cheap and low-budget film inspired by much-better material, but it does make it better when compared to similar films. Not a big victory, but I’ll take what I can get.