Robot Terror from Space!
Cosmos: War of the Planets is a 1977 Italian Space Opera film.
Fred Hamilton is a captain in future Earth's space military, who distrusts the newly-invented artificial intelligence. He's sent to address a distress signal from a group of aliens who have disabled all of Earth's communications until the humans help them. The aliens are rebels who are trying to destroy a computer that has taken over their world and plans to expand its destruction to Earth. Gathering his crew together, Hamilton goes to save both worlds from robotic tyranny.
It got a US DVD release by Mill Creek Entertainment.
This film contains examples of:
- Action Prologue: Hamilton and his crew evading the refractions of an ancient space explosion.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The computer was supposed to serve the aliens, but destroyed their civilization instead.
- Big Bad: The computer controlling the aliens.
- Body Surf: After the computer is destroyed, its mind enters one of the space crew to slaughter them out of revenge. It moves to the ship's computer after its human body is thrown out of an airlock.
- Covers Always Lie: The poster shows SHADO Interceptors, even though no such vessels appear in the film even as Stock Footage.
- Crapsack World: The alien world was once a technologically-advanced utopia, until the computer gained sapience and destroyed civilization in an atomic blast. Now the world is a barren wasteland, the people are forced to live savage and brutish lives, and the computer stalks the planet, killing any living thing it sees.
- Downer Ending: The computer is destroyed, but at the cost of the alien world and all but one of its inhabitants. The computer's mind possesses a crew member and goes on a killing spree in the ship, with the last alien throwing himself out of an airlock to take the computer with him. The rest of the crew heads home, but the computer has possessed the ship's computer, and is preparing to attack Earth.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The alien world is blown up by the shock of the computer's destruction.
- Military Maverick: Hamilton is the only member of the space military who doesn't like computers, and is willing to assault an officer to prove it.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: The computer's Leitmotif is "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" by Johann Sebastian Bach.
- Science Is Bad: Captain Hamilton hates computers and thinks they kill humanity, and given that the Big Bad is a murderous computer, the film seems to take his side.
- Strawman News Media: The press of Earth are convinced that the aliens are attacking Earth, and are willing to print that claim, lack of proof be damned.
