All Alex wants for Christmas is for his parents to stop fighting. He asks them for a robot hoping that it will bring his family together instead it tears them apart, literally.
This isn’t your typical killer robot story. It gets you to sympathize with the machine but not by humanizing it, rather by dehumanizing the human.
At first Blinky acts as a surrogate parent, but the boy quickly grows bored with it. Alex quits in the middle of a game of hide and seek. When the robot finds him, he orders it stand out in the rain and count down from one million. Alex tries to elicit a response by barking out conflicting commands and berating the robot, but it continually responds “no problem.”
Actor Max Records (Where the Wild Things Are) does such a good job of playing the spoiled brat that you find yourself constantly hoping this will be the moment that Blinky inevitably snaps. Of course, it never snaps because it’s not alive. The robot just obediently counts down to the last command it received, before it calls out “Ready or not, here I come.”
Watch BlinkyTM below:
