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NaughtyPenguin came out of the closet to say:



-The eeeevill arms. Ok - so they have some AI that assists the user, and makes it possible to control the arms without having to spend years adapting to tentacle-like appendages. They come out of nowhere - that's ok, the audience was expecting them sooner, rather than later. I can accept that they are controlled via direct neural link. The metal spine looks nice and sinister as it attaches.

There! Right then! Did you catch it? That little blue thing at apex of the spine, that's the point where the believability starts getting thin. At this point, we can still say "Ok, the inhibitor keeps his higher brain functions from being affected by the arms' artificial intelligence. Hell, if that weren't there, he might have trouble speaking or using creative problem solving, since the feedback from a mind-machine interface could be disruptive otherwise.

That's not what the inhibitor does, however. In fact, the arms are INHERENTLY EVIL. That's correct. Remember that movie, Idle Hands? Me neither. Think Army of Darkness, then (I think. It might be Evil Dead II. Been a while). Bruce Cambell's hand turns evil. It wants to kill him, and cause mayhem in general. His hand becomes inherently evil, and he cuts it off with a chainsaw. This is ok. Hell, it's even funny, beacuse once Bruce grafts the chainsaw onto the stump, he's got a chainsaw for a hand. And that's quality.

Sadly, this doesn't translate quite as well to a serious action movie. The arms defend themselves from being cut off. This is still believable, I think; Otto's subconcious could have been controlling the arms - the dark part of him that surfaced as a result of killing his wife could have wanted to strike out, and a programmed AI protocol to restrict damage to the arms could have acted on that...and set up a wonderful little start to Otto's descent into villany. Instead, in the next scene, Otto hears a voice in his head, while the snakelike arms click and hiss like his very own personal Serpent. The AI, for some reason, wants to be that little devil on his shoulder, with massive cybernetic implants.

Maybe it would work if you believed that the influence of the arms was entirely his subconcious - sinister serpentine movement and all. But the concept of the inhibitor chip contradicts that, as does his very swift descent to evil. Maybe I'm just too nitpicky, but hey - I like my villains human.