- “Everything that you know is not what others know. There is more than what you have been told. ”
- ―Tagline
Soul of the Machine: The Movie | |
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![]() The opening title card. | |
Vital statistics | |
Creator | Greedyselfish (Writer & Director) Morningwood Entertainment (Producer) |
Date of Creation | August 26, 2018 |
Date Released | September 22, 2018 (DVD)
November 20, 2018 (Online) |
Platform(s) | DVD, Digital Download |
Rating | ![]() |
Soul of the Machine: The Movie is a fanon/non-existent movie-based project created and directed by Greedyselfish and produced by Morningwood Entertainment. It is based on Greedy's Soul of the Machine storyline of the same name as well as Call of Duty: Online's "Cyborg Rising" mode and tells the story of the events that happened both before and during the events of the story. The film is animated using the in-game Semblance 4.0 engine.
Described as an "underground film", it was originally released exclusively with the Gold Edition of Call of Duty: Zombies Arena. It has since been released online to be watched freely.
Cast & Characters[]
Protagonists[]
- Cortex - Billy Murray
- Madman - Burton C. Bell
- Sergeant - Jolene Blalock
- Trigger - Christopher Bellard
- Cowboy - Michael Rooker
- Lv Bu - Lou Diamond Phillips
- Skylar Henning - Greedyselfish
- Dave Herd - Anakin Nakamura
- Zack Battleman - Zombiehunter115
- Robert Van Alexander - Cokey Falkow
Antagonists[]
Minor[]
- Commander Lawton - J.K. Simmons
- Cowboy Biker Guy - Al Jourgensen
- Dr. Claybon - Bruce Willis
- Various Scientists
- Various U.S. Army Soldiers
Plot[]
Prologue[]
The film begins in 1178 A.D. in Medieval Scotland. A mother is telling her two young sons about the days of when dragons ruled the world and the legend of the last dragon egg in existence. It flashes forward to 1196 A.D. with the two sons, now grown adults, exploring a cave. One of them finds a rock that begins to glow. They both touch it and briefly glow with a new found power. One of the brothers decides to take it back home and keep it safe in case they need it for protection, while the other brother secretly takes it and begins to reek havoc and chaos among the land. He resurrects an undead army of knights, takes over the Dunnottar Castle and discovers the location of the long lost dragon egg. The brother then leads an army of both the King's Men and the Scottish Rebels to come together to stop the undead forces and the now hatched dragon. The two brothers then fight on top of Dunnottar's tower house while the human forces work together to eliminate the undead. In the heat of the battle, the brothers' mother sneaks inside of the castle to stop her sons from fighting, only to be killed by the dragon. After taking the fight to a nearby temple, the brother knocks the other brother to the ground just as the dragon appears. The brother grabs the stone and uses it to cast out the dragon and banish the remaining undead knights. Both of the brothers see the castle in ruins and their mother lying dead within it. The other brother blames his brother for what had happened and walks off.
Act I[]
The film flashes forward to the year 2036 A.D. somewhere near Atlanta, Georgia. A gang of four men are seen driving away from a high speed police chase. They abandon the car and take off on foot in a nearby alleyway, carrying bags of money stolen from a bank. One of them manages to escape while the rest are arrested by a robotic police force known as the Securitron. A white van pulls up and captures the escaped man.
At the same time, a unit of U.S. Army soldiers arrive at a military base known as Base #301-016 located in the outskirts of Guilin, China. A female instructor, Sergeant Xena Mayfield, begins to verbally insult the new recruits. One of the soldiers, codenamed "Madman", talks back at Sergeant and begin an brief exchange of words before Commander Lawton orders the troops to head towards their designated bunks and await further orders. The Commander then talks with Sergeant about what happened, expressing disappointment in her childish actions during the drilling and reminding her to not do it again. Sergeant is dismissed for the day and head back to her quarters.
Back in the states, the escaped man is being interrogated by unseen men in suits. They tell him that he can either spend 20 years in prison or become the new security guard at the CODOL Institute's Scientific Observations Department in Atlanta, Georgia until he can pay off all the money he stole. They explain to him that they need a human guard for the time being as production on Secruitron guards are being halted so CODOL could produce new "advancements in technology beyond the Earth.". The man then accepts the job offer and states his name as Marcus Lawrence before being told that he will go by the codename "Trigger" for now on.
The next day, four bumbling scientists are working on an experimental time travel device. The four are then ordered by Dr. Claybon to activate the device and enter it. They are each given a Samurai Edge A1 pistol for protection during the brief journey. They are then transported to a trailer park in an unknown location where they are confronted by a man wearing a white cowboy hat and a black leather jacket. He aims a Double Barreled Shotgun at the group and tells them to leave before they teleport back to their timeline. Upon arriving back at S.O.D., they are informed that the time travel device not only travels through time, but also different realities and multiverses. Trigger can be seen guarding the door to the warehouse where the testing is taking place, listening in on the whole ordeal.
Meanwhile, at an underground CODOL laboratory located in the Sonoran Desert, a scientist/inventor named George "Lv Bu" Xiao visits the laboratory under the "direction" of CODOL's branch in China. He meets with the infamous and mysterious Dr. Van Lucker in his head office to discuss his latest invention, The Soul Hacker. After getting into a very heated argument, Dr. Van Lucker commands Lv Bu to leave. Lv Bu leaves behind the blueprints and a prototype of the Soul Hacker, leading Van Lucker to come up with an idea.
On the planet Mars, Dr. Michael Wilhelm is seen inside of the Martian Aerospace Research Station looking out the window and seeing the red planet's surface. He receives a video call from Dr. Van Lucker, who orders him to gather more Martians from the further regions of the planet in exchange of allowing the CODOL Research lab in Breslau, Germany to be attacked by their own cyborgs, as they both felt that the laboratory had "outlived their usefulness". The film then goes into a montage of both the Martians being captured and converted into cyborgs and the lab in Germany being massacred. After the montage, Dr. Van Lucker walks into the main laboratory to check on the progress of the Power Core and the Soul Hacker, where he is informed about the massacre in Germany and pretends to act distraught about it to distract from what truly happened.
The next day, the scientists at the S.O.D. continue work on the time travel device. They decide to attempt to send an individual from either the past or an alternate timeline to the present day in their universe. In order to achieve this, they send a Personal Teleportation Device prototype to a random period in history. The P.T.D. ends up in the year 1887 inside of an old-western town where it is picked up by the town's sheriff, William Gabe Wilson, who is then sent to the S.O.D. in the year 2036 and is captured by the scientists to be held for questioning.
After the massacre in the CODOL lab in Germany, people around the world have began to protest in the streets against CODOL's practices as shipments of new cyborgs begin to fill the streets around the world. Dr. Van Lucker is seen thinking hard in his office about his big plan. Because of his refusal to "let anyone stand in his way", he uses the power he had inhabited from the Soul Stone a long time ago to order the cyborgs in to attack and murder the protesters. As people are being murdered, a man named Cortex watches the events unfold. He then realizes that the time has come to finally stop his brother once and for all.
Act II[]
Back in Guilin, China, the soldiers at Base #421-016 are preparing for a special operation. Commander Lawton explains to the troops that an unsanctioned laboratory has been set up by the CODOL Institute without the Chinese government's permission. The soldiers are to raid and attack the laboratory hidden within the mountain range. As the soldiers are dismissed, Sergeant runs into Madman again, but their words to each other are still hostile.
Dr. Van Lucker, aware of the U.S. Military's plans to attack his lab in Guilin, orders the scientists to cease work on the Soul Hacker and the Power Core and orders them to move the larger teleporter into a UFO that had been rebuilt from scraps found on the Mars base. He then leaves the CODOL Underground laboratory in the Sonoran Desert and teleports himself to the Guilin lab using his P.T.D.. Before he does, he unleashes the cyborgs onto the scientists and staff in the laboratory.
The soldiers are sitting in flying helicopters heading towards the mountain range where the laboratory is located. As Commander Lawton gives them a rousing speech as they prepare for battle, the Securitron launch RPG rockets to attack and bring down the helicopters and the soldiers inside. Both Sergeant and Madman survive but are on opposite sides of the mountains, separated from their units. Madman fights off hordes of cyborgs by himself and eventually reaches a small laboratory where he attempts to reestablish communications with his unit and Base #421-016. After he fails to communicate with anyone, he finds a P.T.D. and uses it to transport himself to the S.O.D. Laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia.
Sergeant manages to find the rest of her unit. However, they are all either dead or too wounded to continue the mission. She finds Commander Lawton, mortally wounded from the crash and near death, who tells her to go find Madman, take out any cyborg she sees, and find out whoever was responsible for all of this. Motivated by Lawton and the deaths of her comrades, she sets out to continue her mission alone. Sometime after she leaves, Dr. Van Lucker and a group of cyborgs takes Commander Lawton's corpse and brings it into a factory like facility, where his limbs and organs are removed and replaced with cybernetic parts, all of it shown in very graphic and gruesome detail.
Meanwhile, Skylar, Dave, Robert, and Zack are sitting in the break room discussing the time travel device and it's ability to travel to other timelines. As this happens, the rest of the laboratory is being attacked by the cyborgs and killing off most of the scientists. The time travel device is destroyed with the exception of a medium-sized tube that housed the energy for it. Trigger attempts to fight off the cyborgs himself, but runs away and escapes from the facility.
He finds his hometown of Atlanta in ruins and all of his friends and family killed by the cyborgs. He is then held by gunpoint by William Gabe Wilson, who also escaped from the S.O.D. facility after being held as a test subject for the time travel experiments. They both come to an agreement to fight against their new found shared enemy before Cortex introduces himself and approaches both men with an "job offer". He then proceeds to explain to them who he is and how he managed to find them. He tells them about Dr. Van Lucker and the various locations of the CODOL Institute around the world and beyond. He shows them an Egyptian medallion that he had received a very long time ago after trading the Soul Stone to an Egyptian pharaoh. He then uses the medallion to transport him, Trigger, and William (now under the codename "Cowboy") to the now abandoned Base #421-016 where they meet Sergeant after she managed to return there from fighting off the cyborgs. Cortex then tells them to head to Shanghai and find Lv Bu. He informs them that once their mission there is complete, he will use a helicopter to transport them to their next location.
Act III[]
Cortex uses a helicopter found at the base to transport the group to Shanghai to find Lv Bu. They fight the cyborgs through the streets of Shanghai before finding Lv Bu protecting himself inside of a makeshift bunker. He lets the group in as they introduce themselves to each other. Lv Bu explains that the CODOL Laboratories in Germany and the Sonoran Desert have been under attacked by the cyborgs and are rapidly spreading across the world. After killing more cyborgs inside the outpost, Cortex returns and transports the group to the CODOL Lab in Germany.
As they arrive at the CODOL Laboratory in Germany, they find it overrun with more cyborgs, but no further clues as to whereabouts of Dr. Van Lucker and the source of the cyborg invasion. As Cortex brings the group out of the facility, he jumps out of the helicopter while the others are unaware of what he was doing. Right before the helicopter crashes, he holds up the medallion and uses it to teleport the crew to their next location. He then uses the medallion on himself to transport to his own next destination.
The Mercenaries find themselves in the middle of the Sonoran Desert where they spot a large hole in the ground with large drills in it. They rappel down and discover the underground CODOL laboratories. They find more hoards of cyborgs to fight.
After holding themselves up in the break room and running through all of their remaining supplies, the four scientists fight their way through the S.O.D. facility and receive additional help from Dr. Claybon, who has barricaded himself inside of a small room in the facility. Madman teleports into the same small room as Dr. Claybon and murders him. Madman then begins to instruct the group and tells them to gather him supplies to fix the P.T.D. in exchange for parts needed to fix an old airplane that was being rebuilt at the facility sometime before the outbreak began.
As the Mercenaries continue the fight in the underground lab, Dr. Van Lucker, who is hiding inside of the UFO, communicates to them through the facility's intercom and begins to instruct them on finishing up the Power Core's creations. The Mercs question who he is, be he falsely reassures them that he is just their "guardian angel". After they construct the Power Core, they teleport to the UFO where Van Lucker reveals himself as the head scientist of the CODOL Institute and the cause of the cyborg apocalypse before using the UFO to transport en route to Georgia. While this happens, the S.O.D. Scientists finish the construction of the airplane and use it to escape the facility, while Madman continues to repair the P.T.D..
The UFO then crashes into the airplane which causes the teleporter that was stored inside of the UFO to go off and transport the group to Guilin, China where the unsanctioned laboratory was. Dr. Van Lucker drags the scientists and parts of the teleporter to a small room inside of the mountains where he keeps the scientists into four small pods. Meanwhile, the Mercs awaken from the other side of the mountain. Sergeant makes a quick remark about "being here before" right as a horde of cyborgs appear and the group begins to fight them off. They eventually find and confront Dr. Van Lucker as soon as the scientists wake up from the pods, who reference dreaming about fighting zombies inside of a high school and at a medieval castle. He convinces the Mercs that if they want to make it out alive they would have to help reconstruct a teleportation device. The Mercs team up with the scientists to find the missing pieces of the teleporter and destroy more cyborgs along the way. Back at the Scientific Observations Department, Madman finishes fixing up the P.T.D. and teleports out of there right before the cyborgs burst into the room. He arrives and confronts Dr. Van Lucker just as soon as the teleporter is rebuilt. During the confrontation, Madman attempts to shoot Dr. Van Lucker, but the bullets do not harm him. Van Lucker then throws Madman into the teleporter and knocks him unconscious and commands the scientists to teleport him to an unknown location. Right before Dr. Van Lucker and the scientists teleport out of the area, he summons Commander Lawton, now completely converted into a cybernetic killing machine with no humanity or emotion left within him, to attack the Mercs. The Mercs survive once more and destroy Commander Lawton. They then proceed to use the teleport with hopes of catching up to Van Lucker.
Act IV[]
The Mercs arrive at a futuristic-looking research station. They look around and then realize that they are at CODOL's Martian Aerospace Research Station on Mars, the origin world of the cyborgs. They then hear the voice of Dr. Van Lucker and see a shadowy figure moving across the lab. As they go to search for it, they are ambushed by the cyborgs. Meanwhile, Dr. Wilhelm, who is revealed to the audience to be the shadowy figured, is seen running with a communication device with Van Lucker on the other line. Van Lucker informs Wilhelm that he and the scientists are in Egypt setting up a com station. He then commands Wilhelm to evacuate the station as this matter was between him, the Mercs, and Cortex. With plans of his own, Wilhelm hides out inside of a small, hidden room for the time being.
Dr. Van Lucker then speaks to the Mercs through a loudspeaker in the facility. He attempts to command the Mercs into constructing the "Death Ray", but they refuse to listen to him. He tries convincing them that he will end the cyborg apocalypse if they help him pull one final favor, but they still do not buy into him. Cortex, who is now inside of the abandoned International Space Station, cuts of Van Lucker and tells them that they must follow his orders as he has plans to sabotage Van Lucker's plans. The Mercs reluctantly agree and manage to construct the "Death Ray" despite the cyborgs getting in the way. Cortex then attempts to contact them about a tomb in the underground area, but Dr. Van Lucker intercepts the signal and commands the Mercs to prepare the teleporter for his arrival. As they do their task, Cortex cuts back in and argues with Dr. Van Lucker, revealing to the crew that they are brothers. Dr. Van Lucker then leaves behind the scientists in Egypt and teleports to the Mars base. The Mercs confronts him, but he pulls out the Soul Stone and the Power Core and causes the Mercs to float in air, unable to move. He brings them down to the underground area of the Research Station where the tomb is located and gloats about his victories. He then drops the Mercs hard on the ground and places the Soul Stone and the Power Core on top of the tomb where he then begins to cite a ritual. Trigger gets up and attacks Van Lucker as the rest go out after him. As they assault and question Van Lucker, Sergeant notices a sword that is stuck to the ground and attempts to retrieve it. Dr. Van Lucker declares that it is the same sword Cortex used to defeat him with during their battle hundreds of years ago. He plans on using it as part of his revenge on Cortex and that no mortal man could be able to harness it's power. Sergeant then easily pulls the sword out of the ground and jokingly declares that "a mortal woman can". She then attempts to kill Van Lucker with the sword but ends up hitting the Soul Stone, the Power Core, and the Tomb at the same time, causing them all to be teleported to an unknown destination.
They find themselves in a darkened but somewhat dim-lit arena. The tomb opens up and explodes in the middle of the arena. The Angel then slowly rises from it and confronts Van Lucker. He attempts to express his achievements to her, but she scolds him for trying to destroy the world rather than preserve it. She fires a beam of dark energy and brutally murders him. The Mercs then work together once more to defeat The Angel. After she is defeated, the arena explodes and the crew find themselves back on the surface of Mars.
They stand next to the "Death Ray" and find the Soul Stone near it. Before they are able to retrieve it, Dr. Wilhelm grabs it and reveals himself to the Mercs as the "true mastermind" of the cyborg invasion. He explains and gloats to them about using Dr. Van Lucker's fruitless quest for revenge to fuel his own revenge against NASA and the entire human species. He then puts the Soul Stone into the Death Ray and charges it up. The Mercs feel as all of their efforts have been for nothing until Cortex contacts them through the loud speaker and acknowledges them that it is not yet the end, but the beginning of a new chapter in their conquests. Dr. Wilhelm tries to mock Cortex, but Cortex informs him that he is in the abandoned International Space Station in the direct path of the ray's blast. The "Death Ray" is then fired out into space and overpowers Cortex, ending his immortality and creating a giant portal. The ray backfires and kills Dr. Wilhelm.
The film ends with The Mercs staring at the giant portal in the sky. They wonder what will happen next with Sergeant reciting the same words as Cortex had told them. "It's not over yet"
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
General[]
- The reason why Semblance 4.0 was used and not any of the later ones is because it was the most recent engine at the time the film was being made.
- This was Greedyselfish's first film based project, being inspired by RoachTheIntelCollector's own film based project, The Greatest Threat of All. Greedy voiced Jack McMack in the film.
Casting[]
- This is the second time Billy Murray has lent his voice talents to a Call of Duty related property, as he best known for his work as Capt. John Price in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare trilogy.
- This is also the third time Michael Rooker has lent his voice talents to the series, as he previously voiced a fictionalized version of himself in the Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies map Call of the Dead and as Lt. Mike Harper in Call of Duty: Black Ops II's Campaign mode.
- Despite being a Chinese character, Lv Bu is voiced by Filipino-American actor Lou Diamond Phillips.
- Developers Zombiehunter115 and Anakin Nakamura, who both play major roles in the film helped with the casting for the movie.