The film opens up with two robots driving through the California desert in an 80's black Ferrari 412, and even though the characters, "Robot Hero #1" and "Robot Hero #2" are played by actors Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich, we immediately identify the gold and silver headed robots as Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter. They've got a cute vanity plate that reads, "Human," and as they drive you start to wonder if they're robot Cannonballers. After a few moments an overhead shot of the car rolling past highway lines starts to remind you of the album cover to Kraftwerks, Autobahn, and a few seconds later it begins to look like an old school video game; like Night Driver or something, where the car just goes from side to side as new landscape is generated. The robots pull into a small desert town, where we quickly learn that they're not the only tin-heads around. There are domesticated robots everywhere: riding a tractor, watering the garden, reading the paper, holding but not sipping a cup of coffee, and there's even a pregnant robot in this Outer Limits version of Norman Rockwell.

Even robots want to be able to live like they're in a car commercial, but our man/machines long for something more as they cruise around town (Their Ferrari prowling the streets like the Lincoln Mark III in The Car) looking for other signs of human life . . . to no avail. Stepping out of the car wearing black leather racing outfits (the Dior Homme garb they used to promote their last album, Human, After All), they've got the famous Daft Punk logo on their backs. The robots make their way to a laboratory in a scene right out of THX1138 or 2001. We get their really, I mean really slow approach from the blacks outside of the facility to the blown-out whites on the inside. It's all about contrast on the inside of the lab; everything stark white except for our robots and the knobs and switches on the black equipment. The Robots each lay back on an operating chair, and it's here we begin to hope that this all has been nothing more than a hi-concept opening to a bad-ass concert film. The robots are getting ready to undergo a major transformation, a make-over, if you will, as liquid latex is poured all over their helmets and molded into human looking masks. Never underestimate the French's love for Woody Allen, because the latex goops like peanut butter allover their shiny helmets, giving us a little Sleeper-type humor.

They are now unique and ready to debut their new look out on the town, but the locals aren't so ready to accept these freaky looking dudes and begin to chase them away like monster-pariah. Even though it's a silent film (as in music, but no dialogue) our robots are played by impressively expressive actors and we feel their pain and horror as their new faces begin to melt like ice cream in the burning sun. They take refuge in a gas station bathroom, sulking in their deformed and expressionistic masks (like something Peter Gabriel would wear with Genesis). "Welcome to the machine" fellas, because it doesn't get any easier. The next few sequences pay homage to every movie, gatefold, and inner-sleeve Pink Floyd was ever involved in. Think explosions in the Death Valley, ala Zabriskie Point or the "Magritte" man on fire in Wish You Were Here. That's not to take away from the intensity and drama of these moments, in fact, Daft Punk allows your inner stoner to contemplate the severity of topics like robot euthanasia, robot suicide, and the obligatory, "Shit, are we ALL robots?" There's a touch of Tarkovsky in the contemplative canvas that gets stretched out when a character walks across an overbearing landscape; the man vs. machine vs. nature, and all that mumbo, really gets your own mind working. And part of Electroma's success is that we buy into our robots dilemma to become human to the point where accept them as legitimate protagonists that we could project our own "human" feelings and inner dialogue onto; and to that extent, our "heroes" struggle wasn't in vain.

Of course, one man's canvas is another man's blankness, and so it wasn't surprising when at my screening at the New Beverly Theatre in Hollywood, one exasperated Daft Punk fan yelled out, " . . . And action!" And who could blame him? Even some artsie fartsie's walked out on it when it played at the Cannes Film Festival, despite the dazzling camera work. An art movie with your favorite band doing the soundtrack equals hall of fame midnight movie, but an art movie with your favorite band playing auteur instead of music equals disappointing art movie. The soundtrack that included Curtis Mayfield, Todd Rundgren, Brian Eno, and other more obscure artists was perfect except for the unforgivable fact that it did not include ANY Daft Punk. The reason we love their silly robot mythos so much is because it's usually accompanied by their own brand of sci-fi bleeps and beats, but with its overabundance of ambience, you'd think that that other French duo, Air, made this movie. People are already watching bootleg versions with the sound off and the Daft Punk turned on the stereo, making one think that they should have saved this footage for the best concert film ever made; their own techno version of Led Zep's The Song Remains the Same, or something.

Limited screenings are going on in Miami and Canada before Vice Records releases the DVD in the fall.