Unlike most of androids populating the sundry Terminator copies, this makes some effort to depict an android that behaves in a credible manner. Bruce Greenwood’s Companion comes with a complete lack of personality and an infuriating syntactic perfectionism – personality is something that has to be programmed into it and this comes with a range of options as to naturalness and degree of sexuality. Most amusingly, when the Companion goes out of control, it is not because it is a killer android or some decommissioned military robot, but rather because the heroine of the pieces ignores the safety specifications in its programming. Ultimately though, The Companion disappoints – it is not quite able to leave the killer android amok genre behind it and the latter quarter with Bruce Greenwood going out of control descends increasingly into cliche. Certainly, not many of the killer android clones have scenes with the android insisting that it is doing everything for the heroine and that it is only trying to protect her.

The Companion was the feature debut of director Gary Fleder. Fleder next went on to have modest success with the chic crime film Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1996) – which is probably his best film – followed by the serial killer thriller Kiss the Girls (1997) and the thriller Don’t Say a Word (2001), before returning to the sf genre with the modest Impostor (2002) and producing the tv series Beauty and the Beast (2012-6).
 

Full film available online here:-