It breaks my heart to have to give a bad review to an independent film.
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS****
Kill Command is a straight Sci-Fi film; it tells the story of a group of Marines who get sent out to a drop point, where they are attacked by sentient machines.
They regroup, and find a building. Inside there is a bunch of these machines. A girl speaks with one of them and they find out that the machines think this is a training exercise. Then the machines kill them.
That is the entire plot.
But what is a let down is not the barebones plot. Films like Enemy Mine, for example, have managed to carry a film with a few pages of script.
The problem is that this film was made by someone who does not know how to make films.
OK, let me start with the good bits first;
The casting is good (this means "the actors look like they could feasibly be their characters", nothing more); the CGI is superb, the machines look almost like animatronics. The special effects are OK, and for once the film doesn't have some horrid color filter to mess everything up.
The bad;
The pacing is awful. The direction is ridiculous .. there's a shot (inbetween two identical shots of the same frame, just spaced further) with glorious light and epic music, while some guy is saying some completely irrelevant line of speech. The actors, and those who designed the scenes for them, have no idea what a military unit would behave like - and i'm not a military person myself, it's just that they look like a bunch of idiots holding their props. The story is as back of the napkin as you can get; the dialogue is pedestrian, and the acting is all over the place. It's like, a bunch of first year students got a ton of money form mom and pops and blew it making a EPIC FILM, while knowing absolutely nothing about filmmaking, while their teacher facepalms himself in a corner.
I would not recommend Kill Command, if not to see how a film can fail even with so many assets.
My vote: 5/10 - lots of wasted effort.
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS****
Kill Command is a straight Sci-Fi film; it tells the story of a group of Marines who get sent out to a drop point, where they are attacked by sentient machines.
They regroup, and find a building. Inside there is a bunch of these machines. A girl speaks with one of them and they find out that the machines think this is a training exercise. Then the machines kill them.
That is the entire plot.
But what is a let down is not the barebones plot. Films like Enemy Mine, for example, have managed to carry a film with a few pages of script.
The problem is that this film was made by someone who does not know how to make films.
OK, let me start with the good bits first;
The casting is good (this means "the actors look like they could feasibly be their characters", nothing more); the CGI is superb, the machines look almost like animatronics. The special effects are OK, and for once the film doesn't have some horrid color filter to mess everything up.
The bad;
The pacing is awful. The direction is ridiculous .. there's a shot (inbetween two identical shots of the same frame, just spaced further) with glorious light and epic music, while some guy is saying some completely irrelevant line of speech. The actors, and those who designed the scenes for them, have no idea what a military unit would behave like - and i'm not a military person myself, it's just that they look like a bunch of idiots holding their props. The story is as back of the napkin as you can get; the dialogue is pedestrian, and the acting is all over the place. It's like, a bunch of first year students got a ton of money form mom and pops and blew it making a EPIC FILM, while knowing absolutely nothing about filmmaking, while their teacher facepalms himself in a corner.
I would not recommend Kill Command, if not to see how a film can fail even with so many assets.
My vote: 5/10 - lots of wasted effort.