Monday, August 23, 2010

Ultramarines Trailer: Excitement Level Decremented

I've been quite a fanboy for the Ultramarines movie, from the visual to the writing team to the voice casting.  Up until today.

Trailer #1 was just released, and it has lowered my expectations for this movie.  Why?  Allow me to explain....

  1. Too much exposition.  Good grief, I don't need great honking paragraphs from the Space Marine codex read to me with smoky backgrounds to "get" what a Space Marine is.  Even someone completely ignorant of 40k should be able to understand in about half that time what they are dealing with.
  2. Too much standing and shooting.  I've seen Space Marines stand around shooting before.  It was called "Dawn of War."  A trailer should have some sense that there is something happening in the movie, some sort of plot.  What I got from this trailer was "Marines shoot some building on a mountain and kill it.  Then some marines get shot."
  3. Audio!  One scene in the trailer has an older marine speaking.  Maybe this is just an initial render of the scene, but the audio level of his voice was way too strong for the distance that his face was from the camera.  The large room and the camera distance should have created an entirely different sound, and the fact that his voice was about as loud and clear as the narrator made his voice entirely disconnected from his visual.
  4. Image flashing.  No, no, no.  Teasing with clips is one thing but the flashed images of the Imperial Fists made me think my movie player was having connection problems.  I could only identify them as stills of Fists by pausing the movie and advancing in tiny bursts.  Pointless.
  5. Frame rate: The space ship flyby and the jumping/landing Space Marines were really jerky.  Distractingly jerky.  Seriously.  Fix that in the final render, or add motion blur or something.  This movie needs to look at least as good as the average cinematic from a video game.
I am really hoping that this trailer is not indicative of the movie as a final product.  I really want this to be done well, and all the ducks seemed to be in a row (for lack of a better metaphor.)  I have a long running tendency to hate Pixar trailers but love Pixar movies.  I'm hoping I can have the same experience with this movie.

2 comments:

  1. Amen.

    Hopefully some adults will see this and join the hobby!

    ReplyDelete
  2. ....that is not a good trailer. O_o

    The scenes shown are too static, the marines look like they're made of pvc in places, and some of the shots I think look wierd because the only background is single-colour smoke.

    Also, you're completely correct about trailers needing at least some sort of plot or narrative. And why they put in a collapsing building I do not know. ;_; They could have chosen better music, too.

    Here's hoping it's somewhat better than it looks.

    ReplyDelete

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