Dead Space: Downfall
Dir. Chuck Patton, 2008
| Rated: NR | Writers | Voices |
| Runtime: 1 hr. 14 min. | Justin Gray | Nika Futterman |
| Producer: Joe Goyette | Jimmy Palmiotti | Kelly Hu |
| Bruce Boxleitner |
Reviewed by Robert Ring. 11.13.08
Dead Space: Downfall is an animated prequel to the recently released sci-fi/horror survival videogame Dead Space. I have not played Dead Space, but I do know that it involves horrific transmutations of former humans that lurk throughout a large, otherwise-empty spacecraft called the Ishimura. I also know that the game itself is supposed to be very good as well as frightening. Therefore, when I put this movie into my Blu-ray player, I had high hopes despite the fact that movies tied to videogames often fail. My acquired videogame-movie wisdom, to my disappointment, remains true. Dead Space: Downfall is a movie that suffers from shoddy animation and lack of atmosphere and has no other qualities to save it.
A mining colony on the planet Aegis 7 Cygnus has discovered a large, non-naturally occurring structure decorated with symbols. When it is extracted from the planet so that it can be studied, horrible things begin happening -- namely, people start turning into bloodthirsty, mutilated, demonic zombies. When the structure is loaded onto the Ishimura for transport, the horrors follow along. A small group, led by a character named Alissa Vincent, then attempts to eradicate the monsters and save the ship. The bulk of the movie is spent on encounters with the things, which are as abominable and grotesque as you can imagine and which want nothing more than to kill everyone in horrible ways, in turn making them into demon-zombies as well.
What this movie tries to accomplish is to horrify viewers with the most visually frightening creatures it can imagine and having them viciously kill people. This is a solid concept for a movie (considering much of it is taken straight from Alien, except for the zombie aspect of it), but it fails because the atmosphere is not the least bit ominous and because the art is so simplistic. I stated that Dead Space the videogame has gotten great reviews. Looking at screenshots of the game, one can easily see at least part of the reason why: the player's character is all alone on a dark, empty ship that in which anything could pop out of anywhere at any time. The movie misses out on this completely. Everything is always well-lit, and all bad guys are out in the open. They confront the characters directly, rarely jumping out when everything seems safe. Since the timing of the encounters is not measured for tension and since it is usually the characters who stumble upon the monsters (rather than the other way around), there is also no feeling that the main characters are being hunted down, save for one portion of the film when they are discovered by a horde of the creatures. So, instead of having a film in which every moment is terrifying, we have a film that is only (supposedly) scary when we actually see the monster in front of us.
When we do encounter the monsters, the film tries to scare us with ultra goriness. It fails here, too. While there is plenty of gore, the art is not detailed enough to gross you out or scare you. You get to see intestines and mutilated bodies, but the victims' entrails are often drawn with much sharper edges than they would realistically have, and the colors the movie uses never appear in more than two basic shades, so, while the film is very bloody, the blood is always too cartoonish to be sickening. When arms are ripped off, you don't see sinewy flesh hanging from ripped-open body parts with splintered bones sticking out; you see flat, solid red wounds. Very strange for such a conceptually gory film to skimp on visualization of the gore.
The actual animation of the images is no better. It is often choppy, for one thing, giving it the feel of a children's afternoon show on the Cartoon Network. Also, I caught at least one moment of unabashed animation cycling. It was a scene that really could have been stomach-churning, so I'm not sure why the animators didn't go all out for it, but at one point the main characters come across a room of the creatures feeding on a big pile of dead bodies. Instead of seeing the gory details of zombies feeding on flesh, something that would have actually scared us, we see simply, from a safe distance no less, their arms and heads moving back and forth in vague feeding motions -- the cycle can't be any longer than one or two seconds repeated. If I had to guess, I would say the reason for this is that there was probably not a terrible amount of time and funding provided for the production of the film, but this is a reason, not an excuse. It doesn't make the film any more enjoyable.
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