It should have premiered by now. I was not able to watch it since I don’t own a television.
It was pretty solid. You can tell Hillcoat was limited by the medium and the already constructed characters and plot, but he still did a great job within those parameters. If anything, it got me wanting to fix my Xbox 360 that much more so I can play Red Dead Redemption.
I just got back from a showing of it at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville Ny. It was well shot and everything but it was hard to really capture the plot of the first act of the game without the length that the game allowed it to have. Personally I would of preferred watching it on fox and spending the few hours the whole event took playing the game. I did get a t-shirt and a deck of cards though!
Just watched the short today. At first I was a little underwhelmed. As some have said the film just appears to be a series of the game’s cut-scenes strung together as a piece of promotional material. But the film lingered with me long after it was over. It took some time to see how these fragments of seemingly unrelated narrative threads seemed to relate to each other.
In my opinion the film does work as a short film apart from the game. Like a good short story we get a quick introduction to the characters, satisfying plot, and a resolution that ties together the themes of the narrative in a neat uncomplicated fashion. The way I see it, it is unnecessary to know how Williamson escaped from the room at the end or whether or not Marsten will capture Williamson any more then it is necessary to learn what was in the locked chest. The final image of Marsten behind the barred window drives home the point of the story especially when contrasted with the films opening long panoramic shots of beautifully rendered vistas. Despite the freedom and tranquility that is associated with the old west, these men are prisoners of a way of life that demands that they feed off the weak and the gullible; and where the only difference between the law and the outlaw is a badge.
So far this is quite easily the best movie ever “based” on a video game. I put based in quotations because unlike other films that were inspired by video games and what ever movies that the talentless lead director (Paul W.S. Anderson) just wanted to imitate, this movie is more honest by using the actual graphics engine of the game.
Also I just watched the beginning again and noticed one interesting detail. When the sheriff is introduced to Marsten he asks him “You’re Marsten from ‘Blackwater’ right?” The connotation that that name has now must have been intentional on the part of the scriptwriter.
RaySquirrel
I can recall starting a forum thread where I asked if there could ever be a great film using the style of Machinema. It looks like we may be closer to that point then expected. It looks as if Rockstar games has hired John Hillcoat, the director of The Proposition and The Road, to make a short film using the in-game engine of their new game Red Dead Redemption. The short will premier on Fox tomorrow:
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