Hit or Miss: D-I-M, Deus in Machina

Title: D-I-M, Deus in Machina
Director: Axel Ricke
Hit or Miss: Miss.

http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2010/03/07/d-i-m-deus-in-machina/

While I typically really enjoy films in the Sci-Fi genre, I couldn't get into this short as much as I wanted to. There were just several things about it that just seemed to fall through for me. While I applaud the team behind this short for having the bravery to attempt to take on this project, as Sci-Fi on a low budget isn't always easy to do, I feel that there were still a few more negatives that outweighed the positives in terms of originality that unfortunately I must give this short a a "Miss".

The story is set up as your typical dystopian future. Bleak, cold, technology laden. I kind of felt like I had seen this story before and while this is the general set up for many sci-fi movies, I feel some are able to play with this set up better than others. Still, all in all, there was some originality in the story despite visually looking quite familiar to many other sci-fi stories I've seen such. The plot picks up with Lutz, a dreamer discontent with the controlled world he lives in ( "1984", "Brave New World","Equilibrium", " style) where life is dictated by the number of social points you have. Trying to rise above this, he sets off to "Fight the system" embarking on a race around technology to break into the office that controls the social points (feeling just a little bit like "Gattaca"). Overall, despite offering something a little different (although I'm not entirely sure what that was considering the plot felt a bit uneven to me, dragged on a bit, and was a little unclear) it still rang all too familiar and didn't feel that original to me. Although, I can accept it is hard to make an original story out of the old standard "Dystopian society run by rules and technology", maybe that's why they maybe should have gone with something else.

When it comes to technicality, science fiction can be extremely hard to tackle and make successful. Understanding that this was shot on a low budget and that is is just an independent film and not a big budget Hollywood "Minority Report" style movie with the financial capabilities to be able to have impressive visual effects, I still found myself wrestling with enjoying the film with mediocre-bad visual effects. I applaud them for their hard work, but for my taste personally, I just couldn't get into it. A lot of the time the animation went from average to somewhat terrible, and I just couldn't really enjoy that. I felt like a lot of the time they tried to focus on using their visual effects which felt forced in what felt like "Look at our impressive visual effects, look how much we have here!" when in reality it never really looked that impressive to begin with.

My biggest complaint still was honestly the music, which I found to be pretty cheesy and made it harder for me to take it seriously. I did however like the Title and Credit sequence even though I felt again like I had seen it before. Another minor complaint I had was with the editing which in some instances it just seemed to cut weirdly or almost too abruptly with weird transitions.

Overall, I applaud them for their attempt to make something original out of the Sci-Fi genre while not entirely getting there.While I have taken  budget into consideration, and understand that it is very hard it make an impressive looking sci-fi short, perhaps if they could redo it they should spend less time trying to make it look more impressive and try to cram in all of their visual effects as frequently as possible and focus more on the story, which doesn't take a lot of money, they might have something better.

Hit or Miss: Miss.