Jason Sondhi

To keep you abreast of notable developments in the world of short film, I’ll weigh in on what has become a well-reported event on the internets—on Monday IGN released on its website a 30 min short film comprised solely of footage from the video game Red Dead Redemption, a dark and bloody Western released by Rockstar, the company famous for Grand Theft Auto.

This concept, known as machinima, is not really novel, there is a dedicated subculture surrounding it. What has gotten people’s attention in this case was that John Hillcoat, director of the dark western, The Proposition, and the recent film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is the creator of the film. The film also enjoyed a TV broadcast, playing at midnight, May 26th on the Fox network.

I’m a little fuzzy on the details of what “directing” such a film entails, it seems to me more an exercise in editing, but that may be my ignorance speaking. There does seem to be a certain degree of in-game camera control and scene manipulation possible. It helps Hillcoat certainly that his own films seem to have been studied well by the game designers going in. However the limitations of plot are severe. The film basically retells the game’s 1st act in a stylistic manner, following the hero, John Marston, as he hunts down his old partner, the vicious outlaw Bill Williamson.

Your curiosity may be piqued by all of this, but try to resist. This film is rather bad. As someone who has yet to join this latest video-game console generation, (a Wii doesn’t really count) I did enjoy seeing the remarkable advances that have been made, however, the film suffers in most every possible way: the dialogue is stilted, the vocal performances poor, the plot is riddled with cliches, and ultimately the fact that is is whittled down from from longer, further separated plot episodes means that the film feels disjointed, as settings and events occur with poor rhythm and little sense for how they fit the whole.

All these issues might be forgivable in a shorter film, one that hews closer to the concept of a trailer, which is what this film really is, but at 29 minutes it took everything I had to simply finish. This isn’t a knock on Hillcoat per se. I have not delved into this world much, and have certainly not tried to make a machinima of my own. The fact that the film is visually coherent, has a modicum of style and that the fight scenes by and large have a a good rhythm could very well be an impressive achievment, it’s just not a ton of fun for your average fan to sit through.