greatdwarf

Let's begin with said crick in my neck. The camera work, which appears to have been done with no tripod, or one that could not be locked in the level position. It was like watching the campy old Batman television series during the villain scenes, as the camera was almost never level. In order to make it seem level, I had to almost constantly tilt my head slightly to the left or the right. Mostly the left. I was also amused to see the occasional finger getting in front of the lens, or the shadow of the hand blocking the lower left portion of the shot. Of the sound, much could be said, but none of it would be good. The dialogue, when it could be heard over the background noise, was trite and preachy environmentalist drivel pulled off whatever web site happened to be convenient at the time the script was written. Seldom could the actors be heard clearly, and much fun can be had in trying to make up dialogue that goes with the scene at hand.

On the plot . . . It is incoherent and inexplicable. If my neck were in less pain, I might be able to piece together some sort of explanation from the few words I could hear spoken during the film. The basic impression is that the birds of the region have gotten angry about man's use of fossil fuels and are taking their revenge by learning to hover, making airplane sounds, and taking kamikaze dives (complete with explosions upon impact) at gas stations and random buildings. Or maybe they just snapped under the pressure of being endangered species trying to reproduce enough to maintain their population.

The movie clearly has access to the fourth dimension, as the first forty minutes of it seem to take somewhere between two and sixteen hours, plodding from scene to inexplicable scene of mundane living in the life of Rod the super-software-solar-paneling salesman and part-time creepy stalker. Similarly, there is no indication of how much time passes in the movie, save that our intrepid (and mind-numbingly boring) heroes seem to keep running out of water (but never gas).

Countless slow driving scenes on side roads, endless bad editing cuts, tilted camera, awful sound quality, and anatomically impossible hovering birds with inexplicable motives rendered this movie almost intolerable, save that, with enough alcohol and a few good friends to laugh along with you, it can have some merit. Enough to earn it a 0.5, but the voting doesn't go that low.

My first thought on the show is that the premise seems very much like that of Nightwatch. More akin to the book than the movie, but with a completely different type of mystical beings.

The acting, unsurprisingly, seems a trifle wooden, but it was just the first episode, so the actors are all still feeling out their characters. I'm certain, considering the actors that I'm familiar with, that they'll flesh out well in very little time, though.

Technically, I like that they kept the effects quite minimal, in an effort to give us more character development and more story, rather than try to wow us with a load of digital nonsense.

I have high hopes for the show, and will keep watching to see if it lives up to those hopes.

This is exactly what this is. It seems to me as if the toys were made, and the writers weren't given a set of rules to work from to write the game-playing parts into the show.

The rules of the game change from 'battle' to 'battle', with the sequence of play having no bearing at all on whose turn it is to play.

This is not the way to advertise your product in a show, marketers. Not at all. The target market, likely children between six and ten years of age, are not as dumb as you seem to think they are. They understand that games have rules, and that rules are consistent. A game with good rules will sell. A game with rules they can understand will sell.

Going from the show, the rules seem completely irrelevant, inconsistent, and pretty much unplayable. My 8 year old niece watched the show just once, decided the game didn't make any sense, and won't watch it anymore.

Then, additionally, there's the plot of the show itself... if you can call it that.

Right in the opening credits, the main character states 'My friends and I created this game', and shortly after that, in one of the very first episodes, the same character is saying 'I've never heard of that.' It's inconsistent, tries to steal elements from numerous other toy-selling shows, and fails to make them gel together with any kind of coherency.

A very sad effort on all sides. At least they didn't make all of the characters chibis.