So today was Mardi Gras. For Catholics (like me), today was our last day to indulge before the Lent season started. Many celebrate this by getting wasted while losing their dignity for plastic beads, but I decided to celebrate by gulping down a huge milkshake and getting one last super angry review done before Lent begins.
Today's victim is Sniper's Philosophy, another withered, uninteresting log on the growing fire of dramatic, sniper-centric shorts. What's the big deal with snipers anyway? You never see dramatic narrations about the lives of pilots, cooks or the hundreds of pencil-pushing officers that are required for a modern military to function. One of my relatives was a sniper in Afghanistan, and he spent most of his time staring at the scrub. Snipers, and soldiers in general, are bored almost 90% of the time. The life of a soldier is long stretches of tedium peppered with brief moments of action, and I guarantee you that not all soldiers spend their time talking about errand boys sent by grocery clerks.
But hey, even though the subject matter is unoriginal, maybe this time the approach will be note-worthy enough to make it stand out.
And it certainly is note-worthy in the fact that it's actually very well written...by other people, including Isaac Asimov, Mary Ann Radmacher, and probably many others. Not since Greviousrock's unauthorized additions to Deus Ex Machina have I seen such blatant plagiarism. What wasn't blatantly stolen is by far some of the worst monologing I've ever heard, and considering the volume of dramatic monologues I've had to listen to over the years, that is saying a lot.
I'm sorry, but no one talks like this. And if I ever meet someone who does, I'll do the human race a favor and peg him in the balls with a spiked bat. And I won't even describe what I'd do to the bastard for his overuse, misuse and general abuse of the word 'objective'.
So alright, there's nothing new about the presentation, but maybe if the visuals were good and the art style unique it would compensate, right?
But this is where the short falls short most noticeably. This short has what has got to be the worst shaky-cam I have ever seen. I've seen videos that parody the shaky-cam that have better shaky-cam. It shakes when he's running. It shakes when he's walking. It even shakes when he's not doing a single goddamn thing. And it's the worst kind of shaking, the kind that jostles the image about to make everything so incomprehensible that you can't make anything out. It's like they handed the camera to Michael J Fox in the middle of an earthquake and he decided to jerk off with his one free hand while filming. I feel like I should have taken some Dopamine before watching. It makes the handi-cam filming of Cloverfield look static by comparison.
I'm gonna be frank, nothing takes me out of a machinima more than camera shake done in the theater mode. There's no way you can persuade me that it looks better then camera shake done in post-production with Vegas or After Effects. It's far easier to control the shake when you're working with a mouse instead of analog sticks.
That's not all, though. Even when the screen isn't shaking as if the cameraman was filming while bouncing on a trampoline, the cinematography is pretty flat and uninteresting. The color quality is astonishingly poor, and it's a bad sign when I can't tell if it's the capture card or the director's attempt to be 'artsy'.
The sound design is functional and the voice actor does as good a job he can with the material he's given, but as a whole there's really nothing noteworthy about this short. It takes most of its key dialogue from notable writers and gives nothing back in return.
And then, and then, it has the gall to ask us what we want to happen next in the story.
I'll tell you what I want to happen to that smug, arrogant, monologing little sniping shit skit:
That's all I've got. Treasure this flaming nugget of rage, it'll be the last you get to see of my angry side for a while.
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