The release of the EA game Dead Space met with a lot of hype. Mostly because it was a rare case of EA making an entire new game instead of just rehashing some old franchise. Dead Space is of course the sci fi survival horror set on a derelict space craft overrun with ghastly alien monsters made out of the dead bodies of the ship's crew. The game however is not what I am here to talk about, instead I am going to talk about the story of how the ship came to be derelictified. That just happens to be the basis of an anime (sort of) horror film that is set before the game begins titled Dead Space: Downfall (as you my have guessed when you read the title of this review). Before I begin I use the word 'horror' lightly because there is little to no point where I ever found myself truly on the edge of my seat and terrified, the bloody movie moved too quick for something like THAT to happen. But then again maybe you will find it scary, I honestly find it hard to be scared because these days I'm too bitter.
As any self obsessed pretentious 'look how smart I is' prick will tell you the best place to begin something is at the beginnning, as demonstrated by me. So I'll start by telling the premise first:
It's some time in the distant future but rather than the exciting amazing laser shooting space pod jockeying brightly coloured alien filled super future we all antcipate we are instead treated to an ugly, rusty grey and brown coloured future. Everything looks bland and incredibally mechanised making every room of every planetary colony and every industrialised. This is a very boring future methinks. It honestly doesn't look that much different from the factory floor of a modern day factory (I need to use my full vocabulary don't I?). But anyway back to the story and not how bland the future of man looks.... I could swear the design of the buildings and ships remind me of something.
Well back to the premise, humanity has explored vast amounts of universe and appear to have concluded that Earth is the only planet with life on it. However some long time before the events of this movie something came along to challenge that. The discovery of a true alien artifact on Earth called 'the black marker' this soon spawned a religion called Unitology that quickly replaced all other religion and is now very much a mainstream faith. The beleif that human life may have existed outside of earth and that there is life throughout the universe.
The actual movie begins on the surface of a distant planet called Aegis 7 or something like that. It begins with a group of engineers investigating some kind of disturbance. The entire scene is literally a direct rip from one of the early scenes of Alien where the team finds that alien spaceship on this otherwise empty 'rock' (note: the cast in this movie had a very proud enthusiasm for the word 'rock' in this movie) and as if acknowledging how it is mimicking Alien Dead Space Downfall has almost the exact same thing happen. In this case the engineers find a 'second marker' this one called the 'red marker'. Before I continue I would like to point out that this seems almost miraculous, one very big planet has one solitary artifact, and of all the places a colony could be set up and engineers could investigate they happen to be only a few miles away. Wow, just wow. Just to clarify the movie has a bad habit of asking lot's of questions: "how did that marker get here?" "who put it there?" "how did that happen?" etc. But it has a bad habit of not ever answering these questions.
Well anyway back to the plot, soon enough the spaceship Ishimura arrives to come pick the said marker or 'artifact' as it is called in the film. This is also the point where we are introduced to this film's heroine, security chief Ellen Ripl... Alissa Vincent, a woman who by christ refuses to be even slightly femamine, she strikes me as the sort of woman who does heavy lifting at the gym, curses, has a tattoo, drinks heavy amounts of liquor, never wears makeup, doesn't clean her strange red hair and who spends nearly every waking day angry that she can't pee standing up. The plot then unfolds fairly typically, i.e unexplained violence among colonists at the exact same time as the artifact is moved and all that, the reason for which being never explained. There is this whole idea of 'maybe when we messed around with forces we don't understand we may have unleashed something dangerous' you know standard stuff. Sure enough the colony on the planet soon completely gets fucked up i.e blood smears the walls, the dead litter the corridors, you hear screaming in the background and strange organic growth is all over the place. This is obviously nothing out of the ordinary for the engineers though as they seem unfazed and one even clamly says he's going to find his wife.
The actual Downfall part of Dead Space: Downfall comes around twenty minutes in when a man comes to the colony to find his wife, finds her, she kills herself because she was in a badly traumatised state and he takes her body with him back to the Ishimura and her corpse gets french kissed by some alien thing. After that the ship becomes overrun with hideous alien monsters who are created by infecting, mutating, reshaping and reanimating dead bodies. Soon afterwards the body count starts and the fun begins.
The aliens in this movie are truly determined to correct everyone who thinks Earth is alone and decided the best way to do that would be to kill them all and infect their corpses, I guess a more subtle approach just wasn't fun enough. Once the ragged team of heroes gets introduced the plot follows a formula that I call 'Jurrassic Park syndrome'. The formula goes like this: Team of say, six people get into the mess of monsters. There are many encounters of such monsters and each time at least one member of the team gets killed. It keeps on going until only the most central cast are alive (or in most cases just the lone survivor). This formula is only kept alive by either
A. A wide variety of monsters so everyone gets killed by something different
B. Every single person who dies, does so in various creative and bloody ways.
Dead Space Downfall takes the latter option while having the additional story of the ship's command officers struggling to keept things under control. It worked in the Alien flicks and it works pretty well here too.
Just to give you a hint if you hate subtle monster movies this is the flick for you because the monsters are anything but subtle. Also they don't really look that scary, gross, not scary. However I did find the idea of them fresh and interesting, certainly more so than just typical zombies. I feel monsters like this are the way of the future because we've really gone about as far as we can go with typical zombies now. I think monsters like this will one day take their place.
Overall your standard sci fi horror plot, not original but entertaining at least. DSD feels like a cross between Aliens, Event Horizon and the Thing respectivley. One thing that is well done is the feeling of hopelessness and doom that you'd never feel in say Aliens because in Aliens the marines had all the things they needed to survive but were just too stupid to use them.
Right now let's discuss some of the basics. At the beginning of Dead Space Downfall the voice acting seems a little... off. Some of the early moments either sound really bland and without emotion and some of the time. Especially Alissa Vincent who once again determined not to be girly sounds so butch I began to wonder if she wasn't just a very pretty eighteen year old boy with two basket balls stuffed in his shirt. To be fair though her voice work does improve once you get used to it, as does the rest of the cast, there are some generally powerful emotional acting moments in this piece, mostly in the form of anger. One thing I must get off my broad rippling manly chest however is that the accents in this movie can occasionally just sound fucking funny. There is once again the sensation that no one actually knows what an English accent actually sounds like so the accents are heavily over done. Don't worry though, it won't make your ears bleed.
Next up animation. I have once heard it said that the two biggest things people expect to see in today's movie theatre are violence and sex. The theory goes that both are needed to keep us entertained and that if one is absent there is much more of the other to make up for it. So in the case of DSD the absence of any sexual content of any kind, immature violence is on fire. Without any sex to rely on DSD instead reaches over to the crowd of people who lust for violence the same way other people would lust for porn. Blood oozes out of this movie from every direction, people get completely torn apart, guts fly, faces get eaten and people get sliced and diced like chopped celery. It makes you wonder about the nature of the people who love this kind of thing, and whether or not you'd want to be locked in the same room as them when there's nothing to eat. The fact that the animators of this movie knew exactly the details of human anatomy makes me curious. Either
A. They studied biology or know people who did
B. They have past experiance, perhaps involving prostitute dissection.
Overall though if you have a fetish for gore that exceeds all boundries of 'normal' this is probably the movie for you. If gore is this much your thing feel free to watch it after having a nice warm bath for one, turn off all the lights, light a couple of candles get in a nightrobe and have a box of tissues ready, be sure you feel sensual. Because if you like gore, this is probably your idea of erotica.
Actually while I'm on the subject of animation there are these two engineers at the beginning of this movie who literally have the same face and voice. There is no difference between them and they also seem to share a personality. This just makes me wonder if the animators even realised that the falcon nose, chizled chin and bushy eyebrows don't always look identical from person to person.
Actually this reminds me, sometimes the animation would be quite inconsistent, people's hair colour changes mid scene, and faces can often reshape (slighty granted but enough to still be noticed). You might say that these are small problems but if I notice them, then it is a very large problem.
Here are some complaints that I do have however. It isn't really explained how the colony on the planet became infested by the freaky space zombies anyway. It starts with the violence amongst the colonists that is also never explained. That's my big gripe really,all the things you DON'T see that give unsatisfactory answers. Also having played the game I can say right now they used the bare minimum of the monsters they could have. Just a handful and there were actually a few to pick from. I mean where's the Leaper? You know the one with the long tail made out of the flesh of the human legs, and a mouth that's split open to make room for huge mandibles? That was one of the three most commonly encountered enemies in-game yet the movie just ignores them. This creates a very serious problem as all the monsters look identical when swarming. One is interchangeable with another, given that these monsters are created by infecting dead bodies I think it was fair at least to suggest making each one look like a crew member we encountered earlier like in Shaun of the Dead where every zombie you see earlier as a person in the background. Seriously as a fan of the game the monster selection is a little dissapointing. Watching the same variety of Necromorph (that's what the alien monster things are called, look it up)swarm all at the same time doesn't really feel very creative especially when they all look so similar.
Something this movie lacked was sympathy. Alissa Ripley's character had the very standard tough gal behaviour ('fuck this and fuck that' you know, people curse a lot on this ship) and to be honest it was hard to take her that seriously. Admittedly though she had a few funny lines so I'll forgive that. The big thing for me though, has to be how cardboard her squadmates are. Every single one has the usual quips of a typical marine and often I only even learn their names after they DIE. To begin with they have zero charm what so ever, they just have a name and a single personality trait.
It's hard to empathise with them. One character that I did like was a guy called Samuel Irons who is an engineer who somehow ends up joining their team despite having no previous training. I could understand him helping them in their time of need, but he must be one hell of a saint to stay with them in a combat zone despite having no combat prowess.
Finally I feel the need to mention the cliche's in this movie. Dead Space Downfall is proud of it's cliche's. You know how there's always a point where someone goes off alone in an abandoned haunted house esque building or complex? Downfall has that. The guy who isn't as well characterised as the rest and gets killed to demonstrate how dangerous the situation has become? Downfall's got you covered in that department. The person who stands with their back turned almost and might as well be shouting 'oh boy I hope nothing comes from behind and kills me horribly' nad then something does. Got that. The guy who fights off the hordes of monsters to save the others, sacrifing himself. At least three times. You name it, Dead Space Downfall has it. But surprisingly it doesn't actually weaken the experiance as it should, instead it actually makes it more fun to watch just to see what famous movie moment they'll imitate next.
Dead Space: Downfall to me personally is very much like the game it predates. How so? Because I've played the game a few times and there are parts that are SOOO bad that it just blows my mind at thier awfulness. But then those bad moments are immeditaley backed up by some really Good bits that redeem the badness that came before. That's Downfall in a nutshell, that while it's a bumpy ride there is definetly enough to keep you entertained. While it would have been nice to give a deeper insight than what we got there's no denying that there is SOME entertainment to be had. Not geat no sir, but definetly decent. It's flawed but feels kind of appealing because of it's flaws.
Was this review helpful to you? Express your own personal opinions on this film. I'm aware that this is a 'great wall of text' but I had a lot to say.
As any self obsessed pretentious 'look how smart I is' prick will tell you the best place to begin something is at the beginnning, as demonstrated by me. So I'll start by telling the premise first:
It's some time in the distant future but rather than the exciting amazing laser shooting space pod jockeying brightly coloured alien filled super future we all antcipate we are instead treated to an ugly, rusty grey and brown coloured future. Everything looks bland and incredibally mechanised making every room of every planetary colony and every industrialised. This is a very boring future methinks. It honestly doesn't look that much different from the factory floor of a modern day factory (I need to use my full vocabulary don't I?). But anyway back to the story and not how bland the future of man looks.... I could swear the design of the buildings and ships remind me of something.
Well back to the premise, humanity has explored vast amounts of universe and appear to have concluded that Earth is the only planet with life on it. However some long time before the events of this movie something came along to challenge that. The discovery of a true alien artifact on Earth called 'the black marker' this soon spawned a religion called Unitology that quickly replaced all other religion and is now very much a mainstream faith. The beleif that human life may have existed outside of earth and that there is life throughout the universe.
The actual movie begins on the surface of a distant planet called Aegis 7 or something like that. It begins with a group of engineers investigating some kind of disturbance. The entire scene is literally a direct rip from one of the early scenes of Alien where the team finds that alien spaceship on this otherwise empty 'rock' (note: the cast in this movie had a very proud enthusiasm for the word 'rock' in this movie) and as if acknowledging how it is mimicking Alien Dead Space Downfall has almost the exact same thing happen. In this case the engineers find a 'second marker' this one called the 'red marker'. Before I continue I would like to point out that this seems almost miraculous, one very big planet has one solitary artifact, and of all the places a colony could be set up and engineers could investigate they happen to be only a few miles away. Wow, just wow. Just to clarify the movie has a bad habit of asking lot's of questions: "how did that marker get here?" "who put it there?" "how did that happen?" etc. But it has a bad habit of not ever answering these questions.
Well anyway back to the plot, soon enough the spaceship Ishimura arrives to come pick the said marker or 'artifact' as it is called in the film. This is also the point where we are introduced to this film's heroine, security chief Ellen Ripl... Alissa Vincent, a woman who by christ refuses to be even slightly femamine, she strikes me as the sort of woman who does heavy lifting at the gym, curses, has a tattoo, drinks heavy amounts of liquor, never wears makeup, doesn't clean her strange red hair and who spends nearly every waking day angry that she can't pee standing up. The plot then unfolds fairly typically, i.e unexplained violence among colonists at the exact same time as the artifact is moved and all that, the reason for which being never explained. There is this whole idea of 'maybe when we messed around with forces we don't understand we may have unleashed something dangerous' you know standard stuff. Sure enough the colony on the planet soon completely gets fucked up i.e blood smears the walls, the dead litter the corridors, you hear screaming in the background and strange organic growth is all over the place. This is obviously nothing out of the ordinary for the engineers though as they seem unfazed and one even clamly says he's going to find his wife.
The actual Downfall part of Dead Space: Downfall comes around twenty minutes in when a man comes to the colony to find his wife, finds her, she kills herself because she was in a badly traumatised state and he takes her body with him back to the Ishimura and her corpse gets french kissed by some alien thing. After that the ship becomes overrun with hideous alien monsters who are created by infecting, mutating, reshaping and reanimating dead bodies. Soon afterwards the body count starts and the fun begins.
The aliens in this movie are truly determined to correct everyone who thinks Earth is alone and decided the best way to do that would be to kill them all and infect their corpses, I guess a more subtle approach just wasn't fun enough. Once the ragged team of heroes gets introduced the plot follows a formula that I call 'Jurrassic Park syndrome'. The formula goes like this: Team of say, six people get into the mess of monsters. There are many encounters of such monsters and each time at least one member of the team gets killed. It keeps on going until only the most central cast are alive (or in most cases just the lone survivor). This formula is only kept alive by either
A. A wide variety of monsters so everyone gets killed by something different
B. Every single person who dies, does so in various creative and bloody ways.
Dead Space Downfall takes the latter option while having the additional story of the ship's command officers struggling to keept things under control. It worked in the Alien flicks and it works pretty well here too.
Just to give you a hint if you hate subtle monster movies this is the flick for you because the monsters are anything but subtle. Also they don't really look that scary, gross, not scary. However I did find the idea of them fresh and interesting, certainly more so than just typical zombies. I feel monsters like this are the way of the future because we've really gone about as far as we can go with typical zombies now. I think monsters like this will one day take their place.
Overall your standard sci fi horror plot, not original but entertaining at least. DSD feels like a cross between Aliens, Event Horizon and the Thing respectivley. One thing that is well done is the feeling of hopelessness and doom that you'd never feel in say Aliens because in Aliens the marines had all the things they needed to survive but were just too stupid to use them.
Right now let's discuss some of the basics. At the beginning of Dead Space Downfall the voice acting seems a little... off. Some of the early moments either sound really bland and without emotion and some of the time. Especially Alissa Vincent who once again determined not to be girly sounds so butch I began to wonder if she wasn't just a very pretty eighteen year old boy with two basket balls stuffed in his shirt. To be fair though her voice work does improve once you get used to it, as does the rest of the cast, there are some generally powerful emotional acting moments in this piece, mostly in the form of anger. One thing I must get off my broad rippling manly chest however is that the accents in this movie can occasionally just sound fucking funny. There is once again the sensation that no one actually knows what an English accent actually sounds like so the accents are heavily over done. Don't worry though, it won't make your ears bleed.
Next up animation. I have once heard it said that the two biggest things people expect to see in today's movie theatre are violence and sex. The theory goes that both are needed to keep us entertained and that if one is absent there is much more of the other to make up for it. So in the case of DSD the absence of any sexual content of any kind, immature violence is on fire. Without any sex to rely on DSD instead reaches over to the crowd of people who lust for violence the same way other people would lust for porn. Blood oozes out of this movie from every direction, people get completely torn apart, guts fly, faces get eaten and people get sliced and diced like chopped celery. It makes you wonder about the nature of the people who love this kind of thing, and whether or not you'd want to be locked in the same room as them when there's nothing to eat. The fact that the animators of this movie knew exactly the details of human anatomy makes me curious. Either
A. They studied biology or know people who did
B. They have past experiance, perhaps involving prostitute dissection.
Overall though if you have a fetish for gore that exceeds all boundries of 'normal' this is probably the movie for you. If gore is this much your thing feel free to watch it after having a nice warm bath for one, turn off all the lights, light a couple of candles get in a nightrobe and have a box of tissues ready, be sure you feel sensual. Because if you like gore, this is probably your idea of erotica.
Actually while I'm on the subject of animation there are these two engineers at the beginning of this movie who literally have the same face and voice. There is no difference between them and they also seem to share a personality. This just makes me wonder if the animators even realised that the falcon nose, chizled chin and bushy eyebrows don't always look identical from person to person.
Actually this reminds me, sometimes the animation would be quite inconsistent, people's hair colour changes mid scene, and faces can often reshape (slighty granted but enough to still be noticed). You might say that these are small problems but if I notice them, then it is a very large problem.
Here are some complaints that I do have however. It isn't really explained how the colony on the planet became infested by the freaky space zombies anyway. It starts with the violence amongst the colonists that is also never explained. That's my big gripe really,all the things you DON'T see that give unsatisfactory answers. Also having played the game I can say right now they used the bare minimum of the monsters they could have. Just a handful and there were actually a few to pick from. I mean where's the Leaper? You know the one with the long tail made out of the flesh of the human legs, and a mouth that's split open to make room for huge mandibles? That was one of the three most commonly encountered enemies in-game yet the movie just ignores them. This creates a very serious problem as all the monsters look identical when swarming. One is interchangeable with another, given that these monsters are created by infecting dead bodies I think it was fair at least to suggest making each one look like a crew member we encountered earlier like in Shaun of the Dead where every zombie you see earlier as a person in the background. Seriously as a fan of the game the monster selection is a little dissapointing. Watching the same variety of Necromorph (that's what the alien monster things are called, look it up)swarm all at the same time doesn't really feel very creative especially when they all look so similar.
Something this movie lacked was sympathy. Alissa Ripley's character had the very standard tough gal behaviour ('fuck this and fuck that' you know, people curse a lot on this ship) and to be honest it was hard to take her that seriously. Admittedly though she had a few funny lines so I'll forgive that. The big thing for me though, has to be how cardboard her squadmates are. Every single one has the usual quips of a typical marine and often I only even learn their names after they DIE. To begin with they have zero charm what so ever, they just have a name and a single personality trait.
It's hard to empathise with them. One character that I did like was a guy called Samuel Irons who is an engineer who somehow ends up joining their team despite having no previous training. I could understand him helping them in their time of need, but he must be one hell of a saint to stay with them in a combat zone despite having no combat prowess.
Finally I feel the need to mention the cliche's in this movie. Dead Space Downfall is proud of it's cliche's. You know how there's always a point where someone goes off alone in an abandoned haunted house esque building or complex? Downfall has that. The guy who isn't as well characterised as the rest and gets killed to demonstrate how dangerous the situation has become? Downfall's got you covered in that department. The person who stands with their back turned almost and might as well be shouting 'oh boy I hope nothing comes from behind and kills me horribly' nad then something does. Got that. The guy who fights off the hordes of monsters to save the others, sacrifing himself. At least three times. You name it, Dead Space Downfall has it. But surprisingly it doesn't actually weaken the experiance as it should, instead it actually makes it more fun to watch just to see what famous movie moment they'll imitate next.
Dead Space: Downfall to me personally is very much like the game it predates. How so? Because I've played the game a few times and there are parts that are SOOO bad that it just blows my mind at thier awfulness. But then those bad moments are immeditaley backed up by some really Good bits that redeem the badness that came before. That's Downfall in a nutshell, that while it's a bumpy ride there is definetly enough to keep you entertained. While it would have been nice to give a deeper insight than what we got there's no denying that there is SOME entertainment to be had. Not geat no sir, but definetly decent. It's flawed but feels kind of appealing because of it's flaws.
Was this review helpful to you? Express your own personal opinions on this film. I'm aware that this is a 'great wall of text' but I had a lot to say.
