Zaps' "Derelict" Review

This review contains some spoilers.

Ever since the unfinished Fear, people have been looking forward to the next Andrew Johnson (Mousenator) movie, in hope that he will fulfil much of the potential he has shown. Derelict is this film, and those who praised Fear should have nothing to worry about, as it is far stronger than Fear in terms of suspense and excitement, and shouldn't let you down. To everyone else, this is still a strong recommend. Somehow the director has managed to pull a horror off surprisingly well in such a cartoony program. Derelict starts off strongly. Right from the start, from when you first see the derelict piece of craft flying around in space, suspense is felt already, which is helped along by the dark music. This piece of craft leads us to the first crew, which, while isn't highly significant, it helps set the scene and creates a tense atmosphere and helps Derelict along.

The film most importantly does achieve what it has set out to do as best as it can: to keep viewers nervous. A couple of deaths may be too predictable, but at times, you are capable of fearing for the characters, and in your mind, probably urging them to run away or to not friggin' stand there like a plastic model. This is partly helped by the aliens on-board. You hardly see much of them, making them more mysterious, and their ability to cleverly control doors, water levels, and more, makes them extremely dangerous to the crew. Of course, their huge size and strength also adds to the fear factor. Once the movie gets moving, it's one encounter after another with the aliens (well, mostly; you see, there was one dodgy scene, which I'll explain later on, that did break the chaos up a little in a bad way), and thanks to some great direction and some nice touches with the lighting in places, watching Derelict can be nerve-wrecking. Really awesome stuff.

All this builds up to the finale against the aliens, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who will agree that it was greatly executed. Both the remaining crew and the aliens actually use their brains, and these scenes are thrilling, dramatic, and really entertaining to watch. The music, consistently strong throughout the whole movie, works beautifully here, and adds to the tension, and it is capped off wonderfully. The final showdown is definitely the highlight of the movie for me, and is already a contender for Best Scene 2005. It's just a pity that the supposed cliffhanger right at the end was a little bit too predictable. Oh well. Voice-acting was a little hit-and-miss. Some voices were well-done (I was disappointed that Barton didn't have that many lines to deliver; Catherine Boorer is quite talented though), while others, such as Amy's very unconvincing voice, can be categorised as plain 'poor'. Luckily the poor voice-acting hardly dented the experience at all, partly because there weren't many dialogue scenes to interrupt the flow (after all, it's supposed to be a horror), and partly because the 'horror' scenes worked and shone brightly that the voice-acting doesn't play much of a significant role.

Unfortunately, while Derelict really does shine in these aspects (much better than I had hoped, to the director's credit), there are a large number of flaws which Johnson needs to address in the future. I'm going to apologise in advance for being overly-critical, because what he's produced here is really, really good, and a lot of these flaws did not drastically affect my experience, watching this, in a bad way, but there were a fair number of novice mistakes which should have been avoided. My first negative point though isn't a 'novice' mistake. It isn't necessarily a bad thing as such, because it didn't distract me from what Derelict does best, but it's something that I felt needed to be addressed. What about I talking about? V3DMM. While some may complain about the lack of V3DMM used, bear in mind that this project started many, many months ago, before Fear was released. Yes, having the actors wearing unique, futuristic, sci-fi clothes would be very welcome (I presume the small, first section was planned a little later than the rest of the film), and I wouldn't have minded some V3DMM touches in the scenery, but, really, I can cope with it. Easily. I mean, come on, the spaceship is very competently constructed and I've seen actors in ridiculous costumes in many other films. Why be so harsh about this? It can be easily overlooked, since the V3DMM-era has only just begun, and besides, it's the tension that's supposedly more important in horrors like this, isn't it?

However, ignoring V3DMM, Derelict could have been even better, if it were more polished. This time, I'm talking about the actual story. There were quite a few unanswered questions, such as 'Who were the aliens?', 'Why did they want to kill the crew?', and 'Why make out in a place which is blatantly not safe?' While this did not badly affect my viewing until five minutes after the movie, when you have one of those deep thoughts about what you've just seen, adding depth on and commenting, at least, the first two questions could have created even more tension and made the aliens look more deadly. But this wasn't the only problem. There were many places where the music seemed to end a little bit too early, leaving a couple of seconds of silence and killing off pretty much all of the built-up tension there was. I'm so glad the finale didn't have this problem. Oh, and referring to that third 'unanswered' example question, there was also that very intimate moment, which exactly didn't make a lot of sense: "We'll be safe here" says Dash; Ella, unable to speak for herself, happily goes along with it. It sure does look safe, what with all the aliens lurking around.

For some parts of the film though, the characters do show some personality. It's just that we don't know enough about them before they are killed to care much. We only get glimpses of what they are like and only get to scratch the surface of each character. The relationship between Dash and Ella could have been done a little better if the scrappy script was tidied up a lot, but it was just about bearable. Contrasting that, however, the bridge scene was pulled off well, that is apart from the sound cutting off, and I was feeling sympathetic towards the character who survived that scene (I'm trying not to give much away here, as there will be those who will ignore my spoiler warnings). Still, both characters, and Sidney, could have definitely been exploited much better, and the final scenes could have potentially made a proper aftermath impact. This isn't the most important aspect by a long way, but it's worth mentioning in case Johnson wants to try something like this again in one of his future movies.

Admittedly it does have a few hugely blatant flaws, a couple which could have been fixed if more time was spent, but nevertheless, Derelict is still a strong, tense, exciting, atmospheric film which does work to some extent in making you worry for the characters themselves. A lot of hard work has obviously been put in this sixty-minute movie, which if I'm honest, felt more like thirty, and I can positively say that Derelict is one of the best horrors in 3DMM I've ever seen. Not the best, but it's up there. Maybe top three. Congrats, Andrew, you've made one great movie on your first complete project. I know the split review does not seem to reflect the very high score, with half of it praising the film and half of it being a little harsh, but by looking at the final mark I've given, you can hopefully, obviously tell that the criticisms are very, very minute compared to the very shining positive points. You deserve the score.

Score: 87/100