5DMM

NOTE: This review contains spoilers. You have been warned.

When I had first heard about 5DMM about, oh, a month ago over AIM from Aaron I got a bit curious. Now I knew Denny and Dan were cooking up a chain movie over on the Tunafilms board but I had no idea they had intentions of releasing it for the film fest and the fact that it was gonna be over 50 minutes long. As a fan of Dan's work and a bit of a novice to Denny's my expectations began and I was looking forward to what I expected to be somewhat of an epic staring the two main characters (Dan and Denny respectively). So naturally when that day of the fest came I excitedly downloaded the movie, sat down, and began to watch. But much to my dismay the movie didn't quite hold up to my expectations...

The first thing I noticed about the movie was told to me. It was based off the Mike Belfance and Justin Wars...I'm not even gonna try 's Who's The Director Anyways? series. This didn't alarm me at first since I knew I had to expect crazy things but I think this branch of chain movie making actually hurt the overall product more than anything. For example when one of the two had a massive cop car chase going that the viewer really gets into the director changes about halfway through and all of the sudden the action just stops. Dead. I got rather upset at this point since wouldn't the other director kinda see fifty cop cars right behind the red car and just maybe, ya know, think that there was some sort of chase going on? But that's about all the real nitpickiness I can do for that now on that subject. There were also several parts I noticed where this line of directing just did not work. Period. The movie got too random and parts just didn't make sense. Now I'm used to stuff not making sense and loving it but I was expecting more of a Digouts and ended up with more of a "What the hell is going on?" kind of movie.

But lack of directing wasn't the only thing that hindered the movie. Sometimes the parts just got downright drawn out and boring. I mean if the ambulance army chase didn't happen when it did I might've fallen asleep. And even after that the ambulance giving birth, while kinda funny, got slightly boring and started the slow the movie down. Now believe me I know it's really really hard to pace a chain movie, especially one such as this, but Backwards Chain Movie and hell even parts of the CoE movies kinda had a general premise and a sense of where the movie was going without getting too dull.

But enough of the negative, let's get down to the stuff I rather enjoyed. First off I'll be the first to admit along with pretty much everyone else the animation at the ending, especially the transformation scene, was fucking gorgeous. I've always loved the way Dan creates HMCs and makes them work and this is no exception. Hell even the credits were entertaining to watch, which is unusual. Denny had some rather impressive moments as well and adding on to my earlier comment I can't wait to see more of his work. As a matter of fact at some parts it even looked like Dan has rubbed off on Dan, the ambulance birth scene as an example. Some of this made for a rather impressive and entertaining smattering of sections of the movie but as previously commented there are other parts that needed some serious work.

My final thoughts on this rather lengthy animation fest are such: it was alright but it wasn't quite what I was expecting. The lack of direction severly hurt the movie both pacing wise and just overall. It's a very rough idea of what could've been a pretty good movie but it's worth it only really from Dan's transformation scene to the ending credits with the ambulance chase scene.

6.5/10