Ruins

This marks the third time I've read a Tom Bown script before production on a movie began, thought it was competent enough, and found the finished piece heavy-handed and overdone. What seemed like a slow boil on the page comes off as Bown getting his point across subtly, then less subtly, then blatantly, then screaming at the top of his lungs while hitting you over the head with what you've already figured out a few times over. What charms the movie has are drawn out long past the point of resonating with those likely to find it interesting.

This isn't solely Tom's fault. A combination of all involved make Ruins an overbearing and uneven experience, and sadly where one person drops the ball, another person puts a lot of effort into a bad idea to make up for it, amplifying the the misstep. Case in point with Dustin Guest's performance. He's really working hard to give the character dimension, but when Bown's writing reads in a pedantic way and Michael Sandford's camerawork won't stay put, the cheese factor is overpowering. A performance like this needs to be carefully managed and precisely channeled to avoid losing the audience, and Dustin's bristling, boiling crescendo comes off as over-the-top. This echoes the key issue with the movie as a whole; Ruins is ridiculously ambitious in the tone it wants to achieve, but the three principals working on it are running in different directions. Bown wants a smoldering, emotion-driven character piece, Sandford appears to be animating for spectacle, and Dustin Guest's performance ends up sideswiped in the middle.

I told Bown it was a great idea for a movie, and it still is. A man walks through an underground bunker to a prison block, where he has a conversation with another man about family and the apocalyptic world they live in. As the film goes on, the nature of their relationship becomes clearer through what the imprisoned man is implying, and occasionally Sandford's direction manages to echo the guilt and resentment in the free man's reaction shots. The imprisoned man has a poignant (though a little overlong) speech about a poem his daughter wrote, and though we don't yet know the truth about the two men, we can sense the pain and desperation in the free man's uncomfortable silence. From here, though, the movie crumbles into a one-sided screaming match of pedantic dialogue. The accusations should be somewhat uncomfortable and disturbing for the audience, but the disconnect between the writing, the direction, and the performance makes us feel uncomfortable for the wrong reasons. The damn thing drags and crawls and unloads roar after painful roar at us, apparently trying to achieve poignancy through noise when subtlety fails.

The construction is where the movie is at its sloppiest and most uneven. Sandford's scenery is grainy, slipshodden, and doesn't move with any real consistency. Some credit is due to the attempt at keeping the imprisoned man in the shadow, but like nearly every area of the movie's construction, it's inconsistent and never quite comes off like it should. The v3dmm work is effective only when we catch that first subtle glimpse of the blood on the man's neck, but once we see what he looks like more clearly, the pixelated lack of detail sucks all of the realism out of the film. It looks like it was done in MS Paint. All this coupled with a camera that won't behave and some really poor directorial choices (what's with all the 8-frame pans and whiplash-inducing 180-rule breaks? And nothing quite pounds the mood flat like that pathetic squeal during the freeze-frame inserts of the daughter). Some of Sandford's attempts at visual trickery, like the footsteps appearing on the title, are interesting enough, but still seem a little off. A better footstep sound, with a reverberation, would have suited the mood far more. To this end, so would better textures and a less cluttered looking hallway. Among other things.

I wish I had nicer things to say about this movie. It's a great idea that's somewhat engaging in places, succeeds visually in sporadic incidents (the imprisoned man hitting the wall was great, but one of the default actions he uses at the end of the animation is unintentionally funny and idiotic looking). And Dustin's performance, while at odds with a movie that is already at odds with itself in every other category, clearly had a lot of effort put into it. But there must have been three or four unnecessary minutes near the end of the film that just stop serving the mood and emotional crescendo we're supposed to be feeling. It becomes muddy and tedious when it should be captivating and surprising. With a tighter revision of the script, a more confident command of the program, and a more focused vision of the key voice role, Ruins could've been a brilliant short. As it stands, we have to pick the interesting idea out of the scattered, bloody remains of the finished product. And by that point we're too nauseous to really care.

Critical Score: 42/100.
Personal Score: 56/100.

[Michael Sandford]

I agree... I think that I really messed this movie up...
sorry Tom Bown

[Aaron Haynes]

I don't think you were quite ready for what a project like this probably required. This practically screamed for cinematic precision, and you just don't have that level of expertise yet. The way you place and move the camera has to say something all its own. There are very few people in this community, past and present, that could make this work extremely well.

Don't let it get to you. Study and learn from it.

Also, while Bown's idea was great, the dialogue and pacing needed some serious fine-tuning. Dustin Guest should never have had to scream some of these lines. It's a project that called for a ridiculous amount of prep work and precision; I wouldn't do this movie without storyboarding it, to be honest.

[Andres]

tom bown, just leavfe already.