JDR Revival

Someone wrote a review saying "Every once in a rare while there comes along a movie that is impossible to classify yet impossible not to love". Obviously we didn't watch the same movie, because it is possible to not love this movie. in fact, I am living proof of such a feat. JDR Revival is a lame, plodding, and completely frustrating movie which doesn't amount to much in the end, one of the endless cases where I simply do not see what all the fuss is all about. This time I really, really don't get what the fuss is about. And of course, I'll be flamed for months, with people reminding me that I need to lighten up. Go light yourself on fire if you're thinking of making the comment, n00bs. I like a lot of movies, and this isn't one.

This is one of those cases where everything people love about this movie, I really don't love about it. What is JDR Revival? It's a movie about 3 guys who fight off another guy who's evil. There's nothing to criticize about the plot, though, because this is one of those movies. You know the type I'm talking about. The movies that seem to think they're so cool that they can ignore such thing as plot and simply go on and on about any random nonsense. Surprisingly, this movie actually doesn't fail at that. Unlike some grand masters of idiocy like DD, JDR Revival's stupid story actually works in some parts. Don't ask me why. I've got absolutely no idea why it works, but it does. In fact, that's probably the most unexpected thing here: Here's a movie that's practically a PAM, but what I'm praising is its storyline. It ocassionally manage to rise above the typical "I won't make sense" tendency that has existed for years in the community and manages to make sense in its own little world.

And that's where my appreciation for the movie will end. You see, JDR Revival is for the most part a very long PAM, with many action scenes using all sorts of zany expansion pack effects, and mimicking all sorts of videogame ideas and the like. At the same time, it's a comedy in that it is self-aware, and there's a slew of jokes about it being obvious that it's a movie or whatnot. Sounds like fun, right?

No. This movie takes any potentially good idea and hammers it down repeatedly until it becomes absolutely unbereable. For example, let's go with the humor. The oh-so-clever, hip "ohh, this is a movie" humor. As someone who's doing a similar thing for his movie, I thought the way it was done here was just predictable and pedestrian. There was nothing clever about all the movie jokes. Nothing. You could practically hear them coming a mile away. And that's just the self-referential humor. There's lots of other humor too, and it's unfunny. In fact, I laughed exactly two times during this movie. One was the moustache joke, and one was the clone scene. The moustache joke was repeated later, and was unfunny now because it was REPEATED. And the clone scene dragged on for too long REPEATING ITSELF. Because that defines the movie: repetition. It's just one scene after another until it all becomes an irrecognizable cluster of repeated ideas. And it's more than a half hour long, too. A half hour of bad jokes and directorial excesses. Why, why, why? If I'd known it was that long, too. I was completely unprepared for this epic boredom. Let's take the ending. While the idea is interesting, did it really have to go through the 11,000 movies it went through? The movie is often clever, but wallows so much in it's cleverness that it becomes plain stupid.

There's a reason PAMS are generally short. It's because sustaining an action movie can get pretty impossible unless there's a plot, or something happening between action scenes, that's entertaining. Which is not the case here. While the absurd story was well-executed, it suffers the problem every "absurd story" movie suffers, which is: who gives a shit? Does anyone really care what the bad guy's weakness is, or where he hides something? It can deflate into boredom very quickly. Especially since this movie is excessively long, and excessively littered with idiotic scenes of allegedly funny plot.

Of course, one could say the movie can be appreciated as nothing more than an exercise in animation. But no, no, no. I'll give the director points for actually managing to make a staggering 700+ scenes in a few months. But do I actually like the content of those scenes? No. I think it was Aaron who said something to the extent of "this is the most stylish movie ever made" or something similar (maybe he was referring to JDR Revolutions, I'm not sure). Either way, stylish in what? I hated the style of this movie. Practically every single scene was completely unpolished and looked just plain awful. When there were scenes made with text, you could see millions of little bits that weren't the proper color... not sure how to explain it, but I'm not going to bother with a screenshot. And in the use of the expansion pack, many times the object with the texture was so huge that all you could really see where these gigantic pixels completely dominating the screen. It looked awful. That's always been my problem with using text to make scenes: It can lend itself to some truly shitty looking scenery, like the many times a textured object was used but the upper surface would be the one used, meaning all those irrecognizable lines that don't look like a texture at all, and look like shit. There were some good uses of text, though, such as one of the explosions, which was superbly done.

But that's it. A few good uses. Of everything. That's this movie in a nutshell. It's a hit and miss affair, with the hits being outnumbered by the staggering amount of misses. Once again, I'll give the director credit for being very fast in making a movie. But here's a case where I'm actually going to advocate the slowness that's going to kill our community eventually. Slow it down. Think it over. Watch the scenes over and over. A lot, I mean a lot of the movie felt like it was simply made because you HAD to make a scene, not because you really felt like making the scene that day. I'm guessing that's why there's so much sloppy stuff and so many failed ideas. While planning is good and all, this seems like a case where the excesses the movie falls prey to could have been avoiding by taking it easier, by really looking at the whole thing and cutting and adding properly. There's a lot of potential here. But this potential is drowned in what amounts to a completely self-indulgent movie, one which really needed some cuts, and more time on it. While this review seems maniacally negative, it's like my TOLL FREE review. It's not so much that the movie is bad, it's that the potential is so visible that one can't help but bash away at all that could have been. I guess it'd give this a 2.5/5 for the effort it took and for the ocassionally entertaining scenes, but this amounts to a lesson that it's better to put your heart into every little thing you make rather than forcing 700 scenes out in a few months.