Veteran

This review contains major spoilers.

To be honest, from the Veteran thread, I wasn't really looking forward to watch this. And unfortunately, this movie was as bad as some of the comments. Tom Bown is a cool guy, but Veteran has nothing that stands out at all. Everything, from the visuals to the story itself, fitted between 'poor' to 'average'. On the bright side, Veteran shows that Tom Bown, as an animator, has improved and he should continue his efforts with 3DMM. Bown, please don't get discouraged by this review.

So where does this flop? Well, Veteran reminded me of Retaliation. For those who haven't read my review of it yet, I felt Retaliation made no sense whatsoever, but it did have great animations and sceneries. Veteran also does not make sense. Sure, at first I was watching very carefully, seeing the tension between, what you could say, 'veteran' and 'newbie', but at the end of the movie, and after thirty seconds of thinking, I realised that nothing was really properly explained! Here is the big spoiler here, so don't read if you haven't watched it yet... The ending was not properly balanced. On one side, we have a dramatic conclusion, and yet on the other, there is nothing to explain this. So the 'newbie' decides to gun down the 'veteran'?

After a couple of replies later in the movie thread, I found out that the 'newbie' disposed of the 'veteran' because he was a waste of space, but there are almost no clues, no hints, whatsoever on this idea behind the movie. To some guy who happens to pick this up with no knowledge of Veteran, this would most likely appear as complete crap. Retaliation has some redeeming features with the great animations and such, but Veteran offers nothing else. It tries to be a good drama, but it isn't. Like Retaliation, and even Abortion, Veteran could do with an extended runtime to explain a few puzzling things. Dramas need to be thoroughly thought out and the director behind one should think to him or herself, 'would some random freak understand this?' and as a result, Mr. Director should be able to iron out all the ambiguous questions. But oh well. Sorry Bown, but I didn't like Veteran too much. Just keep animating and plan out something which makes sense and I'm sure you will make an impressive movie. I hope I haven't sounded too harsh.

Score: 44/100