Angel

This review contains some spoilers.

It's reassuring when someone new pleasantly surprises this community. Following Mousenator, who directed the neatly-done yet unfortunately incomplete Fear, comes Andrew Salter, with another impressive debut movie - Angel. It may not be all that great, but what he does have is potential. Angel follows the mini-adventure of a young lad named Junior. He gets specifically recruited by an angel, and he is asked to confront a group which must be stopped.

One thing that was noticeable quite quickly was that the animation itself wasn't too shabby at all. Some water effects did look below par, but there were some scenes were the animation shone. Sticking to the technical side of the movie, the music was argubly the best aspect of Angel. Each selected piece was used wisely, and Andrew created tension when needed. One clear example was after the main character's big speech to the KKK. Nicely done. Thanks to v3DMM, Angel also looks good. With tree and mountain models used, scene construction certainly looks more solid than I expected from someone inexperienced. While Angel's use of v3DMM is rather basic, it still shows that v3DMM is beginner-friendly, and not just for 3DMM veterans.

While technically Angel is actually pretty decent, the script has a fair amount of problems. Imagine this: a woman just teleported out of nowhere in front of you, while you are peacefully on a little boat floating down a stream. She then calls "come with me!" I don't know about you, but I would have ignored her and would have continued making my way down the stream. But not our Junior, who seemingly has a fetish for daring adventures. There are other places where the story also appears a little too jumpy (take a look at the result of Junior's little speech for another example) but I've heard this was because the story had to be compressed so much that it ended like this.

Of course, with a longer runtime, the story could have been told a lot better. It looks like yet another movie joins the large group of movies which could have benefitted from an extended length. One problem with the script that is unrelated to the runtime though is the dialogue. In many places, the one-liners seemed awkward, and perhaps having someone to read through the script beforehand would have been useful. The high quality of the voices were somewhat redeeming though, especially the angel's seemingly-emotionless voice (I presume that was intentional). And what was with Junior's hiding place right out in the open? I'm going to put that to laziness.

But let's not take too much away from Andrew Salter. He has put in a lot of effort into this, and this is the end result, producing an above-average first movie, which leaves behind a little message about beliefs and determination. Despite a crammed script and a story which could have been told a whole lot better, I still found watching Angel an enjoyable experience. Put it this way, at least he's making proper movies. We seem to be lacking some of those in recent months. Angel also further shows how v3DMM can be implemented in movies, and it's nice to see a new director not scared of trying to grasp the basics of this new tool. Andrew isn't wasting much time trying to make a name for himself: Echondria looks like it will be ready before the year is out, and boy, I can't wait for it.

Score: 55/100