I watched this having looked forward to it since discovering Ian Hubert's YouTube channel a year ago, and oh boy was it incredible. A bafflingly small group of artists, mainly just this one guy, have created a world that's expansive in the way that an explosion is expansive, like there's a concussive amount of rad shtuff battering your brain at an information density level that's so impressive you wonder how even three years was enough to pack all of this in.
Not to mention how Ian Hubert's technical achievements, using free open-source software, have themselves been enough to galvanise the entire Blender community into collectively shoving their heads right up into the clouds and keeping them there until no doubt something else wonderful falls back down. Which is not to say that anyone could hold a candle to this level of aptitude at-present - this filmmaking is really a cut above - but it sets a standard for what can be done with these tools, and that standard is certainly a lofty one.
And yeah some might say that these kinds of masterstrokes of worldbuilding tend to kind of fall flat on the storytelling, like with Blade Runner or Star Wars I-III. I thought this was excellent; it's a big step up, in my opinion, from the previous Dynamo shorts (or Tears of Steel, Hubert's short with the Blender Foundation in 2012) in terms of pacing, investment, and just general polish. Yeah sure it sounds pompous to say that about a 20-minute short, but that's because it would sound pompous saying it about anything, and it's really worth charting the progress of Hubert's filmmaking in the past 10 years, as it's pretty much all up there on YouTube to see, and man alive it engenders a lot of respect for him.
Kaitlin Romig is great, and it nearly goes without saying that her greenscreen acting skills are top notch - her performance really makes the world all that more immersive, or maybe intimate is the right word, with her body language playing off of what are often claustrophobic and unnerving cyberpunk 'cagescapes', if that's a word, which it isn't. It certainly feels like a dream, is what I mean, like the title might imply, where the environment is on one level, kind of nice and cosy, and on another, just on the verge of doing... something I'm not sure about.
Watch the film! Do it! It's great! Then hire these folks to do a Star War, Hollywood, or adapt an old science-fiction classic, like a James Tiptree Jr story or something, or, infinitely better yet, upon their cool woodland indie studio dump a truckload of money and young peppy vfx grads to make as many of these as they ever want.
