The Gift

This is a short sci-fi film. You can see an imaginary Russian city in the future. It is very beautiful and is full of mysterious mood.

To be honest, I don't understand well what is happening in the movie. Many things happen one after another and there are few conversations. However, I enjoyed this film very much because the computer graphics is so elaborate and sophisticated. The car chase scene is amazing. The camera is set so that you can feel high speed of moving vehicles. In addition to that, zooming in and out is effectively used and that makes this movie more attractive.

You must be surprised at the beautiful computer graphics.

It was very easy for me to be dragged into the world of sci-fi Russia. Mixtures of CGI and old fashioned Moscow was something worth watching for sure. However, there was "too much information" on the other hand, as a short film. As there is "high fantasy" and "low fantasy," we can say that the sub genre of this film is "low sci-fi". And since it is based on our real world, the question of asking "how?" was inevitable. For instance, I found my self getting interested in how Russia (or could it be Soviet still? Lots of questions) became a Robo-tech super nation rather than its main theme, "Gift" To conclude, I wanted to watch this in 90 minutes film.

This story is hard for me to understand. The detail that are not revealed in this story seems have to imagine myself. What is a unicorn? Why does the man who is run over by a bus kill an old man? Who is the child who gazes at the box? There are a lot of thought-provoking things in this movie.

Also, the action scenes were exciting, The scene of a robot which drove a motorcycle while avoiding the police car was very cool! I also felt a realistic force by the scene that the robot was blown away by crushing the bike against police cars which were blocking a street. His partially destroyed face was very impressive.

Even so, I wonder what was the unicorn. Because it could not be seen in this film, I'm interested in the beautiful contents of the box.

A Russian man delivers a present to a wealthy man, but when it is opened, the box that is in it kills him. This leads to the box changing hands several times, always with destruction in its wake. The country is a combination of futurism with robots all over the place and a regular population in the shadow of the Kremlin. It is open to lots of interpretations but just a little too short on substance.

I think this story is amazing, because I could not think and come up with such an idea. The unicorn is generally fantasy figure, in addition, a robot comes out. I think most people who know the word 'unicorn' can imagine what the unicorn looks like. However, the figure of the unicorn does not come out as what we can usually imagine. Also what I am interested in and think it is impressive is the unicorn is related to 'danger', though the unicorn is usually a divine symbol. I simply enjoy this film. It might be a good and spectacular film because it is short, but I hope that this will be a longer film at least for one hour.