The concept is simple but sounded fun, but theres a lot that went wrong and a only a few things that went right.
The script is terribly paced, the games this is inspired by came from the 90s didnt even have cutscenes or anything much of a story, but they were more interesting, because they changed things up and they were faster, the levels took about 10minutes, 10min in this movie is a timespan where you move maybe 4 rooms foward and find one meaningless item. I have a high tolerance to trash if its either intentionally well done trash (although thats very hard), or sincere attempts that really tried doing something right, but failed due to a lack of money or the necessary knowledge on how to make a film. This movie has a lot of things that could be polished and some could have easily been better with a little more effort, they didnt even have to hire anyone for some of those things. It comes of extremely lazy. An example is that our protagonist finds a pc and as easter egg it has the game-influences (doom, blood, quake) on the desktop, but they are just icons of EMPTY folders. They could have easily gotten the original icons, either install these games that now cost as much as a coffee, or just download the icons and set them as desktop shortcut. Thats something that takes maybe 10mins.
The voice of our player seems unfitting as well, it sounds like a 60 year old smoker, not some young badass. Every computer graphic looks out of place, why would a corpse turn into pixels? The opening doesnt look like an old game, it looks like a terrible indie game, trying to be old, but old games had great limitations on the veriety and gradients of colors, just put your graphics in a lower bit-rate and you got it, simple. The style also is ugly and doesnt fit the games they take as influences, none of them were side-scrolers, how can you mess this up? Then it has a HUD like a remastered game, but "autosave" and "loading", etc. is very pixelated, it just doesnt make sense, why not keep the movie entirely in this "realistic" version and keep the pixel stuff away? Because the realistic stuff is what works, the camera-movement, how the weapons/hands swipe across the screen and all those things, they are the things that work. The other thing that works well is the sound-design, its actually pretty good and very fitting.
Turn a few knobs and i think this could actually be a fun experience, but like this its a bit pitiful, still worth a watch, if only to see what can go wrong with this simple premisse.
