Benutzerrezensionen

A truly chilling, fascinating, brilliant piece of Sci-Fi. Everything great from the other two episodes can be found here and some more.

I am a big fan of the previous two World of Tomorrow installments so I was looking forward to this one. The animation is even better than before, the humour is quirky, the science fiction concepts are creative and the emotions are poignant. However, the story was a bit messy. By now there are so many clones of David and Emily that their interactions become a chore to keep track of, especially with all the time travel. The significance of personal memory becomes drowned in a convoluted quest with the Davids all trying to replace each other.

I am a big fan of Don's work, I adored and appreciated his feature film It's Such a Beautiful Day which is just really three short films in one, Rejected is just hilarious and revolutionary and World of Tomorrow is just beyond amazing!, his shorts are funny, weird, but beautifully well made!, even though a lot of them are convoluted and not all that amazing.

However with this third World of Tomorrow film, i really loved, I prefer the first one but this is better then number two, this is by far the best looking Hertzfeldt film in terms of technology and animation, it's really fantastic and a visual treat, it still has that deep profound feel to it along with it's random but weirdly wonderful humour, along with a lot of creative ideas and it really does you think like his other films!

If you love the guy's work, you'll enjoy this no problem, I know I did and after all that is happening right now, we need a bit of Hertzfeldt's magic to get us through this tough year.

The short gets a 10/10!.

World of Tomorrow Episode Three takes the open-ended series of stick-man animated science fiction to even greater heights than the previous two episodes. Whilst the first two episodes felt largely expositional, Episode Three has a throbbing dramatic pulse. Multiple timelines and clones are involved in a race to stop an assassination across hundreds of years! The humour is well-judged, largely the result of a spaghetti-like plot deliberately designed to be nigh on impossible to keep up with in the cinema. Hertzfeldt plays with us.

World of Tomorrow Episode Three blurs the line between science fiction and horror, highlighting the shared ability of both genres to tell stories without boundaries. Science fiction has the potential to produce the greatest horror, because everything can be put in peril. Suddenly, a timeline can be disrupted and we never existed, or human suffering can dramatically increase (referred to in contemporary ethical literature as an "S risk"). Though David exploits his clones, we still sympathise with him as he's subjected to these horrors and torture from the future, which may either be sadistic revenge or an utterly miscalibrated intervention. It's darkly funny and horrific.

The film introduces intriguing concepts about the future through invasive advertising, making us question the nature of human achievement and experience. What value is there in achieving concert pianist skills instantly, via a cash transaction? Is a perfect moment you lived through inherently more meaningful than one you merely downloaded? Hertzfeldt continues to probe these philosophico-neurological questions with his characteristic acerbic wit. He also plays with complex sci-fi ideas, such as the possibility that time might be quantised, existing in discrete bits rather than as a continuous stream.

The film's title, The Absent Destinations of David Prime, ties back to an incident in Episode Two, where a man - revealed to be David Tertius, the third of his line - transports himself to a state of nullity. It's hinted that this event may have created multiple timelines or even a multiverse filled with grinding suffering, an S risk coming to dark fruition, though we're left in uncertainty.

The final scene of star-cross'd lovers Emily and David brims with suspense, leaving viewers on the edge of their seats and eager for what's next, will they shoot at one another or embrace? One can only hope a fourth episode is on its way from this masterful filmmaker.