Blood Machines

The good , the bad, the awesome:

the good: VISUALS / VFX / MUSICS are seriously amazing!

the bad: turn this super short into 3 parts is a bad idea. the story is just ... nhaaa ... there is almost none.

the awesome: IF you watch this short like a video clip, THEN you get a masterpiece. It is one of the best "exercise of style" i have ever seen.

thanks for this, i get a very good time watching Blood Machines. You really need to give us more! SO Much more!

The gist of Blood Machines is "men abusive, men bad; women gentle; women good."

I know that seems like a crude way to sum up the film, but that's pretty much how it plays out.

The special effects -- for this to be a Kickstarted film -- really do put a lot of bigger budget Hollywood films to shame. It's mostly to do with the intricate attention to detail and physics, which make the world feel weighty and dangerous. It's just such a shame that what little dialogue we do get and what little character development we do see take place is basically to push a pro-feminist message.

It would have been so much cooler had the film been about actual villains trying to capture the souls of ships, and unbeknownst to the bounty hunters, they had no idea that the ships they were collecting had souls. At least then they could have molded a sympathetic redemption arc around the bounty hunters, having the Captain warm to the audience and to the space druid, Corey.

But instead the first season of three episodes beats audiences over the head with what's essentially a feminist revenge tale against men and their destructive weapons.

The '6' out of '10' ratings is basically for the effects, visual presentation and for Carpenter Brut's undeniably awesome soundtrack.

It's quite unfortunate because I really had high hopes for this one.

This needed to be 30 minutes overall. The vfx and atmosphere were great, but there was no coherent story. I still didn't understand what was really going on in there.

Okay, so it's got lots of female nudity. And weird inverted crosses. And pentagonal roses? And the coolest laser guns I've seen since laser guns were put in movies. And sweet space ship designs. And a monstrously impressive sound track. And absolutely no coherent script to explain much of any of this. Something something machine revolt? Feminist power? I don't know.

It's like a 14 year old dropped acid and made his fantasies into a featurette. Except with a better FX budget and musical score.

Well worth a watch, just expect a long form experimental music video instead of an actual story. And what a music video it is.

(I'd also recommend people check out the music video for Turbo Killer elsewhere (you can guess where) to get more-of-the-same, but in a SFW and shorter form)

The imagery and atmosphere of this mini-series is jaw-dropping. Think Blade Runner meets Mandy meets Star Wars, and you'll have an idea (sort of) of what this is.

Beyond that, the plot is borderline nonsensical. It has to do with an AI manifesting as a weird demigod entity, and I'm sure there's some kind of commentary embedded in it that has to do with humanity's relationship to machines/religion/etc., but it's way too abstract.

Ultimately, this movie is best experienced as a visual feast, and that's about it. If you try to extract anything larger from it, you'll get caught up in an endless game of "maybe this is symbolism" that doesn't really go anywhere.

I'd love to see what this director could do with a well written script.