Reign of the Fallen

This was my first Star Wars fan film. It was amazing in its duration, simplicity, and beauty. First, the bad points. The slowly moving story is a bit dragging during the first half hour when the atmosphere was being set. It was confusing in some scenes since most of the characters wear the same hooded cloak. Some scene shifts, acting episodes, special effects and props hint at the minuscule (spell checker prevents me from spelling this correctly) $7000 budget. These were more than adequately made up for by the heartfelt story. The two best segments were the fight with the Jedi master and the epilogue, with the climactic battle lagging in for third. Kudos to the musical score, which although was not original, was fit to the scenes perfectly.

I did not enjoy Reign of the Fallen. It is of generally poor quality, but specifically:

The lead players are unbelievable performers (bad acting), The cinematography is distractingly choppy and detrimental to the story (when you'd like to see the whole scene, close ups are used, and vice versa), The script is incoherent (difficult to follow), The light saber fighting is poorly choreographed and performed, The special effects are inadequate (we frequently see shadows of light sabers, etc.), The sound quality is distracting (some angles within complex scenes ended up with a hum in them, so the audio is fine when you're looking at one character, and then buzzing when you look at the other... They really should have done some serious AVR), The score is obnoxious (overly dramatic, string dominated, ceaseless, and too loud in the audio mix), Also, the story is about a whole planet, and we really only see five people on screen.

This film feels like a college film project.

The only thing in the whole movie that satisfies, is the leaf, which is a well chosen, or constructed prop.

Don't waste your time. I wish I hadn't.

With the ever-growing availability of good digital cameras, high quality, affordable computer graphics systems, digital editing tools and audio sampling and mixing software, we are seeing the growing maturity of micro-movie-making and the increasing sophistication of the fan-film genre. The vast, vast majority of these films are still junk, but there are a few that point to the potential of the genre and micro-movie-making: "Reign of the Fallen" is one of them.

The producer and director of this hour long movie opted to focus on character and a simpler story based in the Lucas universe, rather than spaceships, droids, stormtroopers and other merchandise wannabes. You still get to see a few light-saber battles and glimpses of spaceships, but, for the most part, the film deals with the simple story of two "brothers", an early conflict between the Sith and the Jedi and the maturing of one particular Jedi.

I will comment that the pacing could be improved and the script could be cleaned up to clarify motives and strengthen relationships, but the director has chosen to take some time with each actor and each scene, rather than jump-cutting his way to an action scene and I think it works well. One has to be impressed at the restraint shown by the director in the confrontation between Oram Bren (Kevin Walsh) and the invaders. It is powerful in its understatement and in what it chooses not to show. The producers wisely chose to keep the main cast small and were thus able to get very good performers for the four main roles. Kevin Walsh as the aging Jedi Master has a perfect calm, strong presence and Jason Updike is excellent in his role as Eriq, the other Jedi student. The weakest of the four main actors, the director cast himself as the young Jedi, Jaren. Though his performance is okay, I wish the director had cast someone else in this pivotal role, because he could likely have brought out as good a performance in the character as he was able to pull out of the other three main actors in their roles.

The producers did an excellent job of assembling music that was appropriate for the film and especially in the use of a particular music cue at the climax of the film in a confrontation that is really pretty good.

Its a fan film. Its small. It takes itself a bit seriously. Its made on a negligible budget with unpaid actors and techs, but if you are patient and aren't expecting a wild shoot-em-up space opera, I think you might enjoy this.

Come on! It can't possibly be worse then "Attack of the Clones" can it?!?!