RogerBorg

Yes, yes, the visuals are OK, but that should be expected and unremarkable.

Everything else is a mess. The premise is muddled with no real character motivation behind the actions. The protagonists are bland, poorly fleshed out, and deeply unlikeable. And the plot and pacing are bizarrely random and disjoined.

As with Attack on Titan, it's lousy with flashbacks, and then it adds brutal time skips to that, so you have no idea from one scene to the next what the continuity is meant to be. This is hugely jarring: one moment characters are imprisoned awaiting trial. In the very next scene, they're inexplicably part of a special forces team carrying out a mission, with no, and I mean zero, explanation of why or what happened in the middle or how long it took.

The tone aspires to be serious and consequential, but it's interspersed with anime goofy-face scenes that completely wrecks those pretentions.

None of it gets any better, it just gets more brash and brazen and random and non-character driven as it progresses, leading to a deeply unsatisfying conclusion. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.

If this was written by a human, they should be replaced by AI. If it was written by AI, it should be scrapped and rebuilt. I've rarely seen such a huge waste of time and resources.

I went into this blind, on a recommendation, with no idea of the source or what to expect, and was shocked by how thoughtful and well made it was.

The animation is basic but clear and appealing. Sound is fine, and it makes good use of outro music tracks.

What really makes it are the ideas, which are huge the characters, who are well realised; and the attention to technical detail which is commendable. As a programmer, it was such a treat to see real technology, concepts, and implementation shown - hat tip to the consultants.

What really makes it is the character of Maddie, voiced to absolute perfection by Katie Chang in her last role before bowing out of acting. Chang produces a beautiful, calm, nuanced, and utterly human performance, a perfect counterpoint to the increasingly post-human nature of the material. Watching her voyage and personal growth is fascinating and hugely compelling.

The finale is divisive, as it's clearly an "Oops, no season 3, wrap everything up" episode. Personally, I love it, as it cranks the science up to 11, and commits to the core concept and its ultimate conclusion, leveraging Kardashev type II technology to loop right back to the very humanity in which the series is grounded. I'd have loved to spend more time with Maddie, but found the next step of her journey both satisfying and deeply affecting.

Rarely has a crowdfunded project more comprehensively dunked on the mugs who gave it money. But Rouge Elephants goes all-out to subvert expectations by displaying all of the very same tropes that its creator mercilessly mocks when he observes them in others:

An anodyne, anonymous John Guyman lead with no character or presence. I've watched this twice and still couldn't name one trait of Nothing Dork.

Pacing that opens with a mild bang then immediately slips into flashbacks, tell-don't-show, and even as-you-know exposition to pad out the run-time.

Not one but two girlbosses who perform ridiculous feats of combat, when they would be laid flat by the first hand put on them.

Dialogue that's stilted, cheesy, clumsy, interchangeable, repetitive and rambling.

An utterly generic plot that's so genre-compliant that surely it must qualify as parody.

Bear in mint that all this comes from a writer / producer who can recognise all the traits of a great indie production, and yet chooses to use absolutely none of them himself.

It's telling that not one of the creator's circle of content creators has reviewed this short, because there is literally nothing in it to praise, either objectively, or in comparison to any contemporary production like Terminal List or Reacher.

A creator with courage would do a "The Drinker Fixes: Rogue Elements", but we still await that moment of humility and self awareness.