Another day, another red-hot buzzed-about short film in Hollywood: this time it’s “Azureus Rising” written and directed by California-based one-time ILM employee David Weinstein. The clip is below, but for those of you who can’t be bothered watching anything longer than a trailer but shorter than a feature (most of the time this writer is the same), let us provide you with a summary:
A blue-haired robot/cyborg/metalman with a gas-mask face does some running, jumping and slo-mo cracking of the ground while being fired at by big mounted dystopian-futuristic guns. The guns cannot deal with Azureus’ (we guess that’s his name because his hair is blue) mad jumping and running skillz, and he escapes over a wall. But no! Now he’s surrounded by some other robots with guns. Luckily he has a shiny ball thing that explodes and somehow enables him to kill them all with his shiny sword. Then he has to run away from a dystopian-futuristic aircraft which is also shooting at him. He jumps off the edge of an unfinished skyway or something and falls for a long time, sliding down skyscrapers and amazingly suffering no ill effects when he lands. But wait! He senses something watching from the shadows and pulls a gun, but boy, is it a puny gun compared to the huge robot scorpion thing that uncoils from the shadows (scorpions are really having a moment, aren’t they? And not, unfortunately, the awesome German band variety). Anyway, blah blah, climactic battle, Azureus, using his quick wits and aforementioned running, jumping and slicing skills, prevails. But wait again! – the film may be short but there’s still time for an or-does-he?/to-be-continued-style ending! And not a single word uttered. Well, I never. What a non-stop thrill ride that wasn’t.
Ok, now we’re just being mean. But we don’t get it. Sure, as a portfolio piece for an ambitious animator this would really be something, but are we being asked to look at Weinstein as writer/director material — that is, someone with an ear for story and an eye for an arresting visual? Because if so, we ain’t buying — visually it’s Japanimation meets “Tron Legacy” meets “300,” all soaked in the trendy teal-and-orange palette that has this blogger so amusingly angry; and story-wise, well, there isn’t one.
Short films are, like scorpions, totally happening right now: we have “The Gift” director Carl Rinsch helming the “Logan’s Run” remake; Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison company is picking up the excellent “Pixels” with a view to featurising it somehow; and Gary Shore recently successfully pulled off the old Sam Raimi trick of shooting a trailer for his unmade film (“Cup of Tears”) only to have it snapped up by Universal and Working Title for development into a feature. In principle we are in favor of any route that can bring new talent to the attention of the big hitters, but David Weinstein’s effort is just such a goshdarned blatant calling card that we can’t get behind it. Even the “Cup of Tears” trailer hinted at some sort of story that wanted to be told, but “Azureus Rising” is nothing more than a bunch of cliches glossily animated. Yet, chillingly and rather immodestly, the film’s website suggests that the short is really to be viewed as a “proof of concept test” for a feature film trilogy. A trilogy.
Even so, this would probably all be ho-hum-who-cares? except for the fact that we, like everyone else, have only a limited amount of time in our lives to give to short films, and as long as this thing is getting the buzz there’s some heartfelt, interesting, innovative short that isn’t.
But wait! Actually we’ve just realised what would make 3 x 2 hours of this glossy nonsense bearable: if it was somehow shot in such a way that there was, say, an extra dimension. Like, a third one. Hollywood, are you listening?