Damien Valentine 00:44
Hello and welcome to another episode of A now for something completely in the cinema, Ricky is off climbing a mountain, and we look forward to seeing his progress there. Hopefully we'll hear from him soon, but this week, do I am joined by Tracy Harwood, hello and Phil rice, Hey, there. This week, we're gonna be discussing a film, and it's Phil's pick for the month. So you've chosen something quite intriguing, and I'd like to hear more about it.

Phil Rice 01:15
Yeah. So this is the film is called fragile harmony, and it's made by a YouTuber named Logan. And this one is unusual in one primary regard, and that is that it was actually sent to us asking for our feedback. And that's normal, not normally how films make their way into our picks. We do get asked for feedback sometimes, and we give it when we can. And but this one came in and, you know, he was specifically asking for that. And so I basically said, yeah, let me handle this. I'll take care of it, and then I wouldn't watch the movie. And I thought, oh, okay, I want to talk with you guys about this, because there's some interesting stuff going on. So, yeah, it's called fragile harmony. It's made with Gmod, or, I assume Gmod, Gary's mod, that's the same thing, right? I don't know what happened to Gary, if it's the name that we don't speak anymore, or something, but yeah, G mod. And this was entered into a contest of some sort that I'm not familiar with, but it's, it was called the 2024, crowbar productions, machinima mayhem, so some kind of a filmmaking contest. And I think all the entries were, were made with G mod, so, you know, probably something related to that community. And so the premise of the film, and we'll try to, we'll try our best to avoid spoilers, or if we're going to do spoilers, then we'll, we'll give you some heads up. But it's set in a contemporary setting, I would say, maybe slightly future, and everyone is equipped with a basically, it's, it's, it's, you know, Siri of whatever era this is some kind of a chip, or it's your iPhone is now implanted in you, in your head. So it's kind of classic Philip K Dick, kind of Black Mirror, type of sci fi. And it very much in the vein of either one of those story sources, black mirrors is the one I think of. Things don't go particularly well with that, and that's not immediately apparent until about 10 to 15 minutes into the film, when things take a bit of a turn and it for so, for the first 10 minutes or so of this, this film, it's just kind of setting up the world that they live in. And it's, it's just regular conversations and people going about their day and and there's some kind of artful ways, I feel like that he's showing how this device that everyone seems to have, one of these, is how it affects their lives, how it you know, how they get things done in in that world. And, yeah, then something goes very wrong, and people start behaving very strangely. And you kind of get the impression that it may have something to do with the effing chip in their head. You don't know, but and society basically falls apart, essentially, that's what's going on. So I just really enjoyed the way that it was presented. I. Uh, are there things with pacing that that could use some tweaking? Absolutely, this is not, uh, this is not a perfect film by any means, but it's very much a machinima film, and if you've followed this show, then hopefully that means something to you. Machinima not usually a an adjective that says, load as I'm making it there, but it This really feels like a machinima film. And I mean that as a compliment, as a, as a, you know, as a real specimen of this genre, one that I think Ricky would really like it, even if I don't know how he would feel about you know what the success level was of the execution, but the the conceit of this, the premise of this, the the attempt, I think Ricky would really respect it, because he likes short, short sci fi stories. And that's really what this is. This is a, this is a short, short story that you could easily find in, I don't know, a Ray Bradbury anthology, or a Philip K Dick is who really comes to mind, because a lot of his had to do with this. You know, near future role of technology type stuff. I just really enjoyed it. And it's, it's, it's got some warts, you know, in terms of production values, and there's, we could get into all kinds of stuff about, okay, is this or that sound mix or voice level, perfect? No, it's not, but I really enjoyed that this was a thoughtfully put together piece, like it's clear that this wasn't just thrown together. This was there was a lot of thought put into the telling of this story, and it's it made me realize and remember that there's just not it's not the norm for a machinima film To make you feel something. And I don't mean that as as, you know, this broad lambasting of the whole genre at all, but it's just, you know, machine is really good at certain things. Typically, you know, there's comedy, or, you know, if it's, if it's made in a modern engine, and then there could be a sense of awe, or there's action that's really but to actually make you think and ponder and reflect on yourself and on the world and on our relationship to these, these devices that you know we all use that maybe aren't quite like the ones that they use here, not yet, but it's clearly a society that doesn't seem all that foreign to us. It feels like a a not too distant cousin of how we're operating in the world, and then the for the most part, general helplessness that the people of the society in this movie portray when confronted with catastrophe feels eerily familiar, that that's how it would be. You know, that we wouldn't our society generally, wouldn't know what to do either we would, we would be deer in the headlights, frozen. Uh, just wonderfully, wonderfully made. I have no idea what the the age of the filmmaker is. I think it's probably safe to say to these younger than me, because most people are, but it's a very mature lens that the world has looked at through this, this film, and I just, I really enjoyed it. Was impressed with it, and I'm really curious to hear what you guys have to say.

Damien Valentine 09:16
I kind of came away with a very similar opinion of it as you did. Now, this film is very rough around the edges, and despite that, I really enjoyed it. It pulled me in. And there are moments where I had very strong emotional reactions to things like the scene with the door, which is all I'm going to say about it, because I don't want to give any spoilers away. And I think, you know, there's, there's no lip sync to any of the characters, and that brought back memories of early machinima, right? And, and, you know, the camera works very machinima style, and the way it's put together, very machinima. And like you, Phil, that's a compliment, because you don't see. Much of that anymore. With some of the films you look at, they have very static cameras, or they've mastered the camera controls in a very cinematic way, because they're using something like iClone or unreal, where you have that perfect camera control. And that's not an insult to these this filmmaker here is because he's using the G mod. He doesn't have that kind of camera control. You have to control it yourself with the mouse. And what he's done is he's used it to the best he's able to, and he's put together this story that is really fascinating, and it does make you think and stop and think about, you know, how people use it, the way that the film opens, which I will talk about this, because it's the it's the opening scene where the main character is walking down the street. He's got this holographic display in his in front of his face, and he's on a sort of phone call to someone. They're discussing their plans for the evening, or what they're going to do when they meet up again. And you see from the as the camera changes, that other people walking around the street exactly the same thing screen in front of them as they're walking along. And, you know, they get to the character that gets wants to cross the road, and they're saying, Don't cross the road. You know, a warning comes up this AI thing is telling them not to do it. They just do it anyway. Luckily, nothing happens to them. But you could imagine that people looking at their mobile phone and not looking where they're going because they're so busy talking to or reading whatever message they've had. I actually had an experience once where someone was busy on a on a phone. She got to the crossing to the road and took a step forward. I had to put my arm out because she hadn't seen the double decker bus that was coming. And I grabbed her and pulled it back, and she she was looked so stunned that someone grabbed her. And then I said, Look, there's a bus there. And she realized I just saved her from being hit by this thing, and so she thanked me, but she hadn't thought, because she was so busy talking on her phone. And of course, you see people like that all the time. And this is a good reflection of this video. This film kind of reflects that. And then, of course, it it does take a little while to get to how that goes wrong, but it draws you in. You're kind of curious. You get this feel that something's not quite right in those opening few minutes before it does go wrong. And you try and wonder, where's this going to go because something is obviously going to happen. And then it does and then it just makes you want to watch all the way to the end, because this is not a short film. It's half an hour, which is long. Yeah, it's 30 minutes. But I watched it all in one sitting, because some of these long form machines, it's hard to do that. I didn't feel like half an hour had passed when I got to the end. And, um, it. I stopped thought, I thought this is going to be very rough and because the way it opens, but this was such a great film, and I thoroughly enjoy it. And I will just see more films from Logan. You do need to work on your pacing a little bit. But other than that, I don't really know what to recommend, because I think you've got some real talent here for storytelling and for machinima so it'd be interesting to see what you can do next.

Phil Rice 13:30
Yeah, before you, before you dive in, Tracy, I want to pose a question to you, Damien, and maybe Tracy, you could answer it too, and then segue into your overall commentary, but it's a question I've been asking myself, if I had just encountered, you know, if this film had just turned up in by the algorithm in my feed, or whatever, and I didn't know anything about it and just sat down to to watch it. You remember when I, when I put it on our board for us to look at? I says, Hey, if you're not going to watch the whole thing, at least make it to, you know, 13 minutes in or so, I think is what I said, because that's when a major turning point happens. Right? If I hadn't told you that, or if we hadn't committed to watching this for the purposes of giving feedback, would you have made it that far? It's a question I'm asking myself. Maybe there's not a immediate answer, but like I really wrestle with would I have made it to minute 13 if I just started watching this at random? Didn't know anything about it. Honestly, my gut feeling is probably not and it has, it has something to do with that pacing, which, to Logan's credit, when he, when he submitted this to us with a with a letter, and he, he mentioned that as one of the things that that he already had identified as it's an area that needs some improvement. So that's, that's, that's part of the reason why I feel so comfortable. We'll just throwing that out there as as because I don't think he's going to be devastated by it at all. But, yeah, it's the pacing is really important at the beginning. In particular, how to correct that? We could probably talk for three hours coming up with ideas on that, but, but, yeah, there's, there's, there's something to be said for hooking someone a little bit earlier in things, so that when you get to deliver that punch at minute, 12 or so more people get that far and enjoy that, because it's quite a punch. And from that point forward, I had no trouble, like you said, Damien, I had no trouble staying with it to see where's this going to go. But up till then, there was a point, you know, maybe five, maybe seven minutes in, where I was kind of like, well, I said I'd watch it. So, you know, I don't, I'm not saying that to be mean at all, but just just being straight up, honest. So I think there is something to be said for that, and to hook them good and early. And mind you, there's plenty of shows that are on television right now or on streaming, on Netflix, Amazon, whatever, that have the same issue. My wife and I will sit down. Well, we don't know anything about this. Let's give it a try. And you know, 10 minutes in, it's like, are you at all interested? Do you care at all about what? No, I don't that. We move on to something else, right? So even the pros have trouble nailing that. There was Go ahead, well,

Damien Valentine 16:36
to talking about the pros. First, the the new Daredevil Revival Show is currently on Disney plus right, right during the writers and actors strike, they looked at what they had already made and they scrapped it. Well, they kept some of it, but they basically overhauled the show. Because the first four episodes, he does not put on the superhero suit or do any kind of superhero stuff at all. It's entirely courtroom drama. Now, there's nothing wrong with courtroom dramas, but if you're watching Daredevil, you want to see Daredevil doing Daredevil stuff, which is obviously half of his life, is the lost the courtroom stuff. So you need that, but you also need the superhero stuff. So if you're gonna have four hour long episodes before he does that, no one's going to keep watching it at that point. So one of the things they did was they put a lot more action in the first episode. They scrapped a lot of stuff in between and tightened it up, which I think worked in a huge favor for the show, because I've been really enjoying it so but as far as this film goes, I would probably start looking at the comments which are very favorable before I gave up on it. After like, if nothing really happened, after five minutes, I'd start, I'd look down see, is this worth sticking with? And it probably also depend on the frame of mind I had as I was watching it, and because that kind of stuff. So I don't know if I would have stuck with it or not. Yeah, I

Phil Rice 18:04
know it's hard to answer for sure, because, yeah, it's hard to imagine us encountering this movie any other anyway, other than how we did right? Which was, was, it was kind of presented to us with a request so, but it just, it really made me think that that, but just let me enforce the comments about the pacing. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 18:23
but if I had looked down at these comments so they're all favorable, I thought, Okay, I will stick with it a bit longer and see what happens. But it can be tricky. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 18:34
I wouldn't have stuck with it. I'd be perfectly honest with you. I'd have got five minutes in, and that would have been me, and I would have moved on. And I would have moved on because I wouldn't have been able to determine what is actually going on in this quickly enough, and I wouldn't have been able to pick up from the comments either exactly what was going on or even the description. And the title doesn't give it away either. With you having picked this, I was determined I was going to watch the whole thing, even though you'd said, if you only want to watch, you know, to the 13 minute marker. By 13 minutes, I was well and truly fed up with it. I have to say, however, at that point that you should have said, start at 13 minutes, and then you'll, you know, because the rest of it was really good. I've got some other comments, so I'll go through my comments, and then, you know, let's see where we go with this. Because right on reflection, I want to revise what I've just sort of said, Okay, so first off, I had a look at because, like you I hadn't heard of this crowbar productions, machinima mayhem contest thing, so I looked it up. And it's a, you know, crowbar productions, which is a. Discord channel that's run by somebody called Xander and a few others had put on this machinima Contest, which they'd called the apocalyptic summer, which was run last year on Discord and with a bunch of rules and regulations which obviously none of us would have seen because none of us are particularly involved with either Garry's Mod or this particular discord channel. Anyway, the theme of this was that all the films must adhere to the designated theme of zombie apocalypse or wasteland apocalypse.

Phil Rice 20:36
Oh, I had no idea. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 20:38
the films must be created in Garry's Mod, Source Filmmaker or blender, and the films must be at least eight minutes long and a maximum of 55 minutes long, which is a lot longer than most machinima that that we really review. I mean, most of the Machinima that we look at, it's rare to get to a six minute long machinima, isn't it, so it's already quite a bit different in the brief, I would say, than most stories. And I would say to me, when I when I read that, I think, oh, yeah, okay, that explains why that introduction was just so long and tedious. Because how else are you going to fill 30 minutes or 50 minutes, or whatever it is you're trying to do, unless you drag it out of it? And then it said, all submissions must be original works, and there can be no more than five people on a production team, all of which, obviously this complies with this was the winner of the contest, and I believe that it included a film festival, which took place over a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, as they were shown nightly, daily or whatever, or episodically, in September and October last year. So it ran, you know, I think the call for it ran during the summer, and then it got extended, and then it ran over over a period of time. So, you know, there's clearly quite a community thing on this discord channel, several 100 folks in there, and clearly quite a few films submitted to it. I didn't actually get around to watching any of the other submissions, I'll have to say. Now, then, you know, sort of having looked at that, I think, right. Okay, let's go back to the description then, because I, you know, with with sort of sitting watching it, you can't just sit and watch it. It's tedious in that first 10 minutes, but the description worked quite hard for you. I think I definitely, you know, you definitely needed to read that description, because without it, that first 10 minutes is slow to the point when you do actually switch off. Plus in that first 10 minutes, there are such a lot of characters, and you don't really understand what the differences are between them. And it doesn't really matter what the differences are between them, although it does a little bit later on, but because there's so many characters, and because you don't know what they're doing, and because there's all these different voices going on, all at different levels, and what have you, the clarity of what's going on just is a little bit lost in that first few minutes. I think it just needed to work a little bit harder to help you understand that preliminary context, a little bit more, because it really sets that film up. It's quite a significant 10 minute start. Could it have been shorter, maybe. But what it does actually is really important to the story. What it does so well is help you understand the monotony of the environment these characters are living in. And that's kind of a critical point. The description says, in a society that prides itself on subduing tensions between humans and machines. Well, okay, so the humans and machines are actually the characters they look you know, the machines look like the humans. You cannot differentiate between those characters, who is machine and who is who is human, unless you sort of unravel what, what's said. But you, you don't really do that well enough. Um, however, what's portrayed there is that kind of subjugation of these characters, you know, these humans, if you like, that's portrayed really well. In fact, you know to the point when you really don't know what's Android, what's human, that you know they're all. Acting in this kind of machine like way they look the same. The jobs they do is the same. They, you know, they everything about them is the same. The voice acting is the same. What they're talking about is, well, it's monotonous and bland. It's everything that it's supposed to be given what it's portraying. And it just does that really well, to the point when the characters are even named things like Derek and Ivan, which I think is really quite inspired, because they're just dad names, aren't they? They're just, they're just kind of bland, and apologies if your name is Derek or Ivan. And I actually know people that are called Derek and Ivan as well, but you'll get the point when you see this. But that complexity, I think, is part of one of the challenges, and ultimately it's revealed that that you know the names of these characters and the and who all these characters are doesn't really matter at all. So establishing their names and what they do and how they live, I think, is probably the things, one of the things that could have been cut a little bit to make it a little bit sharper in that first 10 minutes, I found the acting really wooden to say the least. The lack of lip sync effort, I have to say, was distracting too, because I haven't seen stuff like this for years.

Damien Valentine 26:30
Yeah, long time. I'm not sure if G mod actually has any kind of lip

Tracy Harwood 26:35
sync No, no, but you see others make an effort, don't they? To sort of, you know, do something with it in blender or whatever. But there was no, none of that in this. It was just what it was. I don't think we've seen anything like, like that sort of style of machinima for such a long time. It kind of dated it for me, before it even got going. And some of the, you know, the animation quality of the stuff that we've been looking at is astonishing in the last few months, certainly that we've been looking at around the 10 minute marker, though, things started to get very much more interesting. And I think primarily that was achieved through sound design. It's only really at that point I started to take a lot more notice of what was going on. The standout, I think, was the ambient sound, which was really good. It was really immersive and interesting, and not at all what I was expecting, given that these voices were, you know, quiet, monotonous, almost whispering, discussing boring stuff like football or NFL, or whatever it was. It was, you know, it was just lad talk, really, just, you know, just sort of went over my head a little bit. But when the action started, what I didn't fully understand, I guess, given that I'd lost attention a little bit in that first part was whether the zombies that emerged were purely androids attacking humans, or whether they there was something else kind of going on. So I lost the sense a little bit because that first bit was just too long, yeah, which I think was a bit of a pity, because I think it had been bit sharper. I perhaps would have been on the on it a little bit closer, and would have followed exactly what, who was, who was doing what, but because they all look the same, and because that was the intention of it, maybe that's what the confusion was. You know, maybe there was that was part of what was being written into it. But this is where the description came in again, because that was quite helpful. It said a violent and relentless virus suddenly spreads among the Android population, creating deadly Android zombies, and then amidst the chaos, a human worker and his Android co worker must find a way to survive and preserve their fragile harmony. And that's when you started to see blue blood versus some other substance emerging from those that got attacked. So you kind of got a sense of some difference there. Well, what I loved about it was the way the confusion was created in the story from that, from about that kind of midpoint, especially from such a mundane environment, you know, you said, Phil, it's a bit of a slow burn. It definitely is a bit of a slow burn, but it achieved a sense of suspense and thrill, if not terror, at times. And the final punch line, I have to say, maybe a bit predictable, but actually I thought was really well done. So for me, the tempo from about 10 minutes on to the end was really good, the sense of chaos, the frenzy, really well done. I think what I enjoyed most was the same. On design, I think the deliberately tedious voices, the white noise, the voice acting, some very subdued music in the background, which periodically kind of comes to the fore, the breathing noises, with a bit of groaning and grunting, you know, then, but then there was nothing else, you know, there was no foot falls, no blood spatter sounds or or movement, which I thought that that silence for some key action points was disturbing somehow, that actually, I think, was really quite inspired and actually quite hard to pull off in the way that it has been in this, in this film, I, you know, I think it's, it's probably not quite there in the first half, but definitely well done in the letter in the latter part. Later on, there are some footsteps, you know, which are clearly there for added terror, which I think it it does, well, I don't know whether that's meant to play on your mind, but I think it definitely achieves that kind of sense. And then I think what comes across quite nicely, it was, you know, after that sort of final punch line, this, this, this end song, this final song is, is kind of merry and uplifting. I'm not really sure whether it's the the man or the woman that survives and wins out over this Android zombie apocalypse, but I guess it didn't really matter. Um, I have only one main question, though, I thought androids were robots shaped like humans, and if that's the case, aren't they already the undead, having crossed this kind of Uncanny Valley. So this story isn't really about fleshy zombies, I think, but but about other things that freak us out, where the term zombie is just a metaphor for AIs and machines taking our jobs and then destroying us, which is quite a common trope. Well, it's not a trope, it's the thing that's reported in the media. And with that in mind, surely the most horrifying part of this story isn't that the robots attack the humans, but that the robots have taken human jobs and that are basically indistinguishable from humans. And it kind of led me to thinking, actually, you know, in sort of a maybe a bit of a conclusion to my sort of evaluation of it, it's definitely a film of two halves, but depending on the perspective you have of what's the most horrific, then I guess you could pick which half is your favorite in relation to the other half. It's kind of made me think that the whole film, including that first 10 minutes, is actually a bit of a gem. It's a really clever story, because it's presenting some really interesting ideas in quite a novel and cute way. I'd say I think he's done an excellent job with it, even if I do think in places it could have been a bit sharper overall, yeah, I mean, overall, I think he's done a pretty good job with it. I think it's great that he's, you know, he sent it into us to sort of have a chat about I think by the time I got to the end of it, it sort of set me off on a path of thinking about it in a in a way that I hadn't expected to think about it. By the time I got to 10 minutes in, it was a it was really enjoyable from that point of view. And and, yeah, thanks for highlighting it and sending it in, Logan, great.

Damien Valentine 33:51
Yeah. I think we were all quite surprised by how actually enjoyed this film. One piece of advice I'm going to give to Logan for this particular film, as you've got the thumbnail picture of main character's face looking scared, that's good. But another way to draw people in might be to do something more with the thumbnail, like put, maybe put the award you won for it, like the winner of the contest on the actual thumbnail, because that makes people think this one something I want to know why, and so they will stick with it to that early. That's

Phil Rice 34:28
that's a great idea. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 34:32
yeah. So do something like that. You keep the actual picture, just adds a little bit of text or something to make, to draw people in. It might be worth something to consider. But yeah, Logan, I think you got some talent there, and it'd be interesting to see what else you can do next. So when you've made your next film, please send it in to us to have a look at, because I think we'd all like to see what you do next.

Tracy Harwood 34:57
Would you recommend he re edited that first? Section or leave it as it is. Leave it, I'd leave it as well.

Damien Valentine 35:09
It's an essential, even though it is a little bit too long, it's an essential part of the story.

Phil Rice 35:15
It's weird because you don't realize that it is until you've got to the end. Gotten further along into the movie, right when you're when you're experiencing it for the first time, there's this sense of, come on, you know? But when, when you reach that certain point in the movie, it's like, it recontextualizes what, what you saw in a totally different way. And it's like, Oh man, it's, it's, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know how to tell how to you certainly can't shorten it down too much. It's, it's, it's that. It's the establishment of that pattern of inaneness that then gets broken and disrupted. So you the break wouldn't. It would lose its impact if the basis wasn't there. Yeah. It's really, really strange that that is true, but it is, yeah, yeah. For me, the thing that I wish that the film had, more than anything, I mean, there's soundscape wise, yeah, there's, there's, there's some consistency issues there, and I'm not sure Tracy, Tracy, you mentioned some of them and thought maybe they were deliberate choices. Maybe they were, and if so, that would, that would change my, my opinion on that. But the lip sync is really missing, like I missed it. That's what I mean to say. Yeah, me too. I really missed it. Because I think the, I think the body performances of the characters were appropriate for for the story, like very much, even though they were kind of stiff and a little bit robotic. But that, that that worked. That works, you know. But, yeah, it's, it's tough with a to in 2025 to look at a face and hear the talking and not see the lips moving. So challenges of it aside, it's, it takes some, it takes a willingness, on the viewers part, to just suspend the want for that in order to really enjoy the movie. And there's plenty of people who will do that, who will just suspend that, will go, Okay, I could live without it. But there's many who won't, who just who feel too disconnected from things to to let the story grip them. And this, this is a story that, this is the kind of story that deserves a chance to really grip the viewer. You know? Yeah, so anything that that's in the way that, and I'm not suggesting go back and retool this, but I'm saying when you're looking for for future stuff, there's probably a tool set, whether it's source, filmmaker, or something like I clone or or even blender, where you can tell these, this, this quality of story even more effectively.

Tracy Harwood 38:11
It must have mod as well, isn't it?

Phil Rice 38:14
I would have thought, yeah, yeah. I mean, clearly the engine is capable of it. And all those characters, the character models are capable of it. It's just that Gmod doesn't have controls for that, you know. So it doesn't it. It makes it hard.

Damien Valentine 38:33
Well, I would suggest this thing I did with one of my early projects is I had a story. I made the film. I was very proud of the story, but I knew it was very flawed because I didn't know I was still learning a lot about filmmaking and so on. So what I did is, many years later, when I'd expanded my knowledge, I remade that film. And this is not like Hollywood, where they remake films that a classic film will be remade, and the remake is terrible. This is my own film. I really like the story. I can tell it better than I did before, sure. So some advice I'd give to Logan is, in a few years time, when you've made some more films, you can come back and retell this story, and that would be a really interesting thing to see. Absolutely

Phil Rice 39:24
you could, you could come back and retell it, and you could, you could apply every, every level of improvement that you have gone through as a filmmaker, from the writing all the way down the road. You apply that to it and and yet, the the the heart of the story, is still there. And, yeah, you could make it into something, and it would be like a new movie, like a new film, but it's, it's, it's still honoring your, your original idea, which I think the original idea is really solid, good idea. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 39:57
yeah, yeah. It's not, this isn't on. Impressive, though, because it is, I, yeah, I mean, I like, I said, I thought I would watch this. I will. I will be watching this again, when, when I've recovered from the ending of it and my evaluation of it. Because, you know, I suddenly thought, hang on a

Damien Valentine 40:19
minute. I be sharing this with some of my friends who like zombie movies. And I say, like I noticed this little bit stoked to start with, but stick with it, because you're really going to enjoy this. The

Tracy Harwood 40:32
bus is the brilliant bit. Oh yeah, that that burning bus just whoosh going up. That just changes the pace completely. And there's nothing else that moves as quickly as that in the in the whole film. But I really like that touch, brilliant. It's the pace is deliberate. I think it's really good. Yeah. And

Phil Rice 40:53
yeah, the the creepiness factor that yeah, Tracy, which I didn't really ever mention that, but, yeah, palpable. It's really palpable that what it made me think of was there's an Oscar Isaac movie, I don't know it's probably 10 years ago now, at least, called Ex Machina, or Ex Machina, and he is This Zuckerberg slash Musk type. I've seen the film, yeah, entrepreneur, yeah, yeah. And there's a moment where the Android, if you will, the AI, we can call it, whatever, but this non human thing that looks like a person first gets its freedom and then starts behaving and, and it's like, all of a sudden you realize, oh, this thing has no sense of what we would call morality at all, none. It just just, it'll just murder, and it doesn't even, it's not even murder to the thing you know. And it's just a horrifying moment when you realize that. And of course, you're realizing it with him, as as his his creation has has turned on him. But it's not vengeful, it's you're nothing to this thing, you know. And so it's a really, really creepy moment in that movie, and and very graphic as well. And it kind of, it's similar feeling that I got in moments with with this one, where just when you get this sense of, you know, what you're up against here, and that it's, it doesn't care, you know, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 42:44
you hit an uncanny valley with it, right, right? Which is the, I think that's the point in the first 10 minutes, yeah, I did too. Which is, it's very clever. I, you know, I'm, I'm thinking, would I remake this? No, I don't think I would. I would just, I, you know, warts and all, I think is good. I'm impressed with this. I loved

Phil Rice 43:04
your comparison, by the way, of the basically characterizing the Android as essentially the living dead. That's brilliant. I've never heard that those ideas juxtaposed that way, but it totally, totally, totally works. Oh

Tracy Harwood 43:19
yeah, there's articles about that as well. That's wild. That's kind of a well known trope and Damien, that story that you told about pulling that woman out of the an oncoming bus and what have you. That's a classic zombie syndrome thing where people are just zoned into whatever it is they've got going on on their machines and what have you. And they're, they're nothing but zombies. So they might as well be dead to the rest of the world, because, right, they're, they're just there in body. They're not there in any, any physical capacity other than just in a meat space, really. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 43:56
this was in the when that happened. It was the early days of smartphones, where not many people had them yet. So

Tracy Harwood 44:03
done it myself. I have to say, stupidly,

Phil Rice 44:07
yeah, I see people driving now regularly driving their vehicle, not just at stoplights. That's bad enough, but while they're driving, one hand on the wheel and one hand it is. It's totally illegal, but it's just all over the place, yeah? Like how, how the roads are not just filled. I have no idea. It's just crazy. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 44:33
Anyway, great pick. I really

Phil Rice 44:35
enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks for submitting it, Logan. We look forward

Tracy Harwood 44:39
to the next one.

Damien Valentine 44:40
Yeah, thank you Logan for sending us this, because I think we all really enjoyed it, and we look forward to seeing what you do next. So yeah, thank you for sending it. So that's going to wrap up this week's episode. Thank you for my co host, Tracy Harwood and Phil rice. If you've got any feedback about. This film, or us, or anything else about the show, please send us an email at talk at completely machinima.com and you can see our website and blog at completely machinery.com and from me, that's it. See you next week.

Phil Rice 45:13
Bye, bye. You.