Dead Space: Downfall

Dead Space: Downfall is the direct-to-DVD animated movie that tells the story of what happened aboard the USG Ishimura prior to the player’s arrival in the Dead Space video game.

The story revolves primarily around Alissa Vincent, security chief of the interplanetary mining vessel USG Ishimura, her team of security officers and their struggle to not only survive, but to save as many of the crew as they can can after terrifying alien creatures are released aboard the Ishimura shortly after a myserious alien artifact is excavated from the planet’s surface and brought aboard.

Despite Film Roman being the lead animation producer, any animation fan will instantly recognize the character design and animation style as being from a Korean animation studio, and indeed,  it is: JM Animation.  If you’re familiar with productions like “The Batman” TV series, the animated Hellboy movies, “Men in Black”, “Jackie Chan Adventures” and so on, you’ll be familiar with JM’s work.

There’s a mix of CG and traditional animation, with CG animation used primarily for vehicular animation and some set piece rendering.  While the CG animation wasn’t anything spectacular, it did the job and didn’t look or feel particularly out of place as it can sometimes when combining traditional and CG animation.

The character animation, however, was noticeably uneven, ranging from fair to good from scene to scene.  To be honest, I’ve seen better, consistent animation on “The Batman” animated series on TV— incidentally also Korean-animated.

They took a “no holds barred” approach with the violence and Downfall is very graphic, with plenty of dismemberment, disembowling and blood spilling to be had.

Story

This is where Downfall comes up a little short, but the film’s makers can’t really be faulted for that because of Downfall’s role as a prelude story.

It does the job of illustrating (and quite graphically too) what happened to the crew of the Ishimura and the colonists of Aegis 7 prior to the player’s arrival in the game.  But ultimately, its hands tied when it comes to revealing more interesting details and story elements since ideally, those are elements that you want revealed to the player during gameplay, not spoiled ahead of time by the movie.

As a result, Downfall doesn’t have a whole lot of depth when it comes to the story, or emotional depth when it comes to its characters and tends to come off as more of a gore-and-carnage showcase really.

Conclusion

Dead Space: Downfall Random Screen Shots

Dead Space game fans are going to get a lot more out of this movie than your regular movie watcher or even animation fans as the gamers will get the backstory which fleshes out the situation they’re facing onboard the Ishimura as they play the game.

As a movie,  Downfall is only fair at best.  It concentrates more on serving up lots of gore and carnage rather than suspenseful horror and compelling characters.

• 2 out of 5

Rent it if you can, but not worth library space unless you’re a completionist Dead Space fan that has some room next to the Collector’s Edition of the game.

One of the things I love about Halo 3 is the playback feature.  It allows you to relive your greatest (and no so greatest) moments and it can capture amazing fluke events like this inadvertent vehicle kill where the victim is partially responsible for his own demise:

It’s videos like this that make me want to take up Halo 3 again… and I would in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the fact that Xbox Live is just brimming with assholes that really detract from the gaming experience.