Name: zonic - only a year of sorrow
Editor: sinsuuu

Technical

On the surface this movie seems like one which had a lot of effort poured into it. It features a variety of different editing techniques, transitions and effects at pretty much every point. The problem being that these don't help the movie most of the time. The overall style of editing is slick in terms of packaging the movie and in this area it cannot be denied that the editor appears to have some technical proficiency. It's how that proficiency is applied which determines the outcome of the viewing experience. In this case it doesn't produce a good movie from a technical standpoint. The kills are overedited, skipped forwards towards too fast in instances and at times played too fast during the actual kills themselves.

The use of effects is distracting and a little annoying with lens flares and flashes of light which when combined with the editing, which allows little time before kills are due to take place, means there are occasions where the movie can be disorientating for the viewer trying to concentrate on the kills. Showing third person views of the player's model is annoying in any movie regardless of the reason, it so rarely amounts to much more than wasting the viewer's time with a fairly boring sequence during which he is thinking 'come on, come on... get to the action already'. Meanwhile our editor is swinging the camera in from this angle and that and presumably imagining himself some kind of movie auteur of the Counter-Strike variety.

The decision to overlay photographs over some of the action takes away from the quality of the action and the viewing experience of it. Put simply it's distracting in that sense. The colouring of different scenes is not a good thing some of the time either as it makes it more difficult to see what is happening, as does the fast capture style of the action.

Visual

The kills in this movie are fairly unexciting, despite being by one of Denmark's best players for the past four years. There are too many eco sequences and bad eco sequences at that too: spraying into one spot, guarded by walls, onto enemies not even looking at the player and jumping in vain with their glocks is not my idea of entertainment. The eco round on train really lacks any excitement at any point as zonic sprays down a bunch of ts who are rushing off the ladder/raised area and by he gets to killing the last it is more than apparent he could stand still for the next 5 minutes and likely not be killed by the enemy from that distance and with that weaponry.

There is also the appearance of kills which at this point it's safe to say all of us have seen. I'm talking about the Asylum and Scandinavia POV demos which came out in around 2005 and have not only been featured in every other zonic movie but also compilation movies. Some of these kills are decent but having seen them all in other movies and displayed in a much more pleasing fashion means any enjoyment of these kills is largely gone by now.

Not that all the kills are old hat, some are even fairly recent, but aside from a small handful most aren't anything special or at least by the standards we have come to expect from movies. Perhaps the problem is also that the lower end of the frag scale in this movie combined with the editing and effects drags down the viewing experience of the better kills. Just as a really great movie can make average kills seem better so poor decisions in other areas of a movie can bring down otherwise good kills.

What is a little annoying is that so many short cuts were taken by including unworthy kills when not only are there a lot of zonic POVs on readmore but there are also hundreds of HLTV demos out there. If the story element of this movie was really worth telling them how much more impact it would have had with the best frags of zonic's career propping it up.

Audio

The soundtrack for this movie oscillates between atrocious and ok. The lighter elements of the track seem to work for the overall theme being portrayed in the story but the heavier elements are quite annoying and don't lend themselves to the war-like action aspects the moviemaker presumably thought they would enhance.

Overall

It's not even that this is a movie which is horrible to watch. It clocks in at just over 4 minutes and that makes it quite easy to watch once and with a simple level of novelty or curiosity is even an ok watch for the most part. The big problem to me seems to be the idea that every one of the bad aspects of the movie can be justified because it's "a concept movie". That really doesn't work because at the end of the day it's not a good movie overall. Even as a concept movie it is heavily flawed, it's as though the basic concept were there and despite being fairly obvious and uninteresting in itself were not given enough thought in terms of how it could be executed. The concept itself is not interesting enough to hold this movie up, in fact even as a concept it's pretentious in taking some Counter-Strike tournament footage and equating this with some kind of fictional war theme yet clearly linked with real modern day warfare. That's the problem with this movie: it has ideas but it can't express them well or in a manner which is enjoyable to experience.

If this is just a concept movie and we are not to judge the frags then what purpose do the frags serve exactly? They aren't a very good analogue for real warfare and certainly zonic's play in no way links to that of a father away from his family fighting for them and to get back to them. Even on the most basic level that idea falls flat, hell if you're looking for that style of player pick someone like contE or face who plays an extremely cautious CT game and tries to stay alive as long as possible to get into 1v1/1v2 type situations. To excuse everything which doesn't work in the movie on the grounds of it being a concept movie really does a disservice to conceptual art which is well executed and enjoyable to experience. Even within gaming movies these exist, for example 'the badge' quake series fits this bill well as something which has a lot of unorthodox ideas but executes them well and in a way which means the wierder elements actually enhance the action for the viewer.

Again this isn't a terrible movie it's just highly flawed and good for perhaps a single watch, so take it as you will as with such a short running time it's not likely it can offend much.

Thorin Rating: 3.5/10

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