ESCAPE FROM CITY 17

Some days, I swear I'm taking crazy pills.

There are a lot of people this week who are agog, a-blog and a -twitter about this:

This is a little guerilla-style filmlet directed by the Purchase brothers, a pair of commercial directors, based on a great Valve software game called Half-Life (or, more specifically, Half-Life 2). It has some lovely CGI and not much else to recommend it, but it's a fun few minutes of a Half-Life movie, which is cool, because there isn't actually a Half-Life movie and I and a lot of other people would really like to see one, thanks. But it basically boils down to five minutes of two not-particularly-convincing actors running around in a trainyard shooting the same five guys with plastic guns.

However, for reasons I can't fathom, a lot of people are going apeshit for the thing; King Kong apeshit, in fact. And not just the usual gaggle of pudding-lobed troglodytes who dwell, and possibly procreate, amongst YouTube's comment boards. Film industry professionals like John Rogers and Bill Cunningham talk about this thing like it's the fer chrissakes wheel. Like it's fire.

Now, they're no doubt spun up, at least in part, by Warren Ellis calling it a "game changer". Except, as we all know, Ellis is paid twelve cents every time he uses the phrase "game changer" to describe any given blip on the internet fadar; he gets fourteen cents every time he uses "paradigm shift". The pictures of people with metal things in their genitals he gives away for free.

I can only assume that none of these fine people have ever watched a fan film before. I guess they missed out when Sandy Collora (another commercial director) made Batman: Dead End in 2003:

Or are blissfully unaware that James Cawley has been producing seasons of new episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series with members of the original cast and writing staff for half a decade now:

They certainly haven't heard of Shane Felux, who marshalled VFX artists from around the world to create his nigh-on feature-length Star Wars fan film Revelations. Or of Pink Five. Or even Troops, arguably the birthplace of the whole fan film movement, produced a dozen fucking years ago.

Now, I'm not saying any of these are the wheel, either. Or fire for that matter. At their best they only start to approach real professional-grade production values. They are what they are: the creative expression of fannish enthusiasm taken to an almost absurd degree, and there's no bad there. But what they aren't, is "game changing", and neither is Escape From City 17. In fact, it's not even the most interesting piece on the board. Even compared to the thin slice selection of films I've mentioned above, it barely rates a B.

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