Animation Spotlight: Dead Space: Downfall

UPDATE: Disregard the next paragraph. Changed the “Anime Spotlight” category to “Animation Spotlight”… hooray.

Okay, firstly, I know very well that this is NOT an anime, but I’m being extremely lazy and I don’t want to make a new category just for this… in any case, no matter what country of origin it is, the Koreans always get involved anyway, plus this is a lot more violent than most other US origin animated features… so, whatever…

To sum it all up, this is a terrible movie that no one other than die-hard fans of Dead Space should watch out of curiosity but are better off not watching in the first place and should just pretend like it was never made… like I’m sure a lot of people over at Visceral Games have been doing for quite some time now… And that about sums it up, thank you for reading, good night…

What? You want to read more about Dead Space: Downfall? Well okay… I’ll see what I can do to ease your apparent boredom… *ahem* … Now, I did write up a Game Spotlight for the first Dead Space and gave it much deserving praise and also praised EA for backing such a game. I also mentioned how EA seemed to be pushing their new franchise on many different media platforms…

First were the animated comics, then Downfall, and then finally Dead Space: Extraction. All three of these “extended media” releases were prequels to the original game and were designed to fill in the gaps and explore the events that led to Isaac Clarke’s tale of survival and dive into insanity…. The comics were an interesting take and are readily available on Xbox Live, PSN, various places on the interweb and also as a bonus extra on Extraction. Dead Space: Extraction itself is very well done in terms of story and ties in very well with the first game, giving it a very ominous ending and a hint at what’s to come in Dead Space 2… the rest of the game was “meh” at best, but at least it served its purpose… though you can read about all of that in detail in the Game Spotlight I wrote for Dead Space: Extraction…

Dead Space: Downfall is the weakest link in this chain of prequels, and as I said from the very beginning… I’m sure a lot of folks over at Visceral Games are wishing it had never been made…

It’s been awhile since I last watched Downfall, so I’m actually watching it now (the Blu-ray version) as I’m writing this up… in terms of animation quality, it’s pretty much standard when it comes to US origin “serious business” animations of this kind. Characters with square jaws, constant serious looks on their faces and… not nearly as much tits and ass to keep the average male demographic interested for more than 10 seconds. Seriously, if they had at least shown some muff or nipple before everyone started having their blood sprayed across the bulkheads this would have been a much better animation… and that really is how bad this is…

I will say this though, the external shots in Space were actually pretty nice, at least some of the shots were and the detail in the background was pretty nice… I’m grasping at straws here… Anyway, the voice acting, now here’s a funny part of this entire production. The voice acting is actually… pretty good in places, I’m not kidding… and it’s in all of the places where there’s just normal talking too. As soon as any emotion is required, then the quality drops like a cement shoe Mafia enforcer about to sleep with the fishes.

When the shit goes down and the blood splatters, and it does get pretty horrific at times, entertainingly so… the voice acting… well, the best way to describe it is that while the image shows you the horror, the voice acting amounts to “Oh, no… I spilt wine on my best suit”… Looking through IMDb, it looks as if a lot of the voice actors are veterans in their field and have quite a bit of experience… because of this, I feel that 90% of the bad voice acting is due to bad direction rather than the talents of the voice actors themselves.

Anyway, here’s another trailer to watch since I included one for the Dead Space and Extraction entries as well…

For fans of the series, Downfall does have some points of interest… as obscure as they may be… though if you’re ever bored enough, sure, go ahead and watch… otherwise you’d be better off just reading about it in Dead Space Wikia… Maybe I’m being too harsh, it is still can be an entertaining movie if you just don’t expect too much out of it.