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July 29, 2010

Movie Review: Dead Space: Aftermath (Blu-ray)


Anchor Bay takes us back to space in this animated sequel to the Dead Space franchise.

Film: 2/5
Bridging the events between the critically claimed/fan hailed video games, Dead Space & Dead Space 2, this animated flick picks up right after the destruction of Aegis VII. Aegis was the colony space engineer and protagonist Issac Clarke destroyed to wipe out the demonic necromorph's spawned from an ancient artifact known as the Marker. A ship, USG O'Bannon, is sent out to find out what went wrong. Contact is lost with O'Bannon leading Marine battleship Braxus to seek out any survivors. Upon arrival, this ship is heavily damaged and crew has been mutilated. Four surviving crew members remain on the O'Bannon. They are incarcerated by the Marines and taken to the Sprawl for interrogation.




All four members are forced to explain what happened to the O'Bannon ship, in different perspectives. The crew explains they were on Aegis VII to find remaining pieces of the Marker before the colony was annihilated. They find a shard of the marker but it has a negative effect on the crew. It's brought back on board just before Aegis explodes, damaging the ship and killing most of the personnel in process. With the Marker in tow, it mutates the dead crew into blood thirsty Necromorphs.

Me being a Dead Space buff, I was excited to check this out. Dead Space: Aftermath just didn't satisfy my space horror craving. The story fits in nicely into the lore of everything. It's bloody when it needs to be, although no solid scares are to be found. The sore thumb of the whole flick is the strikingly terrible animation. There are about 4 or 5 different types of art style, one for each crew members flashback of the O'Bannon and some seriously shitty CGI animation for the rest. It completely ruins what atmosphere the flick had going for it. It's like having rainbows in a horror film, shit don't fly. If they had used the traditional anime style used for the previous Dead Space animation I would have enjoyed it a lot more. The voice acting is ok, nothing special. One character decides to say "Fuck" multiple times in every sentence and it sounds forced and unnecessary. If you're a Dead Space fan definitely give it a watch, others mileage will extremely vary.

Blu-ray: 2/5

* 1080p High Definition 2.40:1 Transfer
This Blu doesn't look very good at all to be honest. Save for some few scenes, HD just showcases how bad the animation really is. The CGI has this shading that is ugly and distracting. It's a serviceable transfer, but not something to awe at.

* Dolby True HD 5.1
Audio is just fine, didn't have any problems with it.

Bonus Features: 0/0
Bare bones disc save for a few trailers.



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