Red Dead Redemption: Play the game, skip the movie

John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition and The Road, has slapped together a thirty minute short film based in the world of Red Dead Redemption.

The movie uses shots taken entirely from the in-game engine, and features several scenes from the game hashed together in a way the director thought made a modicum of sense. The movie is a conglomeration of several incidents and missions from the first third of the game. The scenes featured will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played RDR for more than a few hours. There are an innumerate amount of dramatic long shots of John Marston riding alone through the tumbleweeds and coyotes. We are briefly and haphazardly introduced to a few characters, John Marston shoots a few folks and the movie ends leaving us unsure of exactly what we’ve seen or why we’ve seen it.

There’s nothing new or notable as far as content or story progression goes. It’s clear that this movie is nothing more than a poorly hashed together marketing ploy. It was not made for fans of RDR who wanted more of John Marston’s story. The scenes used from the game are butchered and often times don’t even progress into one another in a logical manner, taking us from one locale to another haphazardly and without explanation. I’m forced to see this as not a serious movie, but as a gimmick, a long trailer for a game that’s already come out and has already been finished by many people.

Still, credit must be given for the attempt, and I’d love the opportunity to see more of this kind of stuff. Rockstar handicapped themselves setting this entirely within the game engine and not allowing for any new cut scene content to be shot for it. Instead of a new and interesting view of the vibrant and interesting world Rockstar created, we have a dull, disjointed rehashing of something we’ve already seen, or more accurately, already played.

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