Penny Thoughts ‘14—Human Revolution: Deus Ex (2014) **½

NR, 12 min.

Director/Writer: Moe Charif

Starring: Moe Charif, Liannet Borrego, Shayna Nicole E’Orio, Antoni Corone

I’m not a video gamer. I’ve never liked playing video games, and despite how much time I spend watching movies, it seems to me that video games devour a great deal of time from their users that could be better spent. Can you tell that my children eat them up?

Anyway, there has been a great movement of late in the arena of fan made filmmaking. Modern technology has made it increasingly easy to produce home made films that reflect big budget filmmaking qualities. As such, video games have become frequent fodder for fan made films. “Human Revolution-Deus Ex” is a surprisingly high quality movie made by a fan of the “Deus Ex” video game series.

The problem with fan made films, however, is that there seems little purpose to them if it isn’t to draw more people into the worlds that obsess the fans who make them, and yet the fans who make them rarely make an effort to make those worlds accessible to those who are as yet unfamiliar with them. This is the great failing of this short film. I’m sure it wonderfully captures the spirit of the “Deus Ex” video games, but it does nothing to explain what the hell is going on.

There are some impressive production values here. The special effects are seamless and suggest that Moe Charif could use this video as a launching pad for a full-blown film career. He needs to learn a little bit about story telling, however. Working from someone else’s script, he’d probably do just fine, but there’s a difference between being purposely mysterious and just being oblique. I couldn’t begin to tell you what is going on in this film. It’s even more important in short film to efficiently communicate information to the audience, this film just communicates the atmosphere and the action of the Deus Ex world.

Watch the film in its entirety below.