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Review: Odyssey 1x04 - 'Vile Gods' |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
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 Star Trek: Odyssey is slowly moving into a strong series in its own right. The latest entry into the fan film series, titled ‘Vile Gods,’ sets a new bar in the quality of story told by writers Eric Weaver and PK Eiselt. ‘Vile Gods’ doesn’t come across as preachy as the previous episode of Odyssey, and it gets back to the truth of how dangerous a place the Andromeda Galaxy really is. As they say, keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
The Odyssey cast and crew have made great progress since their premiere just a few months ago. The graphics have only gotten better, as have the writing, acting, and cinematography. While it certainly isn’t near the caliber you would expect from a Hollywood studio, ‘Vile Gods’ stands out as well crafted in almost all respects.
That said, as a fan film, there will almost always be things that seem off. For one, fist fight scenes in almost every fan film are unconvincing, and Odyssey is no exception. Be it improper telegraphing of punches or poor actor training or unfortunate camera angles, scenes where two actors grapple universally fall short. That’s more than made up for with a greater variety of camera angles than we’ve seen in past episodes of Odyssey. New angles of the computer-generated sets have been crafted for this episodes and added to a growing catalog of set angles. Sickbay, though, is still rather awkward, it appears much larger than it would be in reality.
The actors themselves are growing into their characters, which themselves are showing signs of growth. Even Lieutenant Maya Stadi, played by Julia Morizawa, irritates me a little less. It was nice to see that she didn’t have a sarcastic and poorly-timed quip for every situation. The crew itself is finally starting to come together and accept the terms of their new Andromedean existence.
It’s was also nice to see that the uniforms worn by the actors are starting to fit better. They still need some work to match the tailoring level of screen-quality costumes, but they’re not half bad. Not half great, either, mind you. Unfortunately, the decent-quality prosthetics worn by Michelle Laurent (Subcommander T’Lorra) and Brandon McConnell’s (Lt. Commander Ro Nevin) seem to have been misplaced. Laurent’s Romulan cranial V-ridges almost appeared to be crumbling around the edges and McConnell’s Bajoran nose wrinkles looked like they were made out of silly putty and didn’t even match the color of his skin, let alone the sweaty sheen of incarceration. Lonnie Finley as quasi-villain Tybiss Mallim is decent, though his portrayal is uninspiring. There’s no depth, no motivation, to a character that should be replete with both.
Computer graphics, as always, are incredibly well done for an amateur production. Though there’s something that’s been bothering me about them and it took watching an older episode of Star Trek to pin it down: shaky cam. The CGI space battle scenes are filled with shaking from explosions and zooming in and panning around in ways that aren’t consistent with the Star Trek filming style or even that of Odyssey itself. If they could manage to set up advanced enough computer-controlled cameras or scene tracking systems to carry the more modern filming and cutting techniques into the live-action scenes, I wouldn’t mind so much, but for now it doesn’t fit.
The graphics do an excellent job of portraying the scale of the Archein battleships to the Odyssey and Kelvan ships, but there are two things that I have to wonder about: why in a galaxy far far away do they have chairs, cups, and bottles exactly like our own, and what’s up with the skull and crossbones?
Overall, ‘Vile Gods’ is a fine entry into a quality fan film series. After ‘The Lotus Eaters’ I was beginning to lose hope, ‘Vile Gods’ has certainly brought me firmly back into the fold. I await the next installment of Star Trek: Odyssey. ‘Vile Gods’ runs 32:42 and is available now for download from the Hidden Frontier website in high (385MB) and low (136MB) resolution formats.
Watch: Star Trek: Odyssey – ‘Vile Gods’
Discuss: TrekUnited Forum
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