Uproxx has showcased a new and exciting short by a new 22-year-old German director called Kaleb Lechowski. Later this month he is arriving in Los Angeles and this little feature is a hell of a calling card for him. The plot involves a mainly one piece scene where an alien has become trapped by a robot interrogator who needs vital information from him. While watching this please take note that Kaleb made this entirely himself, with CGI over a seven month period.
After watching this the obvious parallels between The Terminator franchise have to be mentioned, but the robots themselves look a lot more like the robotic creatures from The Matrix trilogy. They have an organic fluidity to them that makes them fascinating to look at and quite terrifying. The alien looks very much like an oceanic creature with its smooth lines and gill like curvatures (even though we know their home world looks mostly land based). The plot has a hint of Star Wars to it as well; it unfolds like Darth Vader’s interrogation of Princess Leia in A New Hope.
The solo setting works incredibly well in helping to put the focus on the two leads. Also the way these two characters manage to grip us and keep our attention without actually having a lot of facial features is amazing. While watching this I was enthralled throughout. It is easy to see how this piece was going to end however, with the mechanical creature’s references to how inferior organic life can be, becoming something even crueller than its creators could ever be because of its lack of emotions or empathy. The short looks stunning and the voice acting by Dave Masterton really needs to be commended as it shapes these characters and helps to give them life. Hopefully this will not be the last time we hear from Kaleb, as this piece in six minutes has created a sense of tension and amazement a lot of movies fail to achieve at all.
Grizzly Bomb 