My thoughts on the Ultramarine movie ***spoilers***

[Vikki Stardust]

After a lot of bitching I finally decided to sit down and watch this holy grail of the hobby. Here are my thoughts on it. I should warn you that I will not be avoiding any spoilers so if you haven't seen it yet and want it to be a special ride, don't read beyond the dotted line.

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The movie opens with a battle scene seen through the eyes of a yellow space marine who keeps muttering "I must protect the relic" while silly motivational text (PURGE THE UNCLEAN) fills the bottom of his visor. Three skulls are in the top corner, does that mean he has three mans and can die three times before the movie is over? If this is what a space marine sees inside his helmet.. s**t. We are so in for a treat now!

We move to a brown fog where old and wise man gives us the infamous "It is the forty first millennium" speech while the main cast credits roll. Pretty big names for a movie about toy soldiers.

Quick cut to a glass stained window while a choir sings about how awesome blue space marines are. We hear a sword fight going on and see uhm, two blue guys fighting. They all look so much alike! The blue one with all the bling is the captain and the other guy is just blue. All the while one of the blue men is giving a speech about how dangeresque chaos is. Oh noes, could this be foreshadowing?!?!?!? Oh yes, one of the blue men isn't blue at all, he's white with a bit of blue and he has a nasty machine that can heal people while chuckling and making bad jokes. More on that later! Anyway the captain and a regular blue man whose name is Proteus are having a honour duel of sorts while the other blue men surround them and scowl as they fight. The fight ends with the captain seemingly disarmed and at the mercy of the blue man, only for the captain to play dirty and declare victory. So much for courage and honour!!

Straight away something stands out glaringly: THEY ALL TALK LIKE MASSIVE HAMS. You could turn it into a drinking game where whenever a character says something so cheesy and hammy you take a shot but I think that by the end of the second act all players would be dead.

Okay, fight over, they all gather round a relic weapon where they are told that they are all having the honour of going into battle as real space marines! They make a pledge on the hammer and the camera dramatically shoots out through the stained glass window showing that they were on a space ship all along!

Now we're in the armoury where the mighty blue men check their weapons, etch original slogans into ammo (kill the heretic, really guys?) and have servitors attend to them by making vows and looking tiny next to them. I will say that while the servitors have stupid voices that should've sounded more robotic they do look and feel the part of mindwiped zombies. The blue men engage in pre-battle banter about having a boner for action and wanting to plunge into it fully, especially Proteus has a big hard-on for glory. On cue the white marine, Pyhtol, steps in to lecture them, because he's very old and thus has the right to lecture the kids. Proteus calls Pythol a coward to which Pythol gives them his best ***** grin and chuckles at their innocence. Sirens interrupt the catfight and they all gear up even more!

We cut to the hangar bay where a servitor prays to a machine and the Thunderhawk is prepped for launch. The bird launches and we're on our big adventure with the blue men! Yay!

While enroute the squad is briefed. They are going to the planet Mithorn where there is nothing except for an Imperial shrine guarded by an entire company of yellow space marines!!! However they have gone dark and there is an emergency beacon broadcasting. More catfighting and rivalry happens but meh, boring! The squad goes into some "first blood will be mine rawr!!!" banter and they land into a..

Boring brown desert.

Due to a storm they can't land too close to the shrine, so they'll have to walk there. In fact, most of the movie is spent walking. They also deploy a land speeder, which sounds like a hotrod. And they are shadowed by a hissing and growling thing. Oh gee, I wonder what that could be?

Oh noes, the banner starts hissing and shooting lightning, meaning that daemons are nearby! Oh noes what do they do now? They keep on walking... They enter fog, Proteus thinks he sees something and opens fire, gets berated by captain bling and they move on.

Uuuuuuugh.

Oh, they come across a battlezone where a lot of dead yellow marines are crucified, gutted and otherwise raped. Medic marine makes a remark about how dead they are and they keep on walking.

Hurry up already!

They keep walking for a bit until they reach a bridge, across which the land speeder is parked with no response from driver mc-extra and sergeant bionic eye. The captain and uhm.. blue marine with scoped bolter cross the bridge to check on the speeder, only find both dead. Oh noes, ambush!!! Captain and scope hide under the speeder for a bit while the rest of the squad shoots back or something I think? The banner bearer wants to advance but gets sniped and has his heart blown out in delicious chunks of gore. The banner falls in extreme slow motion until Proteus catches it and restores the time flow to a normal rate again, at which the other blue marines find the full auto setting on their bolters and hulk out by shooting at the tower that the sniper hides in. Scope clambers up the cliff and comes face to face with a black marine!!! Whom he shoots pretty dead, only to look at the black marine like an idiot while another black marine creeps up on him with a big spiky axe. Only captain bling saves the day by shoving a chainsword up his arse and letting it come out his chest in a massive shower of gore. The black marine drops to his knees with a sadface and captain bling kicks him into the abyss 300-style. COURAGE AND HONOUR! Meanwhile the rest of the squad keeps shooting at the tower until it collapses. There's some annoying slow-mo with falling shell cases and the fight is over.

Captain bling congratulates scope on making his first kill. Oh noes, the black marine who was dead isn't dead at all and rises with a hisssss. Captain bling hacks off the top of his skull with a lame chop and says "YES, CHAOS INDEED." kill me now crying

They climb down and ask if there's anything to be done for those shot. All dead, so their organs are removed so that they can live on in other blue men.

What's next? More walking, on stairs now. Captain bling tells white marine that if anything should happen, he knows his wishes. Oh gee, more foreshadowing??? They finally reach the shrine but need to find a way in so Proteus and scope are sent out to do some parcour and open scout ahead. They b***h at each other a bit and get inside.

More walking, this time in dark corridors.. They run up some stairs and heavy bolter mans head explodes! White marine walks up to him and he went "HEAD WOUND, FATAL. HOSTILES." so I went NO s**t YOU TRULY ARE HOUSE MD YOU ******** a**! stressed They are attacked by a daemon who fights captain bling and jumps out a window with him, both dead. I wish I could say more about this lengthy battle but it was too dark. So bling is dead! Or is he??? Proteus is the new leader, that was the wish of bling, so they continue with the mission as ordered because?? COURAGE AND HONOUR!!! Also, its raining, very dramatic!

They finally find the source of the signal: two yellow marine survivors. One isn't yellow tho, he wears black armour and has a skull helmet. I'll call him Skullbert and the other guy uhmmm... Barry. So Skullbert and Barry are guarding a book for some reason that needs to be taken away from Mithron. Also, seeds of doubt are sown as Barry is acting verrrrry suspicious around the book. After some tense standing off they all decide to go back to the landing zone. By more walking.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! scream

But along the way they are attacked by more black marines! Yaaaaay! With a mighty "SLAUGHTER THEEEEEEEM" a horde of them charges at the blue marines, who form a firing line and shoot back at the idiots with guns who instead just run forward with swords and axes. Okay, some shoot, like that one cool black marine with GUNS AKIMBO, he was awesome. Anyway, they have a gun battle that's okay and at one point Skullbert is just standing there, gets shouted at for not fighting and then suddenly holds his metal stick out in front of him, shouting one of the best lines of the movie (BUUUUUURN HERETICS!!!) while the black marines are frozen in time or something, giving the others plenty of time to make a badass lineup and gun them down. They retreat to a hill, fight some more, someone gets hit by an axe, the flamer guy's flamer explodes and all seems lost as the black marines attack again!

CAPTAAAAAIN BLING TO THE RESCUE!

It's captain bling, who charges out of the fog and slaughters a lot of black marines, lopping off limbs with his sword and gunning them down with his bolter. He then gets his chainsword thrown at him and becomes even more brutal,hacking the head off one guy and then slamming it into the forehead of another until it grinds to a halt. Yay for ultramarine violence! So with the captain to lead them once more they all retreat to the bird and escape!

Yay, movie over right? Right? s**t, still got about twenty minutes to go. stare

They go back, Proteus tells bling and white marine that something is wrong with Skullbert and Barry, so they load up and get that s**t sorted out. They also bring the flag, which shoots lightning, so a daemon is nearby!!! Barry is knocked out, the book is revealed to have blank pages and so they shoot Skulbert and the day is won! Wait, why is the banner still hissing lightning? And why is the captain grinning like a creepy old man?

Oh noes, the captain has been corrupted!!!

So the rest of the extras are killed off, along with white marine and Barry, while scope and proteus survive. One of them takes the super-hammer from the shrine and beats the bling-daemon to death.

Movie ends with Proteus being the new captain and scope being his a** slave or something.

THE END. Whew.

My final verdict?

gaia_star out of five

IT SUCKS. The fans are stupid if they think this is the best thing ever. As they say, things can only get better from this point onwards, let's hope so because this was a pile of horrible s**t.

Okay, it wasn't all bad. They took great effort to keep it as 40k as possible, with no dumbing down or silly things like that. There were some fun parts and the last gun battle was okay, but it takes forever to get to the pay off. The final twist was unexpected and would've blown socks off (if I wore those) but meh, I think most people stopped caring at that point. Good effort, but better story next time okay? If I want to see a movie about space marines I want to see them be brutal and kill things, not walk through the desert and act like emos.

Tho from what I've been told the next one could be about the inquisition and seeing as I had my roots there.. ninja  

[Sissy Fairy]

Now I'll have to agree with you on the review on that part Kaori. One of the main problems I had with the movie was that it was written as an audio-book. At 75 minutes it was too short, and there could have been so much more added to the movie. I would like to praise actors like Terrence Stamp, Sean Pertwee and John Hurt for their roles in the movie. They did a pretty good job.

If they are going to do another movie, the Inquisition would be cool to see, but lets not have the Ordo Malleus. We had one daemon already so how about some aliens or a rogue psyker.  

[Hoxtalicious]

Everything needs to start somewhere. Here's hoping Codex Pictures makes enough of a profit to start work on another one. Though the real money making hasn't started yet, as all they are selling now is a limited edition version through their own site. Sometime around May I think they'll start selling regular versions through their website and most other regular media outlets that sell DVD movies. There's also word of a Blu-Ray version, both special edition and regular. pirate  

[Van Evok]

Lt. Brookman

Everything needs to start somewhere. Here's hoping Codex Pictures makes enough of a profit to start work on another one. Though the real money making hasn't started yet, as all they are selling now is a limited edition version through their own site. Sometime around May I think they'll start selling regular versions through their website and most other regular media outlets that sell DVD movies. There's also word of a Blu-Ray version, both special edition and regular. pirate

I hope something better is coming up, so far this is only 40k movie therefore the best one there is. Inquisition is a mine of ideas to start a movie, from investigating xenos influence X-files style to Deamonic incursions and plain heretical cults serving either of those threat...
oddly enough, one short movie that fills me the 40k climate is the one in the beginning of the starcraft brood war:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMOTrIjVao  

[The Black Messiah]

I torrented this film about 2 months ago with the intent of buying the DVD if it was good enough, and I'm still on the fence.

On the up: Excellent animation for a small release project, kept to the universe as we know it and the sweet voice acting.

On the down: The marines acted far too "frat boy" (for want of a better describtion), it was 20 minutes too short with too long spent walking and bitching to each other. And bollocks at the end where 3 (?) marines manage to take down a greater demon, in close combat no less.

All in all, it was an excellent start, but it needed a lot more to finish it. Could be great if they made it part of a trilogy, prehaps following the life of the marine who survived (can't remember his name at the moment). I think it would be fun if they did another one with him at the head of the sqaud, and prehaps a third once he's risen to the terminator ranks.

Oh, and more large scale combat. Marine on Chaos Marine close combat fights can be awesome. But watching a single sqaud take on 2 chaos at a time gets dull  

[Lady Blodwynn]

Piracy is super bad okay. evil  

[The Black Messiah]

Lady Blodwynn

Piracy is super bad okay. evil

And bad is the perspective of one person as opposed to another, but I digress.

I only torrented it because GW gives almost no information about their products until they release them, and I wasn't about to sell out 30 odd quid on a product I knew next to nothing about. (With the possible exception of Space Marine/Dark Mellium Online, cause those should be awesome! biggrin )

In any case, if we must define anyone as bad, it would be the person who ripped the film in the first place and put it online. I merely followed in their footstep to gain a clearer insight of the subject matter.  

[Vikki Stardust]

It's a stupid movie, just delete your illegal goods and get the five quid version from your local dvd store, that way everybody is happy. wink  

[Vikki Stardust]

I added a score, to make it even more official and stuff.  

[Asmondai]

I liked it,
it wasn´t a awesome but a good effort.

The marines did act alittle too much normal-humany to potraiyed themselfs truthfully,
except the captain and apothecarion, they seemed close on the mark.

The walking scene was boring, but didn´t seem to take that long to me.
I think it might have been used to build a suspence for what is to come,
but didn´t succeed on that one. :/

The biggest problem with the movie I think is the PG-rating.
If it we´re to be true picture of the 41st universe then it should have been
17 or 18 me things. :/

The lack of actuall fight and the stooopid tactic for chaos to bum-rush
at the firing line was idiotic and out of character,
but I think it may have been used to distract the marines for
the deamon to infiltrate into the group, but I´m just over-analyzing it. ^^"

And what the heck was the Chaplains power? <.<
Was he a psycher?
Was the that effect of "believing something hard, it will happen"?
What? We need explanation!
There´s plot convinience, there´s Deus Ex Machina
and then there´s just pulling stuffs out of your ***! D:

Overall, it´s an ok movie.
Not as good as the original Final Liberation cutscenes or Damnatus movie,
but it´s an ok film.
It could have been worse. Could have been done by Uwe Boll.
Shudders to the tought. >.<;

And to comment Black Messiah´s comment about the 3 marine vs greater deamon fight:

As oppose to the final fight in the Space Marine game?
And I don´t think he was a greater demon, he seems more of a deamon prince to me,
judging his appearance after all. :-/
I maybe be wrong tought, I´m more used to the
fantasy battle and forgeworld versions of the beast.