Well, some of them will.
My daughter and I spent an enjoyable hour+ of our lives watching these short (the longest is 13 minutes) movies and I wanted to get your thoughts.
My favorites: Blinky, Cargo, and Operator.
I’ll talk more in depth later but wanted to share these, see what others thought as well.
Enjoy!
Watched the the first three. Pretty good stuff. I’l watch the rest when my eyelids feel a little less heavy.
Thanks for sharing.
Here’s a list of 33 short science fiction films:
It includes La Jetée, which I think is one of the greatest films of any kind.
Lights Out is a 2-minute gem.
Actually, that’s not quite right. The payoff in the second minute isn’t all that great, but the first minute is simply freaking brilliant. And it doesn’t actually need the second minute to be effective.
So it’s a one-minute gem.
OTOH, can’t show it to my wife - she hated the scenes in AI where people were mean to the robot, she’ll hate Blinky.
I liked “Thresher” more than my daughter did, though I felt movie would have worked better without the final scene with the doctor.
“Unwind” was OK - Sophia had to tell me the reason why the screen went dark was they removed her eyes. Not really a thinking-person’s movie as you’re asking “Why?” and “How does this make sense?” through the entire thing.
“Abe” - existential angst from a robot. Like “Blinky”, this shows how the world will be destroyed by our robotic servants/masters - through a rigid adherence to programming trying to respond to figurative commands and not-very-well-thought-out instruction sets.
“Cargo” was probably the best of the 10. No words spoken, but none really. A father gets bit by a zombie and he needs to figure out the best way to protect his baby girl from himself, and get her to safety, before he changes.
“Pennywise” was probably the weakest of the lot. Taken from Stephen King’s IT, this is a retelling of the story - my daughter was confused the entire time, so having actually read the book makes a BIG difference. On the other hand, I found the Pennywise character to be very well done, so it has that going for them. I did think that, of all these films, the sound on this one was very weak.
“Perfect Drug” - pretty crazy shit. Not so much scary as bizarre, this one might feature the fattest person on film.
“Connected” - Eh, OK. I saw the ending from a mile away and, like “Unwind”, it’s better to turn your mind off on “how does this work?” and “why did this happen?” type questions and just go with it. Come to think about it, this is probably the weakest of the 10 for me - that Pennywise was scary (though “Connected” worked better as a story.)
“Operator” had Sophia screaming at the end - “What is wrong with people? Who would ever think of such a thing? What sort of world have you brought me in to?” - pretty funny stuff. This one is very good with easily the best (i.e., most shocking) ending of the lot.
“Paralyzed” was, imho, nothing too special. The man who created it has gone on to have quite the credits list on IMDB, but I found other films on this list to be much more effective.
Man, Sophia is going to love that one. Thanks!
Glad to be of service!
But, curiously, the version I posted is very slightly different from, and slightly less effective than, the version I remember. Hereis the original, which omits a “jump” scene, making the whole thing even scarier.