Welcome to City 17!

Escape from City 17 Part 2

Directed by David and Ian Purchase, United States, 2011, 14 minutes

Source: Youtube

Welcome to city 17! This live action Half Life based short produced by the purchase brothers is the second part of this series of shorts. This series follows a group of soldiers as they partake in the events during the Half Life video game series. The basic story line is that a group of rebels are attempting to escape from the doomed city 17 that is going to blow up. As is typical of these sort of fan films, there is a love story and a lot of unexplained things going on.

The reason I chose this film was because I had stumbled across the episode 1 of the series and noticed they brought out a newer part of the series. If you take the time to look at the other Purchase Brothers films, the company that made the short, most of them are really well done and are full of great special effects. However, most are also not over the five minute mark besides this one and honestly that has helped them. While the special effects in this short are amazing, the story is atrocious and pathetic. While I love the beauty of the entire film the story and the occasional misfire of special effects really irks me to the point that I just can’t enjoy it. While the film was done on a 250 dollar budget if you are going to spend all that time on doing the models and special effects get a story writer and do things right.

However, in the video game world this video started a whole slew of fan based films most of which are going to be released later this year. While I know as a fact that most of these other fan films will probably end up having horrible story lines, this video is still important because of what it did. However this video should have set an example for a stellar story line with great effects so hopefully the purchase brothers can get their act together by part 3.