[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB9zNen1rs0]
Jason Todd was directed, written, produced and stars a duo who go by the name of LLPro. They have produced a number of DC related films the latest of which tells the origin story of a Red Lantern. But there most successful video to date is Batman: Jason Todd.
This is not a film. Having watched it twice it falls, in my opinion, much more into the category of trailer or concept art. There is no storyline or hint that there is an overarch storyline which if the full film is made would be fleshed out. Rather, this is a series of small action scenes shot in an underground multi-storey car park. They then have edited the film removing all of the colour from it except the red bat on his chest and placed an electro soundtrack over the top.
And to be honest, I did not really enjoy it. Granted while they did not have funds to enlarge on what they had, I find it hard to move beyond the flaws of this which would have been easily fixed with a little fore thought. This is quite clearly a concept trailer with the idea to encourage donations to produce more of them with higher budgets. However, this showed that, for me. I am not sure that they had any idea where they wanted to go or even had any concept of a storyline that they wished to develop. I felt like I had just watched the end result of two people, who being bored at the time, decided that what would be really awesome would be to shoot something with Jason Todd in it and beyond that had no idea of anything. The whole thing rather disappointingly plays like an awful “best of…” film which plague YouTube.
I found the little acting that there was to be jilted and very wooden. I struggled to discern even the most basic of emotion and what I could see seemed to be nothing but glowering.
While the attempt to link the film with the cartoons was a nice touch it seemed lost without the colour and was over used to try and force me to feel a certain emotion, and also believe Jason was feeling an emotion. If the comic sections were in colour this would have contrasted well against the black and white colour technique used to show how Jason views the world.
The soundtrack certain did not help to improve the film. While the use of hard electro/rock was used to create an atmosphere of anger, mirroring Jason’s feelings. It simply ended up overpowering the scenes. This made it like a tribute video rather than a serious film, they may as well have played Linkin Park.
Overall there are some good things to say about this film and I do not think this has zero potential. However if they look to move this forward and into more films then there is a lot of improvement that will be needed.
Batman: Jason Todd:
