Magnesium (2011) Online

I recently asked after this short film because I had seen a trailer for it but had never seen a "proper" version out of it. I was told that the project was to make the trailer, rather than an actual short, so I guess that the 3 minute trailer is the film that we will get. This does seem odd to me since there is also a 2 minute title sequence that had been made – which seems a strange thing to put effort into if the goal was just to produce a trailer that really only uses a few seconds of it. However this is what I'm told and I do not know better, but perhaps any idea of expanding the trailer and promo-credits into a fuller film were shelved when the production company ceased trading? I don't know.

Anyway, in terms of what was made, the trailer clearly has aspirations and it also has the advantage of, being a trailer, only needing "good bits" to clip together and with less importance of building a narrative – or at least so you would think. The problem here is that actually the trailer could have done with just a little bit more exposition. We get the basic blocks: future contains droids who are companions but also for military use – a grieving man buys one looking for snuggles but somehow ends up with a military one – which the supplier wants back, although she clearly doesn't want to go. This soon spirals into some form of organized uprising against the droids, however by this point the trailer has gotten into "tone and style" mode.

This side works to a point because it does have a good eye for what makes up this genre. So we get a lot of guns being pointed while people stride with determination, we get sexy Asian droids for that futuristic feel, we get dramatic jumps (well, one) and some quick edits of fight sequences. It doesn't quite cut it as a Hollywood trailer because the limits of the resources are there to be seen, but it does a decent enough job with it. Ultimately it looks like a reasonable generic sci-fi action movie, which would be a criticism of it if it were a film, but since it has been made as a genre trailer, it does indicate it got its reference points right.