Some of you may be familiar with Damnatus, an extremely low-budget German fan-made 40k film that due to weird copyright differences between German and British law meant that it was never officially released. Naturally it was "leaked" to various torrent sites and the entirety of the film is even easily findable on Youtube, so I suspect it Games Workshops protests were more against the copyright loss than actually disliking the film, since they tend to pursue other copyright violations with extreme prejudice.
Nevertheless, I managed to acquire a copy and finally sat down to watch the 1 hour 45 minute production, and figured I should share my impressions with you.
First off, if you choose to watch it, made sure you approach it with the right mentality. If you go in expecting even an indie filmmaker type movie, you'll be disappointed, and probably end up laughing at a lot of it. If you go in thinking it was a movie made by a bunch of very enthusiastic and talented fans, you'll be very much impressed. The costumes and tone were well done, the story-line was decent if not mind-blowing, and the CGI for a lot of the scenes were far better than I expected. In particular however they did the servo-skulls was really cool, and I liked their Tech-priest costume a lot.
It does however have its weak points, particularly due to pacing. I feel like they wanted it to be a feature-length production, and thus there are quite a few shots that drag on a bit longer than they should, although never horribly so. The dialogue can be a bit stilted, and mostly not that impressive writing-wise (also, everything's in German with English subtitles, which wasn't a problem for me). The fight scenes were also a bit underwhelming, but again that's more due to the nature of the film than the actual shooting itself.
I think by far my favorite part though, has to do with the ending. Also, spoiler warning! If you don't want spoilers, stop reading this entry now. Anyway, the film follows a small kill-team who is sent to purge a cult, and they manage to do so although end up unleashing a Daemon. Now, it turns out my copy was a bit corrupted towards the end, so for the last 15 minutes I was somehow zoning out due to the occasional pausing and loss of visuals, but I perked back up at the end. For the entire team dies to a daemon. That's right, in the last 10 minutes a Daemon appears and kills everyone. I was all for this, since it was very 40k, but it seemed like an odd ending, and I was somewhat confused.
But not to worry! An Inquisitor, who we saw in the first minute of the movie and didn't appear again, finally arrives in his ship, and does the only logical thing to do when a single, lone Daemon appears on a planet:
Exterminatus!
So yes, we get treated to a nice sequence of the entire planet being bombed just because one minor daemon escaped onto the planet again. It's great, you'll love it, and it left me feeling very pleased, since it ended on a super grimdark note.
If you're really into 40k or just want to waste 2 hours on a halfway decent movie, I can recommend Damnatus: The Enemy Within. I bet it would be especially good in a group setting, especially one where people tend to talk a lot anyway.
-HTMC
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