Something random YouTube came up with had me in stitches. I laughed so hard my sides hurt. Can you imagine, The Critical Drinker apparently had a Kickstarter project to make his very own short film. Now, for those of you who don't know, which is I hope most of you, The Critical Drinker is one of those obviously conservative YouTube channels that focus on criticizing wokeness in mainstream media. Well, actually, no, he's calling himself a film critic, but in reality once you have watched a video or two of his it becomes clear that his own critical thinking ability is not all that greatly developed. This leads to having content such as stating that Star Trek: Picard is bad because a female admiral is giving Picard some lip while at the same time extoling the virtues of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a series that has plenty of episodes with female admirals giving Picard some lip, or even sue him with the intent of ruining his career.
For the longest while of the Next Generation era of Star Trek, Admirals were the go-to people in the Federation whenever the writers needed a threat, a villain or just someone who is a completely unsympathetic higher up serving as a foil to properly contrast our heroes. If he had actually watched any of the TNG era Star Trek while paying attention, he would have known that. Alas, he either didn't, or didn't have the mental capacity to process, and his brain reached the conclusion that wokeness RUINED Star Trek.
As if Star Trek wasn't ever among the most woke series on air. What it used to be, though, before the TNG movies, before Enterprise and arguably before parts of Voyager, was well written and engaging in addition to presenting philosophical conundrums and a brighter, optimistic look at the future. Star Trek: Picard ruined that by making the Federation Tump's America, which was a current issue at the time, and by having that cynical backdrop that simply does not fit into the existing Star Trek canon than further dragged down by atrocious writing, a stupid plot and terrible characters.
But @majestic, what does that have to do with his Kickstarter project?
Well, it just recently came out. A forty minute short film that no longer is a film, but has been turned into a TV series proof of concept (they at least had the sense to not call it a pilot). A project that overshot its Kickstarter goal by a factor of fifteen, raking in some 300,000 pounds instead of the 20,000 he asked for. This is it:
I don't blame you if you do not want to sit through forty minutes of the most rote Steven Seagal level straight to video schlock. In fact, I suppose, I encourage you to not give him any clicks. Watching it makes it clear why he has called it a TV series proof of concept. It's not that all technical parts of the film are terrible (the stunt work is fine, actually), except for the soundtrack and the audio mixing, but that writing is... well, how do I put that nicely?
It's an incoherent disaster, hence why it is called a proof of concept - after all, if all you have is a bunch of scenes you cannot string together into a coherent narrative because you suck at making films (oh, the irony), just call it a proof of concept and hope your seriously dumb fanbase does not notice*.
Here's the bit that made me laugh though - I mean, as bad as the film is, what else would one expect from The Critical Drinker - it's that precisely the same people who watch his channel for his critiques are the ones making fun of him in the comments. People are calling him a grifter and a hypocrite, and those are the nicer ones. It's fair, considering that the thing he is most famous for (aside from writing forgettable spy thriller novels which are what this proof of concept is sort of an adaptation of) is making fun of bad writing on YouTube.
Eh, looks like bad writing is still bad, even if you subtract the wokeness, although, dumb short film still features a girl boss coming to the rescue of the protagonist.
Edit: Contrast this with the aforementioned Turbo Kid, which had a budget of 60,000 Canadian dollars in 2015, and out came a heartfelt and fun movie that is also a great homage to the 80ies... and it featured Michael Ironside as villain.
*There are those who blame it on not having enough creative control. Over the film he raised the funds for and credits him as one of the writers of the script, with behind the scenes footage clearly showing his being present and giving input at every turn. Right.