Reviewed by Aaron Haynes

It starts off with a bang of colors and music and flashing lights that just won't stop echoing until the final line of the credits scrolls across the screen. It's as if someone put Vlarion and Diabolical Delightment in a blender, added pinches of Shit Happens, Videogame Nightmare 2, and Ghost in the Shell, and set it to "liquidate". The best present-day movie making techniques are here, swirling in and around ones that haven't seen active service in years. What results is an utterly sublime experience, one of the most colorful and inventive films in the history of the program, and hands-down the single most entertaining 3dmm movie I've ever seen.

The plot boils down to....who cares, really. It's there, it just spends most of its time hiding behind more important things, like the three main characters getting into extremely inventive battles with a series of villains. This is an entry in the "self-insertion" genre, where the storyline is an excuse for you and your friends to have wacky adventures in a medium other than real life. It plays like a fantasy movie directed by Will Maltby; if there isn't an explosion, gunshot, or energy blast in any given fifteen seconds, something is horribly wrong. Dashes of comedy and drama are sprinkled throughout, and there are pieces of animation here that absolutely blew my mind.

But all this in itself isn't why this movie entertained me so much. I was glued to the screen because I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. When the plot does peek out from behind the avalanche of style, it whipsaws around and blindsides you so fast that you don't notice when the movie reverts back to 'normal'. It changes gears about four times, betraying it's status as almost anything you ascribe to it -- PAM, comedy, fantasy, you name it. It also does the absolute unthinkable when you consider it's "self-insertion flick" nature, faking you out twice in a row about something, and still getting the last laugh. It constantly establishes rules just so it can break them, and laugh about it. You get the impression of a kid who keeps building a block tower and then kicking it over, finding the whole thing ridiculously funny. And it seemingly never quits. With a 30-minute runtime, you'll definitely get your download's worth here.

I might as well give a bit of background, because while the plot isn't what's occupying your mind for most of the experience, it's not unimportant. Sometime in the future, a notorious cult called the Perfect Prime started recruiting members and taking over the habited planets in the solar system. They've left Earth for last, and it's up to JDR (Jammin' Jeffery, Dominant Dan, and Ruthless Rory -- the movie has a penchant for alliterative names) to fight back against them. They're in it for the joy of causing wanton destruction, and there's a wide blast radius as they cause about as much damage to Earth as they do to Perfect Prime. Their names tell you all there is to know about their personalities in the film.

The over-arcing plot is your typical full-force attack movie, with the heroes doggedly fighting through wave after wave of bad guys as they keep moving towards the enemy base, where the final boss awaits. It doesn't begin, progress, or end like you'd expect it to, and eventually you'll just give up trying to predict what will happen. Something I found very interesting, and could only have resulted from a lack of exposure to the community, rather than it's movies, was that JDR Revolutions called it's characters by their 3dmm names. From the perspective of someone who's talked to other 3dmmers about the names for years and accepts them as a given, it's kind of surprising to actually see them explicitly considered as characters in a film -- and this one somehow manages to convince us that we're seeing the default actors, stripped of all the roles they've played in every 3dmm movie ever released, in their actual lives, fighting three kids with destructive powers on an alien planet. It's the most surreal thing I've ever seen, and it's borne completely out of a coincidence where the directors simply don't take the character names for granted like we do. You'll have to watch it to see what I mean.

In case you actually care, there are directing techniques as well as some issues here that haven't seen the light of day for a long, long time. It uses text boxes for dialogue. There are long static shots where the characters just talk about things for a while. Some scenes are horribly slow because the objects in the background are gigantic, and numerous. And there are some flaws, if you like to complain about things. Lots of cringe-worthy dialogue and jokes that would work better with voices. Stale or over-used humor. Heavy use of the explosion prop in many places. I could go on, but I'm not going to. Most of this stuff actually enhances the mood in some weird way. You know how you feel after you've watched a 1998-era film and found yourself enjoying the dated techniques out of sheer nostalgia? That's what this is like, only it's not the centerpiece, but works to bolster the rest of the experience.

No matter how you like the board in general, the idea of a centralized community with an unwritten status quo about movies simultaneously downplays and enhances the ones that come completely out of left field. It's easy to forget that there are talented 3dmmers out there who DON'T visit the board and HAVEN'T seen many (or any) other films, so the works they produce could end up substantially different from what people are used to. Here's the kicker: Is this a bad thing? Absolutely not, at least not inherently. This is a creative outlet, after all, and if there are an unstated list of Things You Cannot Put In A 3DMM Movie, then any community built around that is both stunted and ultimately self-defeating. Personal expectations play a huge role in how people react to a movie -- My advice to you is to stop thinking about Ghost in the Shell, Espirit De Corps, and other movies that are cinematically 'acceptable', and just enjoy the ride. JDR Revolutions calls upon an ancient, subconscious form of artistry known as "screwing around and seeing what new things one can make". If I had it my way, a lot more people would be doing this in the community.

Critial Score: 95/100.
Personal Score: 100/100.