Title: A Call to Arms Director: Andres De La Hoz Genre: War Reviewed by MidbackMan Scale: 5 to 10: Very Bad A film of just terrible Quality; Don't bother 11 to 20: Bad A few slightly redeeming qualities but still not worth your time 21 to 30: It's okay Very ordinary technical stats; Not worthless but not great 31 to 40: Good Above average; Usually recommended to the fan of the specific genre 41 to 50: Very Good Well worth your attention; Content and design are spectacular Review: Booya! The last movie of Andres' that I reviewed I think was Dead Heart in a Dead World. I gave it something like a score of 50. It was a hell of a movie. I'm not giving too many perfect scores out recently mostly because I don't like to overhype movies beyond their actual worth. Lemme explain. If I do give a movie a perfect score it usually means after watching it I was so ecstatic over it that I was blind to any possible flaws in it. Meaning that the movie was so enjoyable that I just gave it a perfect score for the hell of it. A Call to Arms, in my opinion - although it has a lower score than DHiaDW - I prefer this movie to that one. I did see a flaw in this movie that annoyed me at first so I took a couple points off for that. ACTA is a War movie with constant action going on. It's not very long but long enough for me to consider it a normal length 3dmm movie. Anyway, throughout the whole thing, it's constantly switching to the different stories of individual persons who were around just before the action broke out. You got to see quick bits of British army dudes, some guys who I'm pretty sure were... I dunno what they were exactly, there was a scene with some peoples - one of whom was played by Professor Spaz. Who the hell was he supposed to be? Doesn't matter. And there was the story of a French assassin sent in to kill a General. It all fit into a short little almalgamated story about this battle that was about to happen and the people who were participating: Normandy or something, I dunno what it was meant to be or if it was just some fictional thing - doesn't matter. ANYWAY, this whole thing starts of kind of shoddy-like. The beginning doesn't really have that great of an introduction but that's soon forgotton because the whole movie is FILLED with fast, quick, animated scenes that are just FULL of completely awesome amounts of debris and cluttersome junk! It was awesome! And the animation throughout just rizzules and is fast too, not unlike Dead Heart in a Dead World. They all have these guns strapped to their backs, suits of armor, helmets and other apparel. There are some scenes with gobs of men lined up ready to march and shoot down their enemies and in these scenes, there is still a display of fantastic scenery, animation - wicked explosions almost everywhere, and to go with it some terrific sound effects and some great music to go with it all and add some tension. WINDOWS XP USERS: I use Windows XP & one of the complaints in this following Paragraph may or may not have been caused by a faster frame-rate in my OS. Just a note. This is all great BUT the one thing that really pissed me off... was the ACTING! Part of why I thought the beginning of the movie sucked was because of the terrible acting! The voices were pretty low quality and the acting was pretty stale. And if it weren't bad enough that the voices sucked ass, they were placed so close to each other that people started their sentences while others were still trying to finish their own! Read the paragraph about WinXP above about what probably caused this if it wasn't Andres' fault. The acting still sucked, though. Weirdly, while the movie progressed the acting bothered me less and less and then eventually seemed to give the movie a feeling of realism. As if we were watching some movie made a long time ago before really good microphones were invented. Like, some guy who was present was making a film of the movie. But then maybe it'd be in black and white. Still, I wasn't as bothered by it through the middle to the end of the movie so I decided to up the score for the Voices part of the scoring tabulation thingy. Speaking of, this is the first review I've written that has the addition of the "flow" to that little scoring thing below. I've reviewed a couple movies with this system, some or most I've given lower scores because of this being absent. It will now be present in all of my future reviews. Oh, and ACTA has a good flow AND a good story, so you don't have to ask me which. Actually, when it comes to the story to this, it was all that stuff I mentioned before about the different little stories combined that impressed me the most and made this so cool. The one story that I suppose would be considered the "main" story - about the French Assassin has a bit of an odd feeling to it. He eventually catches up to the guy he's supposed to kill but since when is a General left all alone on the battlefield to be picked off by some Sniper? and among a couple quick things that come to mind - two or three times when there were some closeups on a couple guys giving a speech the scenery was just one simple background wall with no detail. That was too quick and went by pretty fast for me to really care about it though. Lesse, what else did I wanna mention... OH YEAH! Redwampa said he either laughed or disliked Prof. Spaz's role. I liked it. Uhh, what else... Uhhh, in the last few scenes, when the French Guy is chsaing the General it felt odd when he was running behind him at 3dmm's running pace and wasn't shooting at him. That took a bit of realism out of it. The best part of the movie is mostly near the main battles, however. Hmmmmm... OH! The last thing: When Andres sent me a couple small clips of his movie for me to write on on my website I complained about the guns and the way they looked. Andres ensured me that he was going to change them. He didn't. But it didn't bother me in this full movie. I guess it only bothered me back then because the clips were small clips and I was able to focus on minor details. In the full movie I like the guns now. Good Movie. Midback's Seal of Approval for sure! (which basically means this movie is good and I'm out of things to talk about.) Story/Flow: 10/10 Animation: 10/10 Scenery: 10/10 Voices: 7/10 Music: 10/10 Total: 47/50 The Movies Highs: *Everything is Spectacularly Spectacular The Movies Lows: *Beginning of Movie was... feh. Rest more than made up for weird start. *Voice acting throughout was also pretty feh. Read above for more info Bottom Line: Hell Yes! This is my favorite 3dmm War Movie so far and my favorite War Movie of the year 2001! Midback's Steakhouse Seal of Approval! BING BING! ...what? ...bing bing? BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE IT! Midback liked this movie so much he wanted to watch more of the same type of movie so MidbackMan also recommends to people who enjoyed this: My Last Day in Normandy - Dave Smith NOTE TO READER: Take notice that the technical scores are just that: Technical Scores. The review will contain an opinion of how enjoyable the movie was overall. The Tech Scale may not reflect the opinions in the written review. As always if you agree or disagree with any of the opinions or technical scores in this article please feel free NOT to take it up with MidbackMan or the management of Review Central since no one really gives a rats ass about what you have to say. That's why you're at this site.