Review: Red vs Blue: “The #1 Movie In The Galaxy: 3”

The calm before possibly more calms.

Just like Vic The Narrator says at the beginning of this episode, RVB likes to break up their seasons with little PSA shorts. Out of continuity sketches that aren’t tied down by the drama going on in the story at the moment. Seasons 11 and 13 had PSAs that were essentially trailers parodying the nature of trailers at that time, and, as the name suggests, this is the third one of those. Based on the Lego short we got in between the prequel episodes and the Funhaus episodes, I’m guessing this is another interlude leading to another multi-parter, so we’ll probably get something more serious and/or story-heavy next week.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this one, as it’s just a fake trailer making fun of regular trailers. It’s definitely on point and funny with the things is parodies, but it’s only three minutes long. Instead, I’ll be talking about the director, Freddie Wong, his body of work, and how it relates to the style of the episode.

Wong has been involved with directing work and video games since the late 00’s, starting his own production company: Rocketjump, named for a technique in first-person games adding a jump to a rocket explosion to get higher elevation. And “get higher elevation” he did, with the release of several action-filled short films over a few years leading to the debut of their first full-fledged series: Video Game High School. An homage/parody of 80’s high school dramas with a gamer-centric Sci-fi-ish setting, VGHS (as it is affectionately known) ran for three seasons and was best known for the thing Rocketjump did best: Fast-paced high-octane visually striking fights. The plot seemed to go all over the place, though. The parody came before the story at times, with the structure being just a standard outline of plot progression. The third season ramped up the experimentation for the final six episodes, which started to make me think the show was more a roundabout tutorial of directing techniques than meant to be an actual show. So, it actually seemed pretty natural that, once the show ended, Rocketjump began their own set of free film school videos covering directing, screenwriting, editing, and so on.

To bring this back to the episode itself, it’s representative of Wong’s style of directing. It’s big, bombastic, well constructed, and most importantly, fun as hell.

It’s also really short, so you don’t get much of an impression, even after watching it a few times. So, I’d say it does its job, but it’s a pretty small one. Hopefully next week we can have something more substantial.