Reviewed by Brandie Peters
A military vessel is shot down in an unknown planet, creating darkness and chaos among its passengers.
ICARUS DOWN is a short film that plays like the teaser trailer for a much bigger brain child. Filmmaker Paul Nicoletos grants us a brief glimpse into a future world where humans have adapted to life in space. The style of this short film is reminiscent of science fiction
classics such as the original Aliens with cinematography that is clearly inspired by more recent sci-fi offerings like Prometheus (also part of the Aliens mythology!) In fact, ICARUS DOWN was so reminiscent of the Alien’s franchise that I half expected to see a face sucker burst from the chest of one of the expired crew mates. Without giving too much away, this doesn’t happen. What does occur is the ICARUS defense space craft is shot down in the menacing Epilson 13 galaxy. What dangers actually lurk outside for the survivors of ICARUS space craft, we have yet to see. The meat of the film revolves around events inside the ship immediately following it’s crash descent.
“Icarus Down” is a high concept short film, produced and developed by the team of Reloaded Films Inc. The idea behind the project came from their partner and director Paul Nicoletos. After sending them the script for “Icarus Down” they all saw a potential feature length film in it. A lot of open questions and a lot of cinematic scenes were flushing in their heads. Reloaded then decided to make this the first project for their newly founded company.
Now obviously this short film’s biggest failing is that it is only a sneak peek at a concept that is clearly much more well developed and has yet to be produced. The potential that ICARUS DOWN has to come into it’s own as a respectable full length Sci-Fi thriller is well
established. As a stand alone short film, it is a thoughtful character introduction that delves into the question of what the true threat of imminent danger is?
Currently their is a fad in the indie film making community where filmmakers first produce a short teaser film in order to procure interest for their full length script. The original funds for ICARUS DOWN came from a successful Indiegogo.com campaign that raised the generous $15,000 dollars needed to see this short trailer (it is more of a trailer then a short film) fully realized. As those of us in the film making community are well aware, high concept science fiction movies can be extremely difficult to get funding for without a graspable concept demo. Having a sampler feature like ICARUS DOWN can be a great tool for selling a full length project to a willing production company. The filmmaker’s intention here is obviously to do just that. However, the result is a well produced high quality piece of short cinema with an engaging cliffhanger.
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