Like the headline says, this is Gears of War as reimagined in the form of animate plastic blocks.
Normally I’d just toss something like this out with a shrug and a short internal monologue about this being a Friday (the laziest day of the week), but I’m actually, genuinely impressed by this footage.
Not because the stop-motion animation is on par with those 1980’s claymation specials I grew up with. Not because those paper bullet impact decals that appear every time a gun is fired are a neat touch. Not even because the scenery, constructed entirely in Lego, is a very solid representation of Epic Games’ beloved Gears of War franchise.
No, my affection for this clip stems entirely from a moment 45 seconds in where a Locust grunt is shot in the head. Instead of simply knocking the character over, the creator went to the trouble of animating a clay-based blood geyser that envelopes the creature’s noggin in a decidedly un-child-friendly fashion.
On the one hand, that’s blatantly pandering to the kill-happy Gears audience, but on another, the ridiculousness of adding that level of graphic detail to a scene constructed entirely from a children’s toy is a really clever commentary on the Gears of War series as a whole.
I’m sure it’s unintentional, but the metatextual silliness in that single moment perfectly captures the tone of the series. Well, the tone that one hopes the series is trying to exude. They can’t actually be serious about the hyper-masculine phallocentric homoerotically-repressed gunplay, can they? And the suggestive dual-metaphor of chainsaw impalement? I mean, that’s gotta be a goof, right?
Wait, it’s not? They’re serious?
Wow. Just … wow.
