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My only gripe is that bolter shots could routinely penetrate power in that movie. It's like the CSM and C:SM players were failing their armor saves like mad.

Horrible movie. The animation was terrible. Every single marine walks and moves the exact same - they have this strange awkward bump to their gait. They obviously only made one model and one motion capture set and just copy/pasted it X times for every character. The voice acting and writing was laughable. My little cousins wanted to see it when they found out there was a Warhammer movie and they commented on how every marine walks the exact same, and how bad the voice acting is.

I don't know man, GW has such a rich, powerful IP and when they decide to do something significant like a film, they just screw the pooch with it. What the hell are they thinking?

Can't wait until someone wises up and lets HBO do a Horus Heresy series.

"They" didn't. They sold licensing rights to Codex Pictures. Codex Pictures then made the movie. GW didn't really have a hand in it at that point.

That's just as bad, semantics doesn't really change that they just abandoned the potential.

 BryllCream wrote:
Just watched it...well, skimmed it. Didn't seem as bad as many said . The opening scene was pretty badass, but the terrible voice acting and awful camera angles ruined the dialogue for me, which was itself hit and miss.

Definitely promising though. I'd love to endorse a sequal. What does dakka think?

Try actually watching it

I didn't mind it. But my one gripe with it is, HOW ON TERRA DOES A NEW RECUIT BECOME A COMPANY CAPTAIN? Seriously....

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
Can't wait until someone wises up and lets HBO do a Horus Heresy series.

Oh man! If only............

 captain bloody fists wrote:
I didn't mind it. But my one gripe with it is, HOW ON TERRA DOES A NEW RECUIT BECOME A COMPANY CAPTAIN? Seriously....

I don't think he was a recruit.

Personally. I think one of the big problems with the story is the fact that space marines were central characters. To me they should always stand apart from humanity, held in a kind of terrifying awe (The angels of death.). To place the story perspective right in the middle of them breaks the sense of mystery and reveals them to be rather comical in an attempt to make them engaging when they should come across as well trained and well equipped psychopathic killers. Think how the Uruk hai were handled in LoTR.
I have always thought a good 40K movie would follow, maybe a swashbuckling Rogue Trader of a unit of misfit guard (Gaunt’s Ghosts). They would better allow the viewer to identify with the characters and allow for moments of anger, compassion, fear, humour… without undermining the characters. Space marines would be best served as a movie spectacle. Imagine the ultra-violent marine assaults from the HH books but without having to deal with the awkward attempt at making them interesting out side of battle.

Just my thoughts

Maybe 50% was at the advertised level of CGI, the rest was utterly awful. Combined with a weak storyline, barely registered lip-service to the fluff, and a run-time of <80 mins and you have one pretty big clusterfu....

Also Black Legion tactics = Madly rush forward and be massacred as if you were little better than guardsmen, after all your armour is worthless, unlike the protagonists.

 vim_the_good wrote:
Personally. I think one of the big problems with the story is the fact that space marines were central characters. To me they should always stand apart from humanity, held in a kind of terrifying awe (The angels of death.). To place the story perspective right in the middle of them breaks the sense of mystery and reveals them to be rather comical in an attempt to make them engaging when they should come across as well trained and well equipped psychopathic killers. Think how the Uruk hai were handled in LoTR.
I have always thought a good 40K movie would follow, maybe a swashbuckling Rogue Trader of a unit of misfit guard (Gaunt’s Ghosts). They would better allow the viewer to identify with the characters and allow for moments of anger, compassion, fear, humour… without undermining the characters. Space marines would be best served as a movie spectacle. Imagine the ultra-violent marine assaults from the HH books but without having to deal with the awkward attempt at making them interesting out side of battle.

Just my thoughts

Got to agree with that. Abnett is usually very good on that score. I'm particularly thinking of a scene in Eisenhorn when he is sneaking up on the heretic dig site. When they realise that there is a Chaos Marine present the mood changes to "holy crap! We need to get out of here!" half his team freezes up and the traitor marine starts sprinting through the Walls of the building to attack them. That is what Marines are about.

There are also two other bits of fluff that stick (though no idea of their provenance). One was to do with a nid invasion on an ice planet. Guard unit in full cold weather gear talking about frostbite. Marine stood around with no helmet almost being worshipped by the guardsmen.

The other was supposed to be a quote from a Guard general. Along the lines of "It doesn't matter if we all die, as long as we kill just one Traitor Marine."

There are roughly a million loyalist marines in the galaxy. Millions of colonised worlds. Untold trillions of humans. For 99.999% of humans, marines may as well be a myth. They have never seen them. For all they know, they aren't real. Seeing one should be akin to a religious experience, even for veteran guardsmen.

Marine stuff sells because they are cool, but they are the antithesis of great characters for novels/screenplays. They are alien, beyond human (arguably less than human) warrior monks who live only for war. They don't have hopes/fears/aspirations in the same way that a normal man does. As a vignette to add character to a human-centric story they are brilliant; as the main characters... Meh.

My issues are the crazy weak voice acting, even the animation doesn't bug me as much.

The voices of the veteran Marines (the Captain and Apothecary) were way too quiet and weak. They didn't at all sound like a powerful and strong Space Marines, they were just old men.

 Mark1130 wrote:

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
Can't wait until someone wises up and lets HBO do a Horus Heresy series.

Oh man! If only............

HBO always puts gratuitous sex scenes in its series....how the HH books would deal with that in a almost 100% male cast. Would cause some epic nerd rage.

BladeSwinga wrote:
Visually, they did a good job of capturing the 41st Millennium. My gripe with the movie is how much they butcher the fluff. Marines aren't designed to sneak around, a battle barge is not for the shuttling of a mere dozen marines, and they should have had years of combat experience before going into the field. I also feel there was a missed opportunity with the land speeder to show how a multimelta fires, although you can look to the DoW computer games for that, I guess. I just felt that they could have done better with the fluff of the Space Marines in that movie.

It was actually a Strike Cruiser, which while traditionally used by a single company are sometimes used by smaller groups.

"They" didn't. They sold licensing rights to Codex Pictures. Codex Pictures then made the movie. GW didn't really have a hand in it at that point.

They did license the rights (which is very different form selling them), but if the part about GW not having a hand in it after that were even remotely accurate, the movie would likely have come out very differently.

 Soo'Vah'Cha wrote:

 Mark1130 wrote:

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
Can't wait until someone wises up and lets HBO do a Horus Heresy series.

Oh man! If only............

HBO always puts gratuitous sex scenes in its series....how the HH books would deal with that in a almost 100% male cast. Would cause some epic nerd rage.

Band of Brothers was HBO and it didn't have any sex scenes.

Unless I missed an episode and it took WWII in a drastic new direction

 Soo'Vah'Cha wrote:

 Mark1130 wrote:

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
Can't wait until someone wises up and lets HBO do a Horus Heresy series.

Oh man! If only............

HBO always puts gratuitous sex scenes in its series....how the HH books would deal with that in a almost 100% male cast. Would cause some epic nerd rage.

CYE didn't have a whole lot - just one or two super short sequences. Then again, it was a comedy. Hopefully the amount of blood, gore and death will sate their lust for primeval behavior and we can have a truly gritty, well-adapted TV series.

Ugh. Just imagine the soundtrack, the battle scenes, the intricate political conversations. RAWR.

 Eldarain wrote:
I have far greater faith in The Lord Inquisitor than any second attempt by that company.

This +1

I liked it

 Elector wrote:

 Soo'Vah'Cha wrote:

 Mark1130 wrote:

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
Can't wait until someone wises up and lets HBO do a Horus Heresy series.

Oh man! If only............

HBO always puts gratuitous sex scenes in its series....how the HH books would deal with that in a almost 100% male cast. Would cause some epic nerd rage.

Band of Brothers was HBO and it didn't have any sex scenes.

Unless I missed an episode and it took WWII in a drastic new direction

The last episode had one, I think.

blood_ravens_marine wrote:

 Elector wrote:

 Soo'Vah'Cha wrote:

 Mark1130 wrote:

 PrehistoricUFO wrote:
Can't wait until someone wises up and lets HBO do a Horus Heresy series.

Oh man! If only............

HBO always puts gratuitous sex scenes in its series....how the HH books would deal with that in a almost 100% male cast. Would cause some epic nerd rage.

Band of Brothers was HBO and it didn't have any sex scenes.

Unless I missed an episode and it took WWII in a drastic new direction

The last episode had one, I think.

I don't think it was thee last episode, but don't you remember one of the soldiers doing a German girl and then when Speirs enters the room he jumps out of the bed and salutes naked... and probably... with extreme attention.

I've always wanted a Warhammer 40k series like Band of Brothers where everything are kept "low" so we don't get Space Marines, Dreadnoughts, Daemons and C'Tan at once. Build it up with only Imperial Guard, let's get awed by seeing an Ogryn up close and let us get sucked in by the 40k atmosphere without hearing about the Emperor all the time. This is mere soldiers who have their own lives and fears, that's plenty for a long start. Like Aliens we don't need to be shown much to start with in a proper series, just the atmosphere. And when Space Marines finally are shown, their conversations, opinions and fight styles should be so very different from what else we have seen or read. Each are extreme unique, a super warrior at heart even before he was a Space Marine and went trough so many trials. After surgery it still shows where he came from via his voice, fight style, opinion etc.
When reading Abnett's books and watching Ultramarine, it's like watching an action movie from the 80s. It's all so superficial and could have happened in almost every sci-fi universe, no red thread or detail why the characters say and do different things, just stereotype after stereotype; I can't understand that he remains so popular in the novel industry.

Because, honestly his novels are pretty dang good (both comics and actual books)

What? Oh you mean "A dozen dudes in blue power armor walking around a desert: The movie".