TWO-NESS
creators' Web site
Web site for downloading @ TheForce.Net

review written 2/23/2003

The fan film world turned upside down with this one. A fan film of a fan film. Of course, one could argue that Star Wars itself is just a fan film of Flash Gordon and The Hidden Fortress, but... ah, whatever.

Two-Ness spoofs Duality with a style all its own. I don't even know what school of comedy this is, but it works. It's surrealist, but uniquely American surreal—not the Monty Python style. It's absurd. Even Dadaist. God knows.

This film revels in doing vs. not doing. The elevator scene is completely pointless and nothing really happens, and that's what makes it work. The Scooby-Doo sequence is also a complete waste of time, and a funny one because of that. Duality, of course, was all action. Two-Ness plays with pacing and timing—a risky thing when so many fan films suffer from improper pacing—and makes it work.

That "Caution — Pole" joke. We see it coming. We laugh. But I don't think we laugh because he hits the pole, or even because we know he's going to hit the pole. Perhaps some of the laughs come from the silly visuals. But I think what makes that scene funny is because we can imagine the writers thinking of something to do and just putting the first thing they thought of in the script. It's non-comedy as comedy.

A Sith Lord color-calibrates his lightsaber—original and clever. At 3:02, a moment that touches the heart of every low-budget fan filmmaker occurs.

The commercial break is not particularly good, but worth it just for the bumpers "we'll be right back" / "back to our show". That brought back memories of Saturday morning cartoons for me.

The scene with the flying balls as remotes—how did they do that?! When we see a character holding six lightsabers at once—also impressive. But in that whole post-commercial fight scene, what impresses me most is at 5:29, we get fourteen seconds of our evil gloating Darth Oz rip-off. Fourteen seconds. The timing is so bad that it becomes good again. And it's not just the length of the shot that's funny. He opens a snack! Which, of course, makes perfect sense—he's watching a show. Now I wonder if Palpatine was enjoying some popcorn off-camera during the dramatic moments of the ROTJ duel.

Two full minutes are spent on the Scooby-Doo sequence. Which, even I will confess, is too long, and some of the cuts are not well-put together. The filmmakers should have edited it down a bit—just a bit. Cutting even fifteen seconds might have helped.

At 8:54, Duality's nonsensical double death is spoofed with some very impressive effects (again, how the hell did they do that?) Out comes the angry Sith Master with some very funny business.

Credits roll to strange cowboy music.

What the hell was that?

It was a fan film comedy of the sort that nobody else does. Stephen Ballew and Roy Thomas II did something so unbelievably strange and screwy that one wonders how exactly it all works.