"Tears of Steel" is a 12-minute short film from 3 years ago and this was produced by the Dutch production company Blender Foundation. they made quite some waves with their animated short film work and here they step into a completely new genre: live action. Sadly, I must say it was not a successful transition. The inclusion of Derek de Lint, one of the Netherlands' most known actors, is a nice one, but it cannot make up for this being a really generic uninteresting science fiction movie. it may be true that this is not my favorite genre, but i still have seen many films from it and I feel there is nothing new in "Tears of Steel", nothing that hasn't been done before and, most of the time, at least as good or even better. The film defines itself a bit through its special effects, which is never a good thing. The reason may be that writer and director Ian Hubert is a longtime special effects artist. His work here really could have needed a better plot and story, including better character evaluation. Not recommended.

I was very much intrigued by the opening shot of this . A young man stands on a bridge in Amsterdam and has to tell a young woman that the relationship is over . She is angry and hurt and cries is it because her robotic arm freaks him out ? Jump forward 40 years and there seems to be a robot apocalypse due to the woman making herself entirely cybernetic and building a conquering army of robots At least I think that's what's happened because there's not much exposition as to what has happened in the 40 year gap and it's left for the audience to make up their own mind on the details . Obviously the opening scene is pivotal and all important and ties in with the plot later on but it is slightly frustrating to fill in the gaps for yourself . There might be a train of thought that states short film making should lend itself to ambigeuty and reading between the lines but I must argue when you've got a high concept plot genre that is science fiction you must explain what is happening and why even if it's not in so many words . Instead TEARS OF STEEL concentrates on action and visuals , except I couldn't help thinking there weren't done very well and I don't think it's trying to be sophisticated self knowing parody of Hollywood TRANSFOMER type movies . I have to admit I don't like science fiction blockbusters featuring humans battling giant robots and didn't even like TERMINATOR 2 JUDGEMENT DAY finding it flabby and overblown but I guess it's something of a back handed compliment to the makers of this short that it's no worse than something directed by Michael Bay or Guillermo Del Toro

Tears of Steel sounds like an interest concept. A young man and woman are on a bridge in Amsterdam; their relationship is not working out well perhaps because he has other dreams of being awesome in space whereas she believes he is just freaked out by her robot arm. We then jump forward to a near-future overrun by robots where, for some reason a man tries to recreate and resolve this original conflict with a large robot in the role of the girl. It appears early on that maybe there will be some interesting ideas in here and that ultimately the base of the film will be the relationship situation but it is not too long before you realize that this will not be the case.You see, this is a film credited to the Blender Institute – Blender being an open-source piece of 3D animation software. This film primarily exists as a way of showing off what is capable and as such it is impressive. Large robots, impressive city views, large action sequences – they are all done much better than you would expect with such a low budget. It is a real shame then that it is hard to really enjoy what they have made because outside of the effects it is surprisingly weak. I understand it is a short and it should be applauded for what it did with the resources, but I am always a bit surprised to find some in the shorts community so caught up in the need to praise that they seem to extend that goodwill to everything while at the same time would go after a blockbuster for being the same (money on the screen but nothing else). The plot doesn't go anywhere or tell you anything and the same time the dialogue is really poor – indeed so bad that at several points I assumed it must be a deliberate thing.Performances match the dialogue and are pretty weak throughout and all that remains are the effects. As I said, they are very impressive – not "for a short film" but just generally they are technically impressive. The problem is that they exist to show off Blender, not to make a film – if you really want to win over a community, it is better not just to show that you can animate complex things very effectively, but rather to show that Blender can serve as a tool for the low budget production of great shorts; this film shows the technology is there, but Tears of Steel offers nothing to suggest it helped make a good short film.

I'm a big Blender user myself, have been into it for years and have always followed the movie projects from the Blender Foundation... Its previous one Sintel was an amazing piece of work as it not only demonstrated the capabilities of the software but was also an enjoyable and moving short film.Tears of Steel, instead of being a 100% 3D project instead became the first live action film by the Blender Foundation. Which made perfect sense as over the past year a lot of features have been added to the software to assist in that area... a new rendering engine to help with photo realism, camera tracking... color balancing etc etc... And, as an exercise to demonstrate those new features and what they are capable of the film did its job, the special effects are for the most part very impressive, aside from some poor 'green screen' moments they made a realistic environment to set the film.However, this is where my praise ends... as an actual short film, it falls flat on its face. The script is hammy, a little confusing and in some case, flat out dumb... 'Admit you don't like my robot hand!' ... really? It left me feeling quite let down after the hype and build up and my hope, is that next year they produce something that works as a tech demo AND a film at the same time. Not one or the other.