Clive Thompson has written an interesting piece for Slate about the emerging genre of fan films. Well, I suppose it’s not that emergent, but technology has delivered cinema-quality special effects and a distribution system to the masses:
Fan art works best when it feeds off of dweeby universes that are jam-packed with characters. It would be easy to create amateur, offshoot films based on Lord of the Rings or The Twilight Zone, and possibly even a show with a revolving-door cast like Law & Order. Shows or movies that rely on a single, charismatic actor–like Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer–aren’t as easy to replicate.
In particular, Clive mentions Star Wars Revelations. He watched the whole 40-minute movie (which is available for free), while I just caught the trailer. The trailer was enough for me.
Regardless of the special effects, story or costuming, there’s a key factor that every fan film I’ve ever seen is missing: quality acting. Now, I’m not saying that Lucas’s Star Wars films are a rich with Oliviers, but the worst actor on the big screen is far superior to the best in a fan film. Why? Because the former went to acting school, which will never make a good actor a great one, but it can make a mediocre actor watchable. You can see the fan film’s actors’ lack of acting experience in every frame–in how they move, speak and (most importantly) listen to each other.
On a related note, film actors have to be beautiful, or ugly in a fascinating way. They can rarely look ordinary. If they do, they generally compensate by being great actors (Wallace Shawn comes to mind, but even he’s a strange-looking little bald man with a distinctive voice).
The solution lies in finding actors who love the material–there ought to be plenty of those out there. Fan films are never going to be more than dweeby homages until they resolve this issue. If that’s all fan films aspire to be, then great. However, I’m not going to sit through one, regardless of the veracity of the zooming spaceships, until I see some folks who can act.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I watched the trailer. I may download the movie.
You’re right, the acting is painfully obvious. It shows how good even a much-maligned guy like Hayden Christianson (isn’t that his name?) is.
It also points to how good a guy like Laurence Olivier (and the guy who is his successor, Johnny Depp) is: when he was in a role, you forgot that this was Laurence Olivier. He so completely became the character that Olivier was gone.
The really astonishing thing, though, is how good the rest of the movie looked. At the low resolution that Quicktime offers, it looked every bit as good as a Lucas production.
Oh, one other thing: it seemed to me that part of the problem with the acting may have been the screenplay. The little bit of dialogue that was in the trailer seemed stilted, and I don’t think it was all because of the acting. The anti-Jedi (you could tell she was the Bad Guy because her light sabers were red), for example, says ‘Ready my ship’, which just doesn’t sound like something that an anti-Jedi would say. I think something like ‘Prepare my ship’ is better, starting on a hard consonant like ‘p’ rather than ‘r’. Not to mention the fact that, throughout the Lucas films, Jedi speak formally. ‘Ready my ship’ just doesn’t sound right coming from a Jedi.
Oh, and another thing: I don’t know that fan films will never catch on. People said the same thing about Linux. Consider this ‘open source film-making’.
“Blogs will never catch on. The writing is amateurish and the topics inane. Nobody will ever waste time reading them.”
🙂
Fan films as they currently stand will not catch on. But like anything else, I expect they’ll mature and grow. How long will it be until we see independent net studios popping up and producing quality films? Not long, I’d say.