Director: Patrick Cormack
Running time: 5mins
This World is Defended: The End of Days is the visual companion piece for a song by The Black Death Band – and with such ridiculously grandiose titling on both fronts, you might be expecting something akin to a Dethklok video here. If so, you will be universally disappointed, because as The Black Death Band goes through the motions of their uninspired metal set, all that accompanies their Black Sabbath impression is a montage of ‘highlights’ from what appears to be an unnamed Terminator video game.
One clip re-used multiple times to really set the pulse racing sees a low-resolution rendering of a teenage girl standing amid urban ruins, waving a shotgun at some unseen threat off camera. After pointing the weapon in multiple directions, apparently on edge and triggered by sounds we cannot hear over the guitar riffs, she fires once, and then stands still for a few more seconds before Patrick Cormack – the director, editor, and possibly band-member – sees fit to cut to something else.
Another moment of scintillating action comes later, when a man in a long, black jacket (staples of metal band imagery, early 00s sci-fi, and – in the regrettable years since – Steven Seagal movie sex scenes) stands motionless in a vacant skyscraper. His lank, black hair blends together into a single matted strand, as was typical for the graphic limitations of the early 21st century – and the only way he could look more ‘20-years-ago’ is if he were peering through a set of Keanu Reeves’ micro-sunglasses. Again, exactly what has so transfixed the lone figure is left a mystery, as the frame never turns to show what he is observing – let alone him interacting with it. Again, this is repeated for maximum impact.
In between these two moments are multiple clips possibly taken from a different game, depicting fleets of star ships bearing down on Earth; distinctly T-800-looking skeletal robots marching through municipal wastelands; and one shot of a bald, bruised man standing in front of the green scrolling code that could only have come from a Matrix game. There are also several digital equivalents of matte paintings, which have had three-dimensional fire-effects ill-advisedly grafted onto them. Like the two clips previously mentioned, none of these images have any momentum; any signs of how they might correspond with each other, or even any hints of interactivity within themselves. They all just stand alone, as moments which at one time – possibly a very long time ago – Cormack thought ‘looked cool’, and earmarked to be stitched into his audio-visual bower. But without any connective tissue, any way of suggesting a story to the viewer, all this does is highlight how little progression there is in the track The Black Death Band has supplied.
That is not to say I think there is never a time or place where this kind of project could work. Video game remixes have been huge on internet video websites for almost two decades – with people taking moments of great emotional and narrative impact from their favourite franchises, and syncing them to music they deem the most appropriate to emphasise those aspects. The thing that sets the best of those montages – or even the mediocre ones – apart from The World is Defended, however, is that they tend to show things happening. You know, events. Not just people standing still staring into space, or vaguely waggling a gun at some off-screen intrigue. There are moments where their characters interact, either with each other, or external threats – usually coinciding with a big musical moment: a repeated beat, a shredding guitar solo, a bass drop.
We get none of that here. Even the finale, which hints at an approaching invasion of thousands of Terminators, is utterly flat – each machine standing flat-footed and motionless, as they have done throughout the rest of the montage. And if this was all they did when there were only a few of them, how bad could it be if more actually arrived?
This is an oddly flat edit for a montage set to accompany an apocalyptic metal song. It lacks in tempo and creativity; grafting together a series of outdated signifiers of ‘coolness’ which have since become embarrassing clichés, and removing any of the action which might have interested modern viewers. And as a music video, supposedly designed to help excite listeners for a band’s hot new release, it does nothing to aid the utterly pedestrian This World is Defended song, either.