I am at a disadvantage. I don't know the comic or the cartoon. I'm not satisfied with a film that merely sets up a series. And finally, I am not a preteen, for whom this likely appears deep.
The setup is simple: genius teen gets supernatural power and abuses it. A perhaps greater genius teen battles him. This one is immature and addicted to sweets. The thing ends with an encounter between the two teens them where each appreciates the gifts of and threat from the other. There is an animated demon. Along the way, you find writing, acting and general production values (other than the unimaginative demon) are lower than for your average TeeVee show.
If you want to get value out of this, you have to pay attention to the rules, see how the villain plays them and imagine what you would do, how clever you could be.
The rules are that you have to have someone's face in your mind and write his/her name in a certain book. In 40 seconds they die, unless you specify otherwise. In this case, you can manipulate the time and manner of death. You apparently can get others to do the face recall and writing of names. This allows for rather detailed scripts to be written in advance and if future episodes have promise it will be in how we are conned by events we see that are pre-determined by the script in the book.
Some other rules: if you touch the book, you can see the demon, who harvests the years "left over," from the time of death to the time the person was supposed to die. The demon is otherwise invisible and is there storywise so that these rules can be explained. If the owner of the book passes it on, then his entire memory of it and his actions is erased.
A tantalizing plot development is in the last few minutes. An equally immature girlie girl a TeeVee celebrity because of this coy silliness may have been given a book.
A real writer, working for a mature, demanding audience could actually do something clever and worthwhile with this. But I doubt that will happen.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
The setup is simple: genius teen gets supernatural power and abuses it. A perhaps greater genius teen battles him. This one is immature and addicted to sweets. The thing ends with an encounter between the two teens them where each appreciates the gifts of and threat from the other. There is an animated demon. Along the way, you find writing, acting and general production values (other than the unimaginative demon) are lower than for your average TeeVee show.
If you want to get value out of this, you have to pay attention to the rules, see how the villain plays them and imagine what you would do, how clever you could be.
The rules are that you have to have someone's face in your mind and write his/her name in a certain book. In 40 seconds they die, unless you specify otherwise. In this case, you can manipulate the time and manner of death. You apparently can get others to do the face recall and writing of names. This allows for rather detailed scripts to be written in advance and if future episodes have promise it will be in how we are conned by events we see that are pre-determined by the script in the book.
Some other rules: if you touch the book, you can see the demon, who harvests the years "left over," from the time of death to the time the person was supposed to die. The demon is otherwise invisible and is there storywise so that these rules can be explained. If the owner of the book passes it on, then his entire memory of it and his actions is erased.
A tantalizing plot development is in the last few minutes. An equally immature girlie girl a TeeVee celebrity because of this coy silliness may have been given a book.
A real writer, working for a mature, demanding audience could actually do something clever and worthwhile with this. But I doubt that will happen.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.