This is a good looking short film. It has decent computer animation for what it is and the voice cast benefits from having Stuart Townsend and John Hurt in the two lead roles. It starts out in the icy wilderness of the Arctic and then jumps back to the a young man interacting with his math's professor. A series of interconnected events around the numbers 23 and 5 set the professor off on a mission to explore the world of numbers for the mythical formula which will link and explain everything.
I have seen many films (features and shorts) which use the idea of mysterious numbers and the hunt for something inside them and the one common thread among them tends to be that they underwhelm. So it is with this one. The high production values do not extend to the actual material and what may have been an interesting idea is really given short service on the way to an ending that really does nothing of any note other than be disappointing. The build-up through the maths is unconvincing and the film doesn't seem interested in anything other than getting through it – the 'hand me that book, ah yes here it is
' line was the perfect summary of the film since it occurred so quickly without any time for the character to actually find a page far less anything else – and this was typical of the film racing through material it wasn't interested in.
Getting to the end of the film I can see why it felt like that, because the end is both predictable but yet disappointingly random in terms of how it connects to the rest of the film. The voice actors give it a sense of quality that the animation backs up in terms of being polished, but not in terms of personality or detail – yes it works but it is stiff, mass produced and it adds to the feeling of there being no heart to the film. It plays with ideas but for all the gloss on the production, it offers nothing in the substance to engage and yet, as disinterested as I was, the ending still managed to draw an emotional reaction from me – just not a good one.
