Astartes 1x1

I've started watching Astartes on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There are major spoilers in this review, so don't continue reading if you intend to watch the series yourself and want to experience it fresh.

As an aside, I don't actually know if Astartes is a series or just a single episode. It's always hard to tell on Warhammer+ because they're (refreshingly, if you ask me) very flexible in how they create content. You get ongoing series alongside a 12 minute short, 3D animation alongside 2D animation, lore dumps, talk shows and charmingly awkward game shows using Games Workshop employees as contestants. It's the content platform I thought the Internet combined with the power of independent films was going to deliver to us in the early 2000s, but it never did, and now I'm in the 2020s and have exactly the variety I want, and it just happens to be all about Warhammer. Could be worse!

The power of the Adeptus Astartes

There's real-world lore about an animation called Astartes, but I somehow missed it entirely. I don't know whether this episode is the same as the legendary Astartes or whether this is a different show with the same name. Either way, this was a cool episode that's basically a silent short. There are technically a few lines of dialogue in the middle, but it's just jumbled telepathic messages that I had to turn on Closed Captioning to even understand. As a former worker in the film industry, I have sincere admiration for silent works.

The rhetoric around silent film goes a little something like this: A motion picture ought to tell its story through motion picture, not sound. It's a lofty ideal that you can take too far, but it's also an important one because one of its logical conclusions is the show don't tell adage. Don't tell me that this space marine is the toughest super soldier ever, show me what the space marine does to seemingly unconquerable baddies and let me draw my own conclusion.

That's exactly what Astartes does. Without a word of dialogue, it shows us what a few space marines can do in the face of impossible odds.

The breaking point, I think, is the melee battle against a witch during boarding actions. As melee battles go, there's not much combat involved but there's a pretty epic battle of will. A space marine forces his way past a witch's energy field using the power combo of brute force and force of will, and you've never been so captivated by someone pushing against an invisible wall.

Story

The Argosa uprisings have been checked. Retributor Astartes now assist the hunt for fleeing leaders of the rebellion.

This is the nicely succinct preamble to the episode. It's not entirely necessary, to be fair. The visuals stand on their own: Space marines board an enemy ship and slaughter everyone in sight. That's enough story for a tabletop game or for a 12-minute episode, but the preamble is a nice bit of world-building that may yet be significant later in the series (if this is a series).

As a tangent, I also have to say that the preamble reads like a snippet from a Star Wars story crawl, to me. But in the topsy-turvy world of Warhammer 40,000, the evil Empire are the "good" guys and the rebellion are the "bad" guys. I love this uncomfortable reminder that Warhammer fiction is as ugly as the real world.

In this episode, a bunch of space marines board an enemy ship. They're on the hunt for leaders of the Argosa Uprisings. They kill a bunch of voidsmen, they kill a witch, they kill a cyborg guy hooked into a mysterious orb, and then they attack another mysterious orb (I think the two orbs are linked?), and then a space marine gets absorbed by the orb and ends up teleported to a desert somewhere. I think that qualifies as a story. Anyway, I like the part where the space marine shot the guy with a big gun and there were explosions.

As simple as the narrative is, it's actually satisfying. The pace is perfect, and the Jonathan Hartman -like music (no music credit was provided, so I'm not sure who composed it) is perfectly timed to every cut. It's almost like a music video, in a good way. I don't know the names of any of the space marines, I don't even recognise their chapter markings, but it's 100% a game of Boarding Actions on screen. I was tracking rounds and Victory Points along with each scene.

Beaky helmet

This episode is, to my memory, the first time a beaky helmet (Mark VI armour) has appeared in a Warhammer+ show. There may have been some in Kill Lupercal because that would have been the era for mark VI armour, but either way this is one of the few appearances if not the first.

This is my favourite armour and probably always will be, only because it's the one locked in as my earliest, however vague, memory of Warhammer 40,000. When I was building my Iron Hands army, I bought Horus Heresy space marines because they came with Mark VI head options. It was great to see a Mark VI marine in animation, even if he only gets about 12 seconds of screen time.

Good Warhammer

This isn't great Warhammer yet. Maybe it'll end up being great Warhammer after its story continues to develop, and I understand the ending. But for now, this is really good Warhammer. It's got all the visual expressions of the tabletop game, along with cool music and beefy sound effects. This is 40k as a concrete brick, and I like it.