Dance movies are simple, and generally good fun. You expect a strong lead, gets embarrassed, pulls together a crew, tracks down that one missing ingredient, falls in love with her, loses the crew, regains the crew and beats the opposition in one big massive dance-off. Works that way in the Streetdance franchise, the Step-Up franchise, even Bring It On.
But not here. It's lovely to see a dance film step (skip, somersault?) away from the generic plot line, experiment, do something new.
Unfortunately The LXD: The Secrets of the Ra forgot to replace the generic plot with any sort of plot. It forgets to replace the big dance-off set pieces with beautifully choreographed demonstrations of high quality dancing. It doesn't even have dialogue.
Instead there is an incredibly disjointed series of set pieces, in which individuals do a few seconds of acrobatics. Sometimes someone else is involved. A few times there were actually coordinated choreographed pieces of dancing, but frankly I've seen better from the local Gilbert & Sullivan Society. A lot better.
Much of the dancing isn't done to music. There may be sound, but it's seldom actual music, and it's even rarer that the movements on-screen actually acknowledge the music.
So the plot's non-existent, the dancing's awful, but what about the actors: There aren't any. There _may_ be some acting in this film, but if so it was hidden well.
As for the cinematography, it's tough to call. The decision to heavily overexpose windows, doors, light wells - any light source - must have been intentional, and may well work for some people. I found it distracting, it prevented properly seeing the activity in the foreground and it wasn't the greatest of the technical issues for the film.
Finally, the set design. The plot less disjointed set pieces all had their own sets, themed around common film genres: The museum, the ship, the school, the factory, the saloon. Quite why any given theme was chosen was never explained, and none of them fit together.
Taken individually though, the set designs were quite good. So at least one thing in the film wasn't utterly terrible. Shame about the rest of it.
