The officers in charge decide to try and amputate the suit from the team, but when brought to the hospital, they escape using the suit's abilities. They are intercepted by Adam, but they work together to create a strong energy shield and knock him unconscious. After escaping, they hide out in Hagan's ex-wife's cabin. Zach calls the Worg-controlled Mindy on Skype and gives her his location. She arrives and attacks the group, but they subdue her and Woody communicates with the Worg through the device on the back of her neck. Before they can finish negotiating, Zach rips the device off and it self-destructs, destroying the cabin. They are then pursued by the possessed soldiers, but escape.
The team goes on their way to Zach and Mindy's high school, where they find that an Antarean ship has arrived and is over the town's football field, creating a giant forcefield around it. The Worg transmit a message, calling the Champions of Earth to battle. Lazer Team is once again ambushed by the possessed soldiers, but they use teamwork to kill all four of them. With the pressure of saving the planet weighing down on them, they decide to hide except for Hagan, who turns himself in to the military. However, now seeing the full potential in the team, Adam frees Hagan and they sneak to the stadium where a crowd has formed around the UFO. They find the rest of the team there and regroup, hijacking a police car and ramming it into the forcefield to successfully reach the football field.
The Lazer Team
The Worg warrior arrives in an identical suit of armor. Woody intercepts a transmission from the ship, revealing that rather than a war they are part of an elimination tournament where the Antareans destroy the losers' planets until one remains. Lazer Team proves unsuccessful at defeating the Worg by themselves, so Adam begins a distraction using riot gear from the police car. Adam is killed by the Worg with a dark matter beam, indirectly teaching the team how to achieve this with the suit. Lazer Team and the Worg fire dark matter beams into each other, creating a vortex. The four separated suit pieces malfunction and Lazer Team is blown clear of the forcefield, but the Worg and the Antarean ship are consumed. The team is greeted by a huge crowd outside. Emory arrives and states that the war isn't over, and that Lazer Team is going into space.
Today, YouTube Red gets the gang back together for Lazer Team 2, the sequel of the hugely popular sci-fi action comedy, Lazer Team. Produced by Fullscreen Films and Rooster Teeth, the film taps into Rooster Teeth's 38+ million YouTube subscribers and doubles down on the non-traditional approach the team used to make the first movie. The original Lazer Team film set a new standard for how fans support projects from their favorite creators by breaking crowdsourcing records with over $2 million raised in just 30 days. It also brought together Rooster Teeth fans from around the world who crowdsourced a demand-based theatrical run in more than 200 cities. And it's that rabid fanbase that Lazer Team 2 is meant for.
The original Lazer Team presents a fantastic template from which to pattern this sequel's story, but when it comes to the production and distribution of Rooster Teeth's live-action movies, the company was on the cutting edge. In addition to seeking production partners, the budget for the first film largely came from Rooster Teeth's fanbase through a crowd-sourcing campaign. That's an approach that's been done before by indie filmmakers, but an interesting one for the company known for the animated antics of Red vs Blue and RWBY, along with a variety of live-action YouTube fare. It basically let their fans weigh in, decide if they wanted to see a movie about a team of dysfunctional degenerates equipped with alien technology who take down an extraterrestrial threat, and pony up the dough to make it so. Against all odds, it worked.
And because it worked, Lazer Team 2 is cut from the same cloth of the original. It's sporadically funny throughout, has a strong foundation in the conflicts among its title characters, and pumps up the action as compared to the original. But it's not for everyone, rather, it seems to be specifically tailored to the tastes of Rooster Teeth's fans. Or perhaps the uneven comedy--which veers from the low-brow face-in-crotch/ass jokes and offensive, unfunny comments about Syrian refugees, to clever turns of phrase, perfectly timed gags, and absolute gut-busting moments of surprise humor--grows more from the core creative team at Rooster Teeth which fans of similar tastes gravitated towards over the years. Regardless of the chicken-or-the-egg origin of Rooster Teeth's brand, it works for them, and it works for Lazer Team 2.
The sequel adds a pair of impressive supporting roles with Bloom's intelligent and resourceful scientist Maggie, and the imposing yet charismatic Pratt as Kilborne, a tough-as-nails military leader who antagonizes the team on two fronts. (Dunn remains my favorite of the bunch in both films and his comedic timing can't be beat.) Maggie sort of stands in for those of us in the audience who find the Lazer Team's behavior immature and a bit irritating. She finds them in various states of despair after their short-lived success as world-saving champions eventually ruins their lives, in part because the alien technology is still grafted to their bodies which makes maintaining gainful employment and normal relationships difficult. Woody, whom Maggie worked alongside and got quite close to, is the only one to use his new gifts toward a bigger cause in a pursuit of greater scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, this work leads to his abduction by an unseen alien force. And when Kilborne shuts down the project with Woody still on the wrong side of a wormhole, Maggie is forced to reunite the Lazer Team in the hopes of rescuing him.
It's a fairly simple and straightforward conceit, and one that allows the writers and actors to revisit the dynamics that made the first movie work as well as it did. The members of Lazer Team constantly butt heads over their differing opinions and strong personalities. But rather than just rehash the team-building efforts of the first film, which this sequel does a bit to be honest, the guys and their gear get an upgrade in this new film. New tech emerges, as do new super-stretchy suits, and they get the opportunity to show off their new abilities in fun combat scenes pulled straight out of your favorite video game. You might see the conclusion coming a lightyear away, but it's a fun ride while it lasts. (Oh and it's worth mentioning that video game culture is alive and well in this sequel with numerous references dropped throughout; Rooster Teeth faithful will also spot plenty of Easter eggs and familiar faces.) Be sure to stick around through the end credits because there might even be a tease for a potential Lazer Team 3...
This sci-fi comedy comes from the guys behind the popular Rooster Teeth YouTube channel, and while it's far from brilliant, it shows an infectious enthusiasm for cheesy sci-fi films. Lazer Team is smart about its not-so-smart characters (the title is deliberately misspelled); it paints them as sympathetic and imperfect, and it's easy to root for them, especially since their basic predicament requires teamwork to survive.
The Austin-based Rooster Teeth Productions is no stranger to creating content. In fact, the production company is responsible for the long-running webseries Red Vs. Blue, created using gameplay footage from the Bungie game Halo to tell the story of two opposing teams of soldiers and the ongoing war between their two camps.
After you watch the first video, you can go on to watch visualizations for each individual organization. There are currently eight, but Lazer hopes the public will engage his team in conversation and request visualizations for other entities.
In Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Philip Tetlock (writing with Dan Gardner) discusses the inability of big data-based AI technologies to replace human judgment. Tetlock reports a conversation he had with David Ferrucci, who led the engineering team that built the Jeopardy-winning Watson computer system. Tetlock contrasted two questions: 2ff7e9595c
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