Portal: No Escape fan film is surprisingly great

Fan-made film Portal: No Escape lives up to the high standards of one of the year's best games.

It was only a matter of time before all of the positive surrounding Portal 2 translated into the fan-film scene, but it’s nice to see one of the early entries live up to the high standards of its source material.

In director Dan Trachtenberg’s Portal: No Escape, Danielle Rayne plays a prisoner who comes into possession of one of the game’s portal-producing guns, and attempts to make her escape from the mysterious facility holding her captive.

A commercial director and the co-host of weekly online video series “The Totally Rad Show,” Trachtenburg also directed the short horror film More Than You Can Chew before taking on Portal. According to various reports, Portal: No Escape premiered during this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, and received a standing ovation from the audience.

Given how many bad movies are made from video games, it’s interesting to see such a well-done film based on the popular series. Still, one has to wonder whether there’s enough in the Portal universe to expand into a feature-length film.

Nevertheless, as you can see in No Escape, Trachtenburg clearly has a good grasp on what it takes to give a video-game concept some grounded realism on the screen. Here’s hoping Hollywood looks his way (instead of Uwe Boll) next time it wants to put a video game on the big screen.