After recently hearing about and becoming interested in a game from 1996 called HyperBlade, I started casting my mind back over the older ideas in gaming and it struck me just how more stale the gaming environment has become despite technological innovation.
HyperBlade was a future sports game revolving around the titular sport. The premise was thus:
In the future, medical science has evolved to the extent that death and serious injury is simply a minor inconvenience. This lead to ever more brutal sports to entertain the masses, eventually culminating in the most popular, HyperBlade.
Armour clad players skate around a huge halfpipe arena (known as the "drome"). The ball is known as the "rok". Each player has a large blade mounted on their right arm, known as the "jak". The jak is used both to hold and propel the ball, and also to stab and slash at players on the opposing team.
The arena itself is littered with powerups and traps. One which electrifies the ball, making it a dangerous weapon, while laser grids and spiked pillars make navigation hazardous.
Points are scored for goals, with one goal at each end of the halfpipe. However, slower and nastier teams can make up for their lack of finesse by killing or seriously hurting everyone on the opposing team - this also counts as a win.
Another interesting twist - if a player is decapitated at any point in the match, their head becomes the new "rok". This means that someone can be about to score when their teammate is killed, suddenly rendering the ball they're holding useless and giving possession to the other team.
To lighten up this rather oppressive atmosphere a little, the players all have their own backstories (many of which are both interesting and funny). The sponsors of the game are the most amusing however, with lashings of dark humour. "The Vine Institute" for example, announces that "Money doesn't grow on trees, but our limbs do!".
Simply - wow! Exciting gameplay, a fresh concept and the setting for the game itself is intriguing. What would such a dehumanised society be like? How would day to day life be? The game only gives the smallest hints, but it's a really interesting world to think about.
All this from a few images, a bit of text and a cold, futuristic soundtrack.
Then look at today's games. The only one I can think with anywhere near the same kind of interesting setting is perhaps Bioshock, which was an exception. Even that got a generic sequel.
Then there's Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3...urgh. As much as BF can be great, it'd be so nice I think to see the return or remake of older, more novel ideas.
Syndicate, Speedball, HyperBlade, Flashback...they may not have been graphically amazing, but they were so much more compelling in concept and execution. So much fresher, so much more unique.
Syndicate, in fact, is getting a remake. From the sound of it you will play a rogue Eurocorp Agent who turns to being "good". Where's the fun in that? It sounds formulaic and boring.
The original was fantastic because you were an immoral, faceless Executive. You ordered your mindless killing machines around dystopian futuristic cities, conducting assassinations, brainwashing people you needed influence over, all the while slowly spreading your Corporation across the globe.
The cyberpunk setting was gritty and intriguing, with floating cities on murky water. Amazing stuff! Now it's all traded in for a generic "hero story".
It's sad to think that in the decades of progress we've made in terms of graphics, we seem to have taken 10 steps back with the things that make games special.
Tuesday 4 October 2011
Sunday 4 September 2011
Film Review: Saving Private Ryan
*CONTAINS SPOILERS*
I caught Saving Private Ryan in a DVD sale recently and decided to watch it again for the first time in ages.
First thing that struck me is how powerful the film remains all these years later. There are scenes all the way through that will shock, sadden and occasionally also intrigue and uplift.
Most of all, though, it is great in the same way that Touching the Void is - it shows us the incredible hardships human beings will endure for a cause, whether that be survival or something else entirely.
The opening scene shows an aged man approaching a white cross (from the familiar harrowing seas of white crosses used as war graves). He becomes emotional as he looks down at it, and the camera zooms to his eyes to take us back in time.
Next, the Omaha Beach scene occupies the first 30 minutes of the film. It gives us a mere hellish taste of how horrific such a scenario would have been. Men are cut down again and again, mortars severing limbs of those trying to hide from the bullets. There is a non-stop chorus of screaming and shooting.
Tom Hanks plays the captain of a squad of Rangers landing there, and he is "lucky" enough to survive the initial landing. We see the rest of the destruction from his viewpoint more or less, but the filming style is chaotic and disjointed.
Several scenes really stick with you, as I still remember them from the first time I saw the film years ago. In one, a soldier missing an arm staggers around the beach in shock, paying no attention to the bullets all around him. Eventually, he picks up his severed limb and wanders slowly off-screen with it, apparently unsure what he was going to do with it.
Hanks himself said that even though he knew that everything he saw on the set was comprised of special effects, even he found himself shocked when actors nearby were suddenly collapsing all around.
The film is commendable for it's portrayal of both sides. While seen from an Allied perspective, both sides are seen to be capable of equal cruelty and mercy. Allied soldiers execute surrendering German soldiers at several points throughout the film (and in fact, one of the film's largest moral dilemnas hinges on this). Germans kill the wounded without hesitation. It's a huge moral grey-area, frequently crossing into ugly and very murky territory.
I think a very interesting statement is made by Wade, Hanks' squad medic, played by Giovanni Ribisi. He announces he has "stopped the bleeding" on a casualty, only for the wounded man to be killed by more bullets seconds afterwards. "Just give us a fucking chance!" he screams. It's peculiar but understandable that "fairness" be expected in warfare, but it's interesting to wonder at just where the line should be drawn, or if there is a line at all.
After the beach is taken, we see the squad progress on a new mission to bring home the titular "Private Ryan", whose 3 brothers have all died in service, in order to save his mother an absolutely horrendous blow and the US Government a public embarrassment.
Barry Pepper, one of my favourite actors for this role in particular, plays Jackson, a very religious sniper in Hanks' squad. Jackson is quite poetic in voicing his opinions and has a tendency to kiss his cross and begin religious prayers whenever looking through the scope of his gun.
That a character takes comfort from God when seemingly violating the Commandments is the obvious point of interest for the role. However, it's also compared in the film to the "God is on our side" propaganda of the time, and how appropriate or inappropriate that was to the war situation.
Medic Wade was perhaps my favourite character of the film however. The film makes time for even the more "minor" characters, which contributes to the idea that all these men are equally valuable both to the plot and to us as an audience.
He has a quiet reflection upon his past in one of the film's quieter moments, describing how his mother would always work late, and he would try to stay up as a child to talk to her, but often fall asleep. Then he mentions that sometimes she would get home early, stand in the doorway, but he would pretend to be asleep.
There is a long pause, and then he says "I don't know why I did that."
I think there's something we can all identify with in that line - something we did or even still do to deny ourselves what we actually want in order to prove some kind of "point" perhaps. When it comes to what's important, we suddenly realise how foolish and petty that was. Wade realises that he was denying himself something very important at that moment, just with that simple line of dialogue, and indeed that he might never see his mother again.
Later in the film, Wade is fatally wounded off-screen. His death is perhaps the most high-impact of any in the film. As a medic, he tries to assess his own injuries while the others attempt to stop him bleeding, eventually crying out with horrendous despair "Oh God, it's my liver!"
He asks for more morphine to "fix himself", and the squad realise that he simply wants to dull his pain and die. As he fades away, he cries out for his mother, tragically highlighting his past musings.
This desire for the presence of a mother figure apparently occurred a lot when men really died during the war (in fact, a man is seen shouting the same thing on Omaha beach earlier in the film). The film reflects that in much of the character's speech.
As an example, I think another one of the most touching bits of dialogue comes from the rebellious Private Reiben (Edward Burns), who describes a mischievious and rude encounter with an older lady. He mentions how he was helping her try on a dress he knew was too small for her, and laughs when recalling her breasts.
His story builds up to be more and more crude, with his colleagues laughing at the situation, until he retells what she said to him upon noticing his wandering eyes:
""Now when you're over there, if you see anything that upsets you, if you're ever scared, I want you to close your eyes and think of these. You understand?" So I said, "Yes, ma'am.""
Instantly the mood changes - the laughter and grins drop immediately and the soldiers suddenly become self-conscious and silent. Spielberg masterfully turns something apparently shallow and without meaning into something that really hits at human vulnerability in an oddly poignant manner.
The film presents many other fascinating characters, and I have merely scratched the surface with my observations here, but it's a thoroughly rewarding and expansive film that will make you think that maybe you now understand just a tiny, tiny bit better the terrible struggle soldiers went (and still do go) through.
5/5
[*][*][*][*][*]
I caught Saving Private Ryan in a DVD sale recently and decided to watch it again for the first time in ages.
First thing that struck me is how powerful the film remains all these years later. There are scenes all the way through that will shock, sadden and occasionally also intrigue and uplift.
Most of all, though, it is great in the same way that Touching the Void is - it shows us the incredible hardships human beings will endure for a cause, whether that be survival or something else entirely.
The opening scene shows an aged man approaching a white cross (from the familiar harrowing seas of white crosses used as war graves). He becomes emotional as he looks down at it, and the camera zooms to his eyes to take us back in time.
Next, the Omaha Beach scene occupies the first 30 minutes of the film. It gives us a mere hellish taste of how horrific such a scenario would have been. Men are cut down again and again, mortars severing limbs of those trying to hide from the bullets. There is a non-stop chorus of screaming and shooting.
Tom Hanks plays the captain of a squad of Rangers landing there, and he is "lucky" enough to survive the initial landing. We see the rest of the destruction from his viewpoint more or less, but the filming style is chaotic and disjointed.
Several scenes really stick with you, as I still remember them from the first time I saw the film years ago. In one, a soldier missing an arm staggers around the beach in shock, paying no attention to the bullets all around him. Eventually, he picks up his severed limb and wanders slowly off-screen with it, apparently unsure what he was going to do with it.
Hanks himself said that even though he knew that everything he saw on the set was comprised of special effects, even he found himself shocked when actors nearby were suddenly collapsing all around.
The film is commendable for it's portrayal of both sides. While seen from an Allied perspective, both sides are seen to be capable of equal cruelty and mercy. Allied soldiers execute surrendering German soldiers at several points throughout the film (and in fact, one of the film's largest moral dilemnas hinges on this). Germans kill the wounded without hesitation. It's a huge moral grey-area, frequently crossing into ugly and very murky territory.
I think a very interesting statement is made by Wade, Hanks' squad medic, played by Giovanni Ribisi. He announces he has "stopped the bleeding" on a casualty, only for the wounded man to be killed by more bullets seconds afterwards. "Just give us a fucking chance!" he screams. It's peculiar but understandable that "fairness" be expected in warfare, but it's interesting to wonder at just where the line should be drawn, or if there is a line at all.
After the beach is taken, we see the squad progress on a new mission to bring home the titular "Private Ryan", whose 3 brothers have all died in service, in order to save his mother an absolutely horrendous blow and the US Government a public embarrassment.
Barry Pepper, one of my favourite actors for this role in particular, plays Jackson, a very religious sniper in Hanks' squad. Jackson is quite poetic in voicing his opinions and has a tendency to kiss his cross and begin religious prayers whenever looking through the scope of his gun.
That a character takes comfort from God when seemingly violating the Commandments is the obvious point of interest for the role. However, it's also compared in the film to the "God is on our side" propaganda of the time, and how appropriate or inappropriate that was to the war situation.
Medic Wade was perhaps my favourite character of the film however. The film makes time for even the more "minor" characters, which contributes to the idea that all these men are equally valuable both to the plot and to us as an audience.
He has a quiet reflection upon his past in one of the film's quieter moments, describing how his mother would always work late, and he would try to stay up as a child to talk to her, but often fall asleep. Then he mentions that sometimes she would get home early, stand in the doorway, but he would pretend to be asleep.
There is a long pause, and then he says "I don't know why I did that."
I think there's something we can all identify with in that line - something we did or even still do to deny ourselves what we actually want in order to prove some kind of "point" perhaps. When it comes to what's important, we suddenly realise how foolish and petty that was. Wade realises that he was denying himself something very important at that moment, just with that simple line of dialogue, and indeed that he might never see his mother again.
Later in the film, Wade is fatally wounded off-screen. His death is perhaps the most high-impact of any in the film. As a medic, he tries to assess his own injuries while the others attempt to stop him bleeding, eventually crying out with horrendous despair "Oh God, it's my liver!"
He asks for more morphine to "fix himself", and the squad realise that he simply wants to dull his pain and die. As he fades away, he cries out for his mother, tragically highlighting his past musings.
This desire for the presence of a mother figure apparently occurred a lot when men really died during the war (in fact, a man is seen shouting the same thing on Omaha beach earlier in the film). The film reflects that in much of the character's speech.
As an example, I think another one of the most touching bits of dialogue comes from the rebellious Private Reiben (Edward Burns), who describes a mischievious and rude encounter with an older lady. He mentions how he was helping her try on a dress he knew was too small for her, and laughs when recalling her breasts.
His story builds up to be more and more crude, with his colleagues laughing at the situation, until he retells what she said to him upon noticing his wandering eyes:
""Now when you're over there, if you see anything that upsets you, if you're ever scared, I want you to close your eyes and think of these. You understand?" So I said, "Yes, ma'am.""
Instantly the mood changes - the laughter and grins drop immediately and the soldiers suddenly become self-conscious and silent. Spielberg masterfully turns something apparently shallow and without meaning into something that really hits at human vulnerability in an oddly poignant manner.
The film presents many other fascinating characters, and I have merely scratched the surface with my observations here, but it's a thoroughly rewarding and expansive film that will make you think that maybe you now understand just a tiny, tiny bit better the terrible struggle soldiers went (and still do go) through.
5/5
[*][*][*][*][*]
Thursday 11 August 2011
Let's Play: Kane And Lynch Planned!
Since I don't feel I can adequately sum up the epic fail of the storytelling in the game through text, I figured I'd do a Let's Play now that my FRAPs is working correctly.
It will be up on Youtube soon :)
It will be up on Youtube soon :)
Wednesday 10 August 2011
When Storytelling Fails: "Kane and Lynch: Dead Men"
*Contains spoilers*
So I was at PC World today and saw Kane and Lynch priced at a very tasty £2.98. I happily snapped it up, figuring even if it was total turd such a low price tag would make it at least a good few hours of entertainment.
I've played about 2 hours (which, seeing the ridiculous speed with which the missions are flying by, seems to be about half the game) and it's such a frustrating experience.
Good things:
- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters.
- A gritty feel to the plot.
- Continuous action.
- Reasonably solid gameplay.
- Some gorgeous level design on occasion.
Bad things:
- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters
- The plot is so dark at times that it feels like it could really do with some lightening up. It's almost oppressively depressing.
- Some shitty level design. The gorgeous levels are about balanced out with ones that seem pretty bland and uninteresting.
- Swearing. Gritty or not, an F-bomb gets dropped several times a sentence sometimes. It frequently feels over the top, rather than appropriate.
- The story is ridiculously under explained at times (see below).
- The game seems very, very short so far.
An example of the annoyances: The Tokyo Nightclub level blew me away. Fantastic use of lighting and music to create an awesome feeling level - it was like the "Club Scene" in Collateral.
However, the level lasted about 5 minutes. Rather than really exploit the cool feeling you get when taking down a guard quietly near the dancefloor and have a proper stealthy infiltration section that goes on for a while, the developers inexplicably decide to let the player walk through the level for a very short time before it essentially turns into your typical shooting gallery.
Not to mention the music stops and the dancers all run off. It was real fun just walking through a set of empty rooms shooting people (The sarcasm here is so heavy it's almost dripping off of my fangs!)
-------------------------------------------
SO! THE STORY!
The story takes the biscuit for the most irritating part of the game thus far.
Kane and Lynch has a really interesting setup. Kane is a middle aged, haggard-looking prison inmate on Death Row for apparently doing Some Really Bad Stuff™. He is wracked with guilt over his criminality, and writes a regretful letter to his daughter at the beginning of the game.
Lynch is a fellow prisoner. He's a wild-haired, scowling man with a rather scary beard. It's gradually revealed that underneath the beard is positively terrifying - he suffers from severe psychosis. Every now and then he morphs into an absolute raving maniac, kept in check only by popping some rather ineffective pills. Half the time he runs out of his medication, or forgets to take it.
Lynch bails Kane out of his appointment with death, and goes on to form an uneasy partnership with him. Kane must apparently get some stuff he "stole" for his old "friends" - though they have his family hostage as leverage and plan to kill him for his past transgression.
Lynch hides his illness from Kane and all seems to be well - until, in the middle of a heist, he suddenly snaps and executes nearly all the civilians in the bank, to Kane's astonished horror. Lynch himself wails with despair when Kane later informs him of his mass-slaughter, which apparently he had no control over.
This very interesting concept is totally squandered with a meandering, stupid plot that makes less and less sense as the game goes on.
The game seems to act like it's the middle movie of a trilogy, rather than a debut videogame. Most characters get about 2 seconds of introduction, then seem to disappear just as fast and the setting changes as if the producers were on crack.
Take the main villains: Ketamoto (at least, I think that was his name o_0) and "The7", which are apparently Kane's old group. I say apparently, because I have no clue whether I'm right there or not - the game gives an appallingly crap amount of background info. It would seem that Ketamoto is a crime boss in Japan - and Kane used to know him. However, that's all we learn. Absolutely jack is explained other than that. We don't even know who The7 are or what they do.
There's a difference between creating an air of mystery and an air of "What the shit is happening?". K&L usually gets the latter vibe.
I've played the whole game without skipping cutscenes thus far, and I have literally no idea what the hell is going on. One minute you're robbing a bank for an item which is not actually identified (lolwut?), then you're in Tokyo randomly attacking a nightclub because "That old fucker is there" (No joke, that's literally the only reason you fly to Tokyo and start shooting - because some old guy who Kane doesn't even mention previously is there. Or something. Maybe he just shoots up Tokyo for a laugh?)
Then you're back in the US, then you're in Tokyo again, then someone's dead so you have to bust into a prison (?!), then you're somewhere else. Lynch spends half the time asking WTF is going on, and rather than Kane dickishly telling him to shut up, we wish he'd fucking tell us as well.
Remember how I mentioned the moral ambiguity as both a negative and a positive? There's a reason for that - the characters are total arseholes at times. Both of them.
They almost did too good a job of making them tortured souls. Kane neglects his family completely, and ends up getting them killed. He leaves his heist buddies to die because he apparently can't be fucked to help them out of a burning van. He kidnaps Ketamoto's daughter for the vaguest of reasons (the guy apparently has something he needs, goodness knows what) and then stupidly leaves her with Lynch, despite his condition. She ends up dead, naturally.
What a hero!
Lynch on the other hand is rumoured to have murdered his own wife in one of his psycho black outs. This is hinted very strongly in a certain loading screen, where he apparently breaks down after "discovering" what he may or may not have done. In the present, he spends most of his time screwing up the plan by shooting innocents and butchering people they're meant to be protecting.
The areas in which they really could have deepened the bond between the characters were really missed, which I think is where the narrative drops the ball the most.
So far, the saddest scene in the game has been when Kane's wife was murdered by The7 for his failure to complete the task they gave him. They said they would at least let him talk to her before their collective deaths, but the thug in charge of the deed didn't even give him that opportunity. This causes Kane to go berserk and beat his would-be killer to death with a shovel.
Even the bloodthirsty Lynch is shocked by these events, and he leaps to Kane's aid without any of his normal bitching. Wow, I thought - perhaps the macho "Shut up", "No, you shut up" shit is finally over, and the devs will now add a stronger bond between the characters?
Err, no. Instead we get Kane grieving over the newly dug grave of his wife, Lynch starting to sympathise and then Kane being a total wanker and viciously brushing him off. Nice going with the character development!
I think if I were a wanted man, my wife had just died, my daughter was in terrible danger and I had no one I could count on, I'd be a little more thankful for the one guy who also lost his wife and got backstabbed by the same people. In this game, apparently such human traits are not present in the characters.
I shall play on tomorrow, but damn. The game really could have been neat, if there had actually been some thought put into the progression of things.
So I was at PC World today and saw Kane and Lynch priced at a very tasty £2.98. I happily snapped it up, figuring even if it was total turd such a low price tag would make it at least a good few hours of entertainment.
I've played about 2 hours (which, seeing the ridiculous speed with which the missions are flying by, seems to be about half the game) and it's such a frustrating experience.
Good things:
- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters.
- A gritty feel to the plot.
- Continuous action.
- Reasonably solid gameplay.
- Some gorgeous level design on occasion.
Bad things:
- Constant moral ambiguity of the central characters
- The plot is so dark at times that it feels like it could really do with some lightening up. It's almost oppressively depressing.
- Some shitty level design. The gorgeous levels are about balanced out with ones that seem pretty bland and uninteresting.
- Swearing. Gritty or not, an F-bomb gets dropped several times a sentence sometimes. It frequently feels over the top, rather than appropriate.
- The story is ridiculously under explained at times (see below).
- The game seems very, very short so far.
An example of the annoyances: The Tokyo Nightclub level blew me away. Fantastic use of lighting and music to create an awesome feeling level - it was like the "Club Scene" in Collateral.
However, the level lasted about 5 minutes. Rather than really exploit the cool feeling you get when taking down a guard quietly near the dancefloor and have a proper stealthy infiltration section that goes on for a while, the developers inexplicably decide to let the player walk through the level for a very short time before it essentially turns into your typical shooting gallery.
Not to mention the music stops and the dancers all run off. It was real fun just walking through a set of empty rooms shooting people (The sarcasm here is so heavy it's almost dripping off of my fangs!)
-------------------------------------------
SO! THE STORY!
The story takes the biscuit for the most irritating part of the game thus far.
Kane and Lynch has a really interesting setup. Kane is a middle aged, haggard-looking prison inmate on Death Row for apparently doing Some Really Bad Stuff™. He is wracked with guilt over his criminality, and writes a regretful letter to his daughter at the beginning of the game.
Lynch is a fellow prisoner. He's a wild-haired, scowling man with a rather scary beard. It's gradually revealed that underneath the beard is positively terrifying - he suffers from severe psychosis. Every now and then he morphs into an absolute raving maniac, kept in check only by popping some rather ineffective pills. Half the time he runs out of his medication, or forgets to take it.
Lynch bails Kane out of his appointment with death, and goes on to form an uneasy partnership with him. Kane must apparently get some stuff he "stole" for his old "friends" - though they have his family hostage as leverage and plan to kill him for his past transgression.
Lynch hides his illness from Kane and all seems to be well - until, in the middle of a heist, he suddenly snaps and executes nearly all the civilians in the bank, to Kane's astonished horror. Lynch himself wails with despair when Kane later informs him of his mass-slaughter, which apparently he had no control over.
This very interesting concept is totally squandered with a meandering, stupid plot that makes less and less sense as the game goes on.
The game seems to act like it's the middle movie of a trilogy, rather than a debut videogame. Most characters get about 2 seconds of introduction, then seem to disappear just as fast and the setting changes as if the producers were on crack.
Take the main villains: Ketamoto (at least, I think that was his name o_0) and "The7", which are apparently Kane's old group. I say apparently, because I have no clue whether I'm right there or not - the game gives an appallingly crap amount of background info. It would seem that Ketamoto is a crime boss in Japan - and Kane used to know him. However, that's all we learn. Absolutely jack is explained other than that. We don't even know who The7 are or what they do.
There's a difference between creating an air of mystery and an air of "What the shit is happening?". K&L usually gets the latter vibe.
I've played the whole game without skipping cutscenes thus far, and I have literally no idea what the hell is going on. One minute you're robbing a bank for an item which is not actually identified (lolwut?), then you're in Tokyo randomly attacking a nightclub because "That old fucker is there" (No joke, that's literally the only reason you fly to Tokyo and start shooting - because some old guy who Kane doesn't even mention previously is there. Or something. Maybe he just shoots up Tokyo for a laugh?)
Then you're back in the US, then you're in Tokyo again, then someone's dead so you have to bust into a prison (?!), then you're somewhere else. Lynch spends half the time asking WTF is going on, and rather than Kane dickishly telling him to shut up, we wish he'd fucking tell us as well.
Remember how I mentioned the moral ambiguity as both a negative and a positive? There's a reason for that - the characters are total arseholes at times. Both of them.
They almost did too good a job of making them tortured souls. Kane neglects his family completely, and ends up getting them killed. He leaves his heist buddies to die because he apparently can't be fucked to help them out of a burning van. He kidnaps Ketamoto's daughter for the vaguest of reasons (the guy apparently has something he needs, goodness knows what) and then stupidly leaves her with Lynch, despite his condition. She ends up dead, naturally.
What a hero!
Lynch on the other hand is rumoured to have murdered his own wife in one of his psycho black outs. This is hinted very strongly in a certain loading screen, where he apparently breaks down after "discovering" what he may or may not have done. In the present, he spends most of his time screwing up the plan by shooting innocents and butchering people they're meant to be protecting.
The areas in which they really could have deepened the bond between the characters were really missed, which I think is where the narrative drops the ball the most.
So far, the saddest scene in the game has been when Kane's wife was murdered by The7 for his failure to complete the task they gave him. They said they would at least let him talk to her before their collective deaths, but the thug in charge of the deed didn't even give him that opportunity. This causes Kane to go berserk and beat his would-be killer to death with a shovel.
Even the bloodthirsty Lynch is shocked by these events, and he leaps to Kane's aid without any of his normal bitching. Wow, I thought - perhaps the macho "Shut up", "No, you shut up" shit is finally over, and the devs will now add a stronger bond between the characters?
Err, no. Instead we get Kane grieving over the newly dug grave of his wife, Lynch starting to sympathise and then Kane being a total wanker and viciously brushing him off. Nice going with the character development!
I think if I were a wanted man, my wife had just died, my daughter was in terrible danger and I had no one I could count on, I'd be a little more thankful for the one guy who also lost his wife and got backstabbed by the same people. In this game, apparently such human traits are not present in the characters.
I shall play on tomorrow, but damn. The game really could have been neat, if there had actually been some thought put into the progression of things.
Sunday 7 August 2011
Games That Should Have Been Great: "Republic: The Revolution"
So, for what feels like about the 20th time, I reinstalled the old strategy game "Republic: The Revolution" again.
The game is...unique. Set in a fictional ex-Soviet Union splinter state named Novistrana, it allows you to lead a political revolution against a corrupt, dictatorial government.
There are 3 central Ideologies: Influence, Wealth and Force. Depending on the route your party follows, you will acquire new members with different views and form a different type of government over time.
For example - a typical Influence party will primarily use traditional rallies and canvassing to gain support, while a Force based party will perhaps use crime or intimidation to further it's agenda. A Wealthy party will seek to sway minds with flashy ad campaigns and use financial ruin to attack other parties.
It's all very odd and interesting. Unfortunately, that's where Republic starts to fall flat.
It's crammed to the brim with interesting ideas and mechanics, but the gameplay is nothing short of infuriating at times.
Take the way your party progresses: You will take out a "support increasing" action, such as a poster campaign, to increase your support in a city district. However, you can only win support from neutral Proletarians who don't support any party.
This means you have to damage opposition support before you can harvest it for yourself.
This leads to seemingly infinite "Damage Support" actions followed by "Increase Support" actions. Of course, opposing parties are doing this all the time too.
You end up winning one district, then immediately losing the one you held before. As a result, it sometimes feels bloody impossible to actually sway anyone for more than 5 seconds.
Another highly annoying design failure is that you cannot see what your party members can eventually unlock as they level. This means that you'll spend hours meticulously levelling up a guy to find that he is rubbish.
I have a "Political Activist" as one of my party members. At about Level 10, he only has 3 very mundane Influence actions. He can't even damage hostile party support. This essentially means that I have spent several hours in-game using him to unlock useful abilities he doesn't have. To get a useful party member, I have to fire him and hire someone else, meaning all my effort was totally wasted. Very, very annoying.
By contrast, you sometimes get an "uber member" who seems to be able to do everything. This is also useless. Since you need to order your political members to be working together every day (one weakens support, for example, then the other gains you support right after), having one guy able to inexplicably do loads of different stuff is actually counter-intuitive.
The objectives are also frequently ridiculous. My current goal is to "Attain 60% support in 4 areas around the Church District."
I have three methods of gaining support at present - Canvassing, Poster Campaigns and Graffiti. Both Graffiti and Canvassing create Sleaze, which basically means other parties can print it in the paper (they almost inevitably discover your actions), then you get all your support utterly destroyed in that region.
So even my "gain support" actions lose their support about 1 day later. Excellent! Now, I have majority support in all those regions, but that counts for jack. I need exactly 60%.
The local Socialist Union party (AKA the Commies) are a bunch of criminal arsehats, and will vandalise the utter shit out of my territory the minute I convince some of their proles to support me. In return, I must consolidate my support by launching graffii campaigns in their territory and reporting their acts to the papers.
This results in an endless back and forth in the papers of "OMG, COMMIES USING VIOLENCE" followed by "OMG, OTHER GUYS USING GRAFFITI".
As a result, the objective is mind-numbingly annoying to achieve. In addition to all the above, there is some kind of retarded player handicap in effect, or so it seems. Whenever you really start to take some territory, you'll suddenly find all the other parties gang up over one evening to totally rape your support base with a sudden all-out attack of graffiti, vandalism, crime waves and leaflet campaigns.
It sure is fun to work for about 2 hours and then lose it all instantly!
Now, supposedly you can counter this. A dickhead working for the local hoods keeps organising attacks on your supporters? Use your Business contact to drop a massive debt on his head, then laugh as he deserts his party and lives a poor life of ruin.
Supposedly. In actuality, the Weaken Character attacks are piss weak, and you have to perform them about 5 times to get a guy to leave his party. Then they just hire someone else >_> <_<
Of course, while you're ruining his day your guy is also unable to be supporting you with poster campaigns and the like too, meaning other parties will quite happily destroy your own support anyway. Everything requires way too much micromanagement - why should the player be punished merely for knocking on the doors of some proles? It's simply not feasible to constantly keep your actions secret, especially when only one of your 3 guys has that action available.
The end result feels like a game that could have been fantastic (interesting concept, a story that feels fresh and intriguing, an environment that is large and very ambitious) but is really let down by some stupid design choices.
The game is...unique. Set in a fictional ex-Soviet Union splinter state named Novistrana, it allows you to lead a political revolution against a corrupt, dictatorial government.
There are 3 central Ideologies: Influence, Wealth and Force. Depending on the route your party follows, you will acquire new members with different views and form a different type of government over time.
For example - a typical Influence party will primarily use traditional rallies and canvassing to gain support, while a Force based party will perhaps use crime or intimidation to further it's agenda. A Wealthy party will seek to sway minds with flashy ad campaigns and use financial ruin to attack other parties.
It's all very odd and interesting. Unfortunately, that's where Republic starts to fall flat.
It's crammed to the brim with interesting ideas and mechanics, but the gameplay is nothing short of infuriating at times.
Take the way your party progresses: You will take out a "support increasing" action, such as a poster campaign, to increase your support in a city district. However, you can only win support from neutral Proletarians who don't support any party.
This means you have to damage opposition support before you can harvest it for yourself.
This leads to seemingly infinite "Damage Support" actions followed by "Increase Support" actions. Of course, opposing parties are doing this all the time too.
You end up winning one district, then immediately losing the one you held before. As a result, it sometimes feels bloody impossible to actually sway anyone for more than 5 seconds.
Another highly annoying design failure is that you cannot see what your party members can eventually unlock as they level. This means that you'll spend hours meticulously levelling up a guy to find that he is rubbish.
I have a "Political Activist" as one of my party members. At about Level 10, he only has 3 very mundane Influence actions. He can't even damage hostile party support. This essentially means that I have spent several hours in-game using him to unlock useful abilities he doesn't have. To get a useful party member, I have to fire him and hire someone else, meaning all my effort was totally wasted. Very, very annoying.
By contrast, you sometimes get an "uber member" who seems to be able to do everything. This is also useless. Since you need to order your political members to be working together every day (one weakens support, for example, then the other gains you support right after), having one guy able to inexplicably do loads of different stuff is actually counter-intuitive.
The objectives are also frequently ridiculous. My current goal is to "Attain 60% support in 4 areas around the Church District."
I have three methods of gaining support at present - Canvassing, Poster Campaigns and Graffiti. Both Graffiti and Canvassing create Sleaze, which basically means other parties can print it in the paper (they almost inevitably discover your actions), then you get all your support utterly destroyed in that region.
So even my "gain support" actions lose their support about 1 day later. Excellent! Now, I have majority support in all those regions, but that counts for jack. I need exactly 60%.
The local Socialist Union party (AKA the Commies) are a bunch of criminal arsehats, and will vandalise the utter shit out of my territory the minute I convince some of their proles to support me. In return, I must consolidate my support by launching graffii campaigns in their territory and reporting their acts to the papers.
This results in an endless back and forth in the papers of "OMG, COMMIES USING VIOLENCE" followed by "OMG, OTHER GUYS USING GRAFFITI".
As a result, the objective is mind-numbingly annoying to achieve. In addition to all the above, there is some kind of retarded player handicap in effect, or so it seems. Whenever you really start to take some territory, you'll suddenly find all the other parties gang up over one evening to totally rape your support base with a sudden all-out attack of graffiti, vandalism, crime waves and leaflet campaigns.
It sure is fun to work for about 2 hours and then lose it all instantly!
Now, supposedly you can counter this. A dickhead working for the local hoods keeps organising attacks on your supporters? Use your Business contact to drop a massive debt on his head, then laugh as he deserts his party and lives a poor life of ruin.
Supposedly. In actuality, the Weaken Character attacks are piss weak, and you have to perform them about 5 times to get a guy to leave his party. Then they just hire someone else >_> <_<
Of course, while you're ruining his day your guy is also unable to be supporting you with poster campaigns and the like too, meaning other parties will quite happily destroy your own support anyway. Everything requires way too much micromanagement - why should the player be punished merely for knocking on the doors of some proles? It's simply not feasible to constantly keep your actions secret, especially when only one of your 3 guys has that action available.
The end result feels like a game that could have been fantastic (interesting concept, a story that feels fresh and intriguing, an environment that is large and very ambitious) but is really let down by some stupid design choices.
Friday 29 July 2011
How To Make A "Realistic" FPS Game
Having played a lot of FPS games in my time and getting frustrated over all the same issues in every single one, I thought I'd write a nice little list for any developer that wishes to make one in the future :D
The Unofficial Official Design Document For Any Bestselling "Realistic" Shooter
Step 1: Get a Theme
It's an unwritten rule that FPS games can only be set in three different times:
1 - World War II
2 - Vietnam
3 - The (Near) Future
Any other setting is a breach of design ethics.
In the near future, the game must centre around America versus Unnamed Middle Eastern Nation. If you want to get really, really creative, replace the UMEN with Russia or China.
Step 2 - Create Some Maps
Maps can be set in three different locations only:
1 - Snowy mountains
2 - Bombed out Arabic street
3 - Bombed out Russian street
Any other locations aren't plausible enough.
Step 3 - Dim the Colour Palette
In real life, everything is either grey or brown. The more grey and brown you can fit into your game world, the more realistic it is. A sufficiently realistic game will be able to make even blood and explosions look a muddled shade of brown-grey colour.
Step 4 - Make Everything Hard to See
Everyone knows that walking out of your front door, you cannot see further than 15 feet in front of you due to vegetation, fog and swirling debris in the air.
To make your game really realistic, add loads of trees, plants, shrubs, bushes fog, fire, smoke and dust flying around in the air. You'll know your game is realistic enough when the people playing it are completely confused as to what is just down the road. Blades of grass on the hills in the distance should be easily mistaken for enemy sharpshooters.
When players start shooting at man-shaped trees shrouded in gloom and saying "What the heck? That cactus wasn't a Tank?" you know that your game is truly blessed with realism.
Step 5 - Make Death Inevitable And Instantaneous
War is Hell. You should educate players that this is the case by making almost every gun one-shot kill them and survival for more than 10 seconds utterly impossible.
In real life, it's common knowledge that a 9mm sidearm can punch through a three foot solid cinderblock wall and kill someone in one hit to their little toe. To make your game an accurate simulation, your firearms should be equally deadly, if not more so. Cover should be for aesthetics only - bullets and explosions should tear right through it in seconds.
To be really accurate, you should make sure players have no idea what in the holy fuck is killing them most of the time. This is best achieved by giving everyone and their dog the ability to drop artillery, silent helicopter attacks, heavy machinegun bursts and huge bombing runs from jet planes at the press of a button, anywhere they like.
Spawn points should also belch players out in front of tanks, high explosives and mines at every possible opportunity.
Step 6 - Add An Annoying Class/Ability/Weapon
Commonly known as "The Noob Cannon" or "The Noob Class" or "That Sodding Gun That All The Lamearses Use".
The high level of realism in your game may make it less attractive to "casual" gamers. To increase your mass market appeal, add a retardedly powerful bigass machinegun or rapid fire sniper rifle to your game. Hell, it's even realistic (sort-of)! Make such a gun extremely accurate, give it a massive clip and practically unlimited damage potential. You'll soon have players falling over themselves to buy the game.
Even better, make it a DLC item. Players will be shelling out their hard-earned in no time.
Some players will also be unable to work in a team. Hence you must make it easy for them to grief their teammates and/or whore kills without helping the team. A modified Sniper class is ideal for this kind of player, so be sure to include it in your game. Give it a cool name like "Recon Master" or something, to make sure all the kiddies use it.
Step 7 - Encourage The "Pro" Mentality
To really get your game up in the sales, make sure to design obnoxious achievements and add a "Humiliation" weapon. Monitor your forums, and delete any posts that aren't roughly like the following:
"Zo me an' mah clannn p0rned some pubb1e pub-serv0r bitzhesa last nite and i got Like a 50:1 K/D ratio LOL fear my pwnage LOL fuk yerrrrrrrrrr u all noobs bitczhessz LOL!!!1"
Step 8 - Let The Money And Good Reviews Pour In
Make an expansion pack that has 2 maps and 1 gun for £59.99 two weeks later. Swim in cash, repeat.
ALSO IN THIS SERIES!
How To Make A Game That Is Actually Realistic And Not "Pseudo-Realistic"
AND
How To Make A Game That Is Actually Fucking Fun To Play
Sunday 26 June 2011
Oblivion and Schizophrenic Difficulty Settings
So I reinstalled TES: Oblivion the other day, and so far I am once again hooked. Playing as a hardcore mage for the first time, the amount of options (especially seeing as I am now finally in the Arcane University) are mind-boggling. I'm finding Wizards are considerably stronger than Warrior types so far, because they don't need to rely on a wide range of Skills or gear nearly as much, plus they can do very high damage.
However, the game still clearly suffers from a bizarre lack of balance. Upon gaining access to the Uni, I created my first spell - a Fire Damage on Touch effect that I named Ashburner I. It does a total of 62 damage in one big hit, far more than my previous 15 damage cold spell.
I proceeded to absolutely massacre wild beasts with that and my Weakness to Magic spell, plus a healthy dose of Hand To Hand punching.
Then I went to the Arena, and the fights were all pretty easy, aside from one, which just struck me as absolute BS.
The guy with the Grey Aegis shield was the opponent. I don't know the exact stats, but the shield appears to convey absolute, 100% resistance to magic on the wearer. Combined with this he has a decent longsword (Silver) and, most infuriatingly, ridiculously powerful fireball and fire touch spells.
My character relies on magic to do damage and has a crippling weakness to getting hit with it (A Breton for some resistance, but +100% vulnerability due to my Apprentice birthsign).
The fight proceeded thus - he would throw a fireball at me, ignoring my summoned partner, and it would "home in" on me as I dodged. I'd never seen that happen before, but it definitely was in this fight. Said fireball would take off 75% of my health. He'd then do it again...DEAD.
This was followed by me trying to get closer to him, to use my fists. He blocked with the shield, then Fire Touched me. DEAD.
Next time I brought my Silver Dagger, and kept poisoning it. I hit him a few times by deflecting his sword, but then he point-blank Fireballed me. DEAD.
Meanwhile, every magic attack I did was naturally 0% effective. To top it off, he had ridiculous hitpoints. I must have hit him about 100+ times with that dagger to kill him in the end, having to Quicksave part-way through the fight to actually beat him.
In the end I defeated him by standing absolutely still and dodging the fireball at the last second (worked about 30% of the time >_>) and chugging health and Fire Resistance potions like Pepsi. I'd run away at close range so he couldn't Fire Touch me to death instantly, instead waiting for him to swing the sword so I could deflect and attack.
It was very tedious and felt utterly unfair as opposed to challenging. This was followed by me looking at the shield on the floor and seeing that it was worth 15,000 gold. Lawl.
I'm now waiting for the wildnerness encounters to become ridiculous, I'm sure it will happen soon :(
However, the game still clearly suffers from a bizarre lack of balance. Upon gaining access to the Uni, I created my first spell - a Fire Damage on Touch effect that I named Ashburner I. It does a total of 62 damage in one big hit, far more than my previous 15 damage cold spell.
I proceeded to absolutely massacre wild beasts with that and my Weakness to Magic spell, plus a healthy dose of Hand To Hand punching.
Then I went to the Arena, and the fights were all pretty easy, aside from one, which just struck me as absolute BS.
The guy with the Grey Aegis shield was the opponent. I don't know the exact stats, but the shield appears to convey absolute, 100% resistance to magic on the wearer. Combined with this he has a decent longsword (Silver) and, most infuriatingly, ridiculously powerful fireball and fire touch spells.
My character relies on magic to do damage and has a crippling weakness to getting hit with it (A Breton for some resistance, but +100% vulnerability due to my Apprentice birthsign).
The fight proceeded thus - he would throw a fireball at me, ignoring my summoned partner, and it would "home in" on me as I dodged. I'd never seen that happen before, but it definitely was in this fight. Said fireball would take off 75% of my health. He'd then do it again...DEAD.
This was followed by me trying to get closer to him, to use my fists. He blocked with the shield, then Fire Touched me. DEAD.
Next time I brought my Silver Dagger, and kept poisoning it. I hit him a few times by deflecting his sword, but then he point-blank Fireballed me. DEAD.
Meanwhile, every magic attack I did was naturally 0% effective. To top it off, he had ridiculous hitpoints. I must have hit him about 100+ times with that dagger to kill him in the end, having to Quicksave part-way through the fight to actually beat him.
In the end I defeated him by standing absolutely still and dodging the fireball at the last second (worked about 30% of the time >_>) and chugging health and Fire Resistance potions like Pepsi. I'd run away at close range so he couldn't Fire Touch me to death instantly, instead waiting for him to swing the sword so I could deflect and attack.
It was very tedious and felt utterly unfair as opposed to challenging. This was followed by me looking at the shield on the floor and seeing that it was worth 15,000 gold. Lawl.
I'm now waiting for the wildnerness encounters to become ridiculous, I'm sure it will happen soon :(
Monday 20 June 2011
Series Review/Discussion: The Shadow Line
*Contains some spoilers*
So I somehow missed the excellent BBC Drama series The Shadow Line when it was on over the past few weeks. I heard about it through a friend yesterday and promptly set about watching it on iPlayer.
I must say I was pleasantly (and unpleasantly, given the nature of the programme) surprised.
The series has some moments in which it loses "Oomph" a little, but overall I would say it was a very tight and well acted Drama.
The basic plot concerns the murder of a drug lord, the instatement into power of his reluctant right hand man and the investigation of the murder by the police, the gang and an unknown third party.
Amazingly, the script (and some spot-on acting by Christopher Eccleston) actually manage to make the Heroin-dealing mastermind Joseph Bede a highly sympathetic character whose fate eventually adds a huge emotional swell to a highly charged ending. Surprising and also very pleasing to see such reversal of traditional roles in media.
Rafe Spall is great as the slimy psychopath Jay Wratten and Stephen Rae turns his character Gatehouse into a ruthless, efficient and incredibly evil man that you will utterly loathe as the series goes on.
Chiwetal Eijofor also plays DI Jonah Gabriel very believably, and he is able to present both a confused and shattered man and a decent human being simultaneously.
I found the middle episodes the weakest of the lot, but they were still enjoyable. The beginning episodes set things up very well, the later episodes all have very sharp knife-edge twists and the ending episode in particular is an hour of near non-stop revelation and shock.
In The Shadow Line, there are no happy endings. Good does not always prevail, and there is indeed the question of what "good" actually is.
In fact, when we look at the nastiest characters, they tend to be the ones that consistently profit most from the events of the series. Interestingly, however, the question is raised of whether they are the true winners over the more "noble" characters, who generally aspire to have more than money or drugs.
The only thing I found confusing (and perhaps I will not on subsequent re-watchings) was the police corruption plot overarching with the main story. Not only does this plot result in one of the most surprising and gut-wrenching twists, but it also gets very complicated to the point of confusion. In the end, I could witness the acts the characters commit, but not always their motivations.
I got the impression I was meant to know why, but it was hard to remember every small detail.
The series is also the absolute darkest I can remember ever really seeing on TV. The ending just didn't let up and felt very much like a Shakespearian tragedy - many of the characters really do not get what they deserve.
In a way though, this relentless bleakness is strangely appropriate. It almost feels like after the long tunnel that came before, things just could not have possibly ended happily in any plausible fashion. After so many murders and drug deals, so many personal heartaches for the main characters, a happy ending would have looked flippant and inconsistent.
I highly recommend you catch the series on BBC iPlayer if you haven't already, it's up for 3 more days. I know that I'm certainly going to be getting the DVD so that I can live through that final nail biting episode again at some point.
5/5.
So I somehow missed the excellent BBC Drama series The Shadow Line when it was on over the past few weeks. I heard about it through a friend yesterday and promptly set about watching it on iPlayer.
I must say I was pleasantly (and unpleasantly, given the nature of the programme) surprised.
The series has some moments in which it loses "Oomph" a little, but overall I would say it was a very tight and well acted Drama.
The basic plot concerns the murder of a drug lord, the instatement into power of his reluctant right hand man and the investigation of the murder by the police, the gang and an unknown third party.
Amazingly, the script (and some spot-on acting by Christopher Eccleston) actually manage to make the Heroin-dealing mastermind Joseph Bede a highly sympathetic character whose fate eventually adds a huge emotional swell to a highly charged ending. Surprising and also very pleasing to see such reversal of traditional roles in media.
Rafe Spall is great as the slimy psychopath Jay Wratten and Stephen Rae turns his character Gatehouse into a ruthless, efficient and incredibly evil man that you will utterly loathe as the series goes on.
Chiwetal Eijofor also plays DI Jonah Gabriel very believably, and he is able to present both a confused and shattered man and a decent human being simultaneously.
I found the middle episodes the weakest of the lot, but they were still enjoyable. The beginning episodes set things up very well, the later episodes all have very sharp knife-edge twists and the ending episode in particular is an hour of near non-stop revelation and shock.
In The Shadow Line, there are no happy endings. Good does not always prevail, and there is indeed the question of what "good" actually is.
In fact, when we look at the nastiest characters, they tend to be the ones that consistently profit most from the events of the series. Interestingly, however, the question is raised of whether they are the true winners over the more "noble" characters, who generally aspire to have more than money or drugs.
The only thing I found confusing (and perhaps I will not on subsequent re-watchings) was the police corruption plot overarching with the main story. Not only does this plot result in one of the most surprising and gut-wrenching twists, but it also gets very complicated to the point of confusion. In the end, I could witness the acts the characters commit, but not always their motivations.
I got the impression I was meant to know why, but it was hard to remember every small detail.
The series is also the absolute darkest I can remember ever really seeing on TV. The ending just didn't let up and felt very much like a Shakespearian tragedy - many of the characters really do not get what they deserve.
In a way though, this relentless bleakness is strangely appropriate. It almost feels like after the long tunnel that came before, things just could not have possibly ended happily in any plausible fashion. After so many murders and drug deals, so many personal heartaches for the main characters, a happy ending would have looked flippant and inconsistent.
I highly recommend you catch the series on BBC iPlayer if you haven't already, it's up for 3 more days. I know that I'm certainly going to be getting the DVD so that I can live through that final nail biting episode again at some point.
5/5.
Saturday 4 June 2011
Blood Bowl Races: Nurgle
So the first team I will be taking a look at will be the Nurgle team.
Nurgle are essentially a variant of Chaos teams. Nurgle is the God of Disease in the fluff, and as such Nurgle teams are made of of slimy, infectious zombie-esque abominations.
They are one of the best teams in the game for infuriating your opponent. Right from the start they have skills that make passing very hard for the other team, Foul Appearance will sometimes really mess up your opponent's blocking and they only get more irritating as they continue to level. Tentacles will make an Elf cry.
At high level, Nurgle can also be an effective bashing team. Regenerate + AV 9 means their positionals are exceedingly tough, so they can weather an onslaught of hits, then use their own strength and mutation access to really pile on pain in return.
Nurgle are similar to Chaos teams in that they have the same glaring weaknesses and strengths - a total lack of starting skills means the team is very vulnerable to Turnovers and failed actions early on, but universal access to Mutations and a lot of Strength and General access means the team can be very varied and effective once skilled.
They are also very slow, being only marginally faster than Dwarves. This means their offence is extremely weak, and they cannot expect to win by 2 TDs very often if they win at all. Poor speed and Agility is the largest weakness of a Nurgle team.
Nurgle differ from Chaos in that their Big Guy fills a completely different role (and is in fact the centre of their play) and they also focus on a disruptive gameplan rather than purely bashing skulls (though they can be good at that too).
Let's look at the player types:
Rotter
Number Limit: 1-16
Cost: 40,000/Free.
Movement: 5
Strength: 3
Agility: 3
Armour Value: 8
Normal Skill Access:
General
Mutation
Starting Skills/Traits:
Decay
Nurgle's Rot
Suggested Skills:
Dirty Player
Wrestle
Fend
Claw
Foul Appearance
Tackle
Suggested Doubles:
Guard
Mighty Blow
Sneaky Git
Unlike Chaos, who have the all-round Beastman, Nurgle teams have a dedicated Lineman known as a Rotter. Rotters are actually damn good for a measly 40,000 gold pieces, packing average Strength, average Agility and respectable Armour. However, they are slow at Movement 5 and have the Decay trait.
The Decay trait means that any serious injury (a Casualty result) will cause 2 injuries instead of one. For this reason, Rotters have short lifespans despite their reasonable AV. Lack of Regen and a doctor on the team means they are down and out when injured. They are the soft target that enemy teams will undoubtedly be trying to get off the pitch.
However, for cheap fodder that can get in the way of the opposition and play the ball in emergencies, they're very useful. They make excellent foulers out of the box and become more deadly with Dirty Player.
Mutation access also means Claw is an option, meaning they can be quite dangerous against high Armour opponents, just don't expect them to last long in a fight.
Foul Appearance en masse can also be used to get your opponent's veins throbbing. If you want to lengthen your Rotters' lifespans (and make them hyper annoying), give them Wrestle and Foul Appearance. Bashing teams will give themselves a hernia.
Finally, they (along with all Nurgle players) possess the "Nurgle's Rot" skill. This means any opponent with a STR of 4 or less killed on a block or foul action by the player will come back as a Rotter for free. The exception is players with Regen or Stunty, who can't be "infected".
This means that you never really have to worry about buying Rotters - just use free mercs if your team is bashed up and/or get replacements from players you kill.
Nurgle Warrior
Number Limit: 1-4
Cost: 110,000
Movement: 4
Strength: 4
Agility: 2
Armour Value: 9
Normal Skill Access:
General
Strength
Mutation
Starting Skills/Traits:
Foul Appearance
Disturbing Presence
Regeneration
Nurgle's Rot
Suggested Skills:
Block
Mighty Blow
Claw
Tentacles
Stand Firm
Guard
Prehensile Tail
Grab
Doubles:
Dodge
Ah, the Warriors! These guys are the killing machines of the team and the central pillars of your defence and offence. With a high Strength rating, two great disruption skills from the start (FA and DP), high AV and Regeneration, they are some of the toughest and nastiest players in the game.
They get access to General, Strength and Mutie skills on normal rolls, meaning you can customise them to be really hard hitters (Block, Mighty Blow, Claw...) or infuriating roadblock players (Block, Guard, Stand Firm, Tentacles, Prehensile Tail).
I like to have at least one killer for making my all around life easier on the pitch, while at the same time really playing to their strengths as an "annoyance" team by giving them roadblock skills as much as possible.
Their only weakness is low Movement and their lower Agility (when compared to Chaos Warriors). For this reason you want to handle them in two ways: firstly, keep them in the thick of the action, beating people senseless.
Secondly, plan where you most need them before you need them there. Their slow movement means you can really be caught out if you're not already positioned where you need to be.
Try and keep their Disturbing Presence auras spread around the pitch (or overlapping on potential pass targets). This will usually wreck any hope of a passing game, even with teams like Elves. Foul Appearance shuts down an opponent's attack 1/6 times and they lose their action unless they try to reroll it.
This means your Warriors are most annoying when just standing in the way, so I wouldn't recommend skills like Piling On if you go the killer route, since you're weakening yourself.
Block is an absolute must on first skill, I'd turn down anything but +1 Strength for it. If you do get a Strength increase, Tentacles is fantastic.Dodge on doubles can be great combined with Block + Guard, but I wouldn't take it early on.
Beast of Nurgle
Number Limit: 1
Cost: 140,000
Movement: 4
Strength: 5
Agility: 1
Armour Value: 9
Normal Skill Access:
Strength
(Mutation & General on doubles)
Starting Skills/Traits:
Disturbing Presence
Foul Appearance
Mighty Blow
Tentacles
Nurgle's Rot
Regeneration
Really Stupid
Loner
Suggested Skills:
Block
Stand Firm
Break Tackle
Grab
Guard
Thick Skull or Juggernaut (last skill perhaps)
The Beast of Nurgle is the cornerstone of Nurgle play. No other team relies on their Big Guy like Nurgle do.
This ugly mofo's Tentacles make him an absolute nightmare for Elves, Goblins and other dodgy opponents with low to average Strength. He also has the same AV and Regen as a Warrior and DP and FA too.
The Beast should always be positioned in such a way that he is tying up the opposition's most dangerous scorers. If no scorers are around (e.g. you're playing against a slow bash team), try to keep him away from killers on his own, especially if they have Claw.
He is still very tough with AV 9 and Regenerate however, so don't feel too afraid, just be aware that he is an important anchor for your play. Gang him up with your Warriors to create a formidable line, or keep him in a position where he can lock down anyone who gets past your front defences.
While he has Mighty Blow, the Beast also has Really Stupid. This means you will want someone next to him at all times, and even then he will lose his Tacklezones (and thus Tentacles) if he rolls a 1 and goes Stupid. This can be disasterous.
If you have players wrapped up in Tentacles, it may be worth not using the Beast in your next turn, and so avoid rolling for Stupidity. Losing the Tentacles can sometimes mean the difference between winning and losing - and trying to score an Injury by hitting with Mighty Blow is often not worth that. Only hit with him if you have no real risk of losing the ball or giving away a Touchdown if he goes Stupid.
He also has Loner, meaning he has a 50% chance of eating your rerolls. Without Block and with Loner, he is very unreliable when hitting people.
If the ball ever gets loose from your opponent (and it should do with Nurgle - that's your job), get your Beast on it immediately. This will really mess up Dodging teams, and makes life very hard for Strength teams too.
I tend to get Stand Firm on mine as a first skill, to make him near impossible to push away once he is lodged in somewhere. After that Guard is a good pick. Break Tackle is very good for stopping him getting tied up by one crappy opponent. He can also try to shove his way into cages with it and get his Tents around the ball carrier.
On Doubles Block is excellent because it makes his hits less risky and also keeps him stood up and in the way. Pro is also good (for rerolling Stupid). Alternatively you can get him Claw, giving him the Claw + Mighty Blow combo. This will make him very dangerous and a good killer, but it's a dubious skillup for the reasons above - he should not really be hitting often. He is not a Minotaur, and trying to use him as such will usually ruin your game.
Pestigor
Number Limit: 1-4
Cost: 80,000
Movement: 6
Strength: 3
Agility: 3
Armour Value: 8
Normal Skill Access:
General
Strength
Mutation
Starting Skills/Traits:
Horns
Nurgle's Rot
Regeneration
Suggested Skills:
Extra Arm
Sure Hands
Two Heads (very good for ball carriers)
Big Hand (for a ball retriever, preferably with +AG)
Block
Wrestle
Tackle
Pestigors are very, very useful. Rotters make reasonable ball carriers with AG 3, but they are slow. Pests give a much needed speed boost and with Sure Hands or Extra Arms make perfect carriers. They are also tough with Regenerate and with extra skill access and no Decay, they are far preferable to Rotters.
You can also go the "killy" route and take Block, Mighty Blow, Tackle, Claw, Piling On and so on, but I prefer to leave that stuff to the Warriors. And if you want pure killing power, Chaos is likely a preferable team in the first place.
Pestigors are also very expensive for what they are. I usually take two until the team has some skills (in TV matchmaking anyway). This ensures you are not enormously outskilled by your opponent's team too fast.
Since Nurgle tend to lack Tackle early on (another big weakness), I like to build a Pestigor with Wrestle, Tackle and perhaps Strip Ball. Wrestle in particular acts as a kind of "alternate Tackle" early on for you.
This gives you someone you can leave in the backfield - with Horns Pests Blitz with +1 Strength, essentially making them Strength 4 on Blitzes.
Not only is this great if you're cornered in possession, but it's also very useful for Wrackling down Catchers and the like as they sneak into your backfield. Then you can get your Rotters to stamp on them, or wrap some slimy tentacles around the ball!
Nurgle Summary:
Nurgle are one of my favourite teams in the game. For all their strengths however, they can be very hard to play consistently with. One tiny mistake can mean the difference between winning or losing. I don't enjoy such a good record with them as I do with teams like Orcs and Norse.
Even so, they are rewarding to play when things go smoothly, have a lot of room for development and watching your skills make your opponent's turn absolute hell is a joy!
Now get out there and infect some pointy-earred pansies!
Nurgle are essentially a variant of Chaos teams. Nurgle is the God of Disease in the fluff, and as such Nurgle teams are made of of slimy, infectious zombie-esque abominations.
They are one of the best teams in the game for infuriating your opponent. Right from the start they have skills that make passing very hard for the other team, Foul Appearance will sometimes really mess up your opponent's blocking and they only get more irritating as they continue to level. Tentacles will make an Elf cry.
At high level, Nurgle can also be an effective bashing team. Regenerate + AV 9 means their positionals are exceedingly tough, so they can weather an onslaught of hits, then use their own strength and mutation access to really pile on pain in return.
Nurgle are similar to Chaos teams in that they have the same glaring weaknesses and strengths - a total lack of starting skills means the team is very vulnerable to Turnovers and failed actions early on, but universal access to Mutations and a lot of Strength and General access means the team can be very varied and effective once skilled.
They are also very slow, being only marginally faster than Dwarves. This means their offence is extremely weak, and they cannot expect to win by 2 TDs very often if they win at all. Poor speed and Agility is the largest weakness of a Nurgle team.
Nurgle differ from Chaos in that their Big Guy fills a completely different role (and is in fact the centre of their play) and they also focus on a disruptive gameplan rather than purely bashing skulls (though they can be good at that too).
Let's look at the player types:
Rotter
Number Limit: 1-16
Cost: 40,000/Free.
Movement: 5
Strength: 3
Agility: 3
Armour Value: 8
Normal Skill Access:
General
Mutation
Starting Skills/Traits:
Decay
Nurgle's Rot
Suggested Skills:
Dirty Player
Wrestle
Fend
Claw
Foul Appearance
Tackle
Suggested Doubles:
Guard
Mighty Blow
Sneaky Git
Unlike Chaos, who have the all-round Beastman, Nurgle teams have a dedicated Lineman known as a Rotter. Rotters are actually damn good for a measly 40,000 gold pieces, packing average Strength, average Agility and respectable Armour. However, they are slow at Movement 5 and have the Decay trait.
The Decay trait means that any serious injury (a Casualty result) will cause 2 injuries instead of one. For this reason, Rotters have short lifespans despite their reasonable AV. Lack of Regen and a doctor on the team means they are down and out when injured. They are the soft target that enemy teams will undoubtedly be trying to get off the pitch.
However, for cheap fodder that can get in the way of the opposition and play the ball in emergencies, they're very useful. They make excellent foulers out of the box and become more deadly with Dirty Player.
Mutation access also means Claw is an option, meaning they can be quite dangerous against high Armour opponents, just don't expect them to last long in a fight.
Foul Appearance en masse can also be used to get your opponent's veins throbbing. If you want to lengthen your Rotters' lifespans (and make them hyper annoying), give them Wrestle and Foul Appearance. Bashing teams will give themselves a hernia.
Finally, they (along with all Nurgle players) possess the "Nurgle's Rot" skill. This means any opponent with a STR of 4 or less killed on a block or foul action by the player will come back as a Rotter for free. The exception is players with Regen or Stunty, who can't be "infected".
This means that you never really have to worry about buying Rotters - just use free mercs if your team is bashed up and/or get replacements from players you kill.
Nurgle Warrior
Number Limit: 1-4
Cost: 110,000
Movement: 4
Strength: 4
Agility: 2
Armour Value: 9
Normal Skill Access:
General
Strength
Mutation
Starting Skills/Traits:
Foul Appearance
Disturbing Presence
Regeneration
Nurgle's Rot
Suggested Skills:
Block
Mighty Blow
Claw
Tentacles
Stand Firm
Guard
Prehensile Tail
Grab
Doubles:
Dodge
Ah, the Warriors! These guys are the killing machines of the team and the central pillars of your defence and offence. With a high Strength rating, two great disruption skills from the start (FA and DP), high AV and Regeneration, they are some of the toughest and nastiest players in the game.
They get access to General, Strength and Mutie skills on normal rolls, meaning you can customise them to be really hard hitters (Block, Mighty Blow, Claw...) or infuriating roadblock players (Block, Guard, Stand Firm, Tentacles, Prehensile Tail).
I like to have at least one killer for making my all around life easier on the pitch, while at the same time really playing to their strengths as an "annoyance" team by giving them roadblock skills as much as possible.
Their only weakness is low Movement and their lower Agility (when compared to Chaos Warriors). For this reason you want to handle them in two ways: firstly, keep them in the thick of the action, beating people senseless.
Secondly, plan where you most need them before you need them there. Their slow movement means you can really be caught out if you're not already positioned where you need to be.
Try and keep their Disturbing Presence auras spread around the pitch (or overlapping on potential pass targets). This will usually wreck any hope of a passing game, even with teams like Elves. Foul Appearance shuts down an opponent's attack 1/6 times and they lose their action unless they try to reroll it.
This means your Warriors are most annoying when just standing in the way, so I wouldn't recommend skills like Piling On if you go the killer route, since you're weakening yourself.
Block is an absolute must on first skill, I'd turn down anything but +1 Strength for it. If you do get a Strength increase, Tentacles is fantastic.Dodge on doubles can be great combined with Block + Guard, but I wouldn't take it early on.
Beast of Nurgle
Number Limit: 1
Cost: 140,000
Movement: 4
Strength: 5
Agility: 1
Armour Value: 9
Normal Skill Access:
Strength
(Mutation & General on doubles)
Starting Skills/Traits:
Disturbing Presence
Foul Appearance
Mighty Blow
Tentacles
Nurgle's Rot
Regeneration
Really Stupid
Loner
Suggested Skills:
Block
Stand Firm
Break Tackle
Grab
Guard
Thick Skull or Juggernaut (last skill perhaps)
The Beast of Nurgle is the cornerstone of Nurgle play. No other team relies on their Big Guy like Nurgle do.
This ugly mofo's Tentacles make him an absolute nightmare for Elves, Goblins and other dodgy opponents with low to average Strength. He also has the same AV and Regen as a Warrior and DP and FA too.
The Beast should always be positioned in such a way that he is tying up the opposition's most dangerous scorers. If no scorers are around (e.g. you're playing against a slow bash team), try to keep him away from killers on his own, especially if they have Claw.
He is still very tough with AV 9 and Regenerate however, so don't feel too afraid, just be aware that he is an important anchor for your play. Gang him up with your Warriors to create a formidable line, or keep him in a position where he can lock down anyone who gets past your front defences.
While he has Mighty Blow, the Beast also has Really Stupid. This means you will want someone next to him at all times, and even then he will lose his Tacklezones (and thus Tentacles) if he rolls a 1 and goes Stupid. This can be disasterous.
If you have players wrapped up in Tentacles, it may be worth not using the Beast in your next turn, and so avoid rolling for Stupidity. Losing the Tentacles can sometimes mean the difference between winning and losing - and trying to score an Injury by hitting with Mighty Blow is often not worth that. Only hit with him if you have no real risk of losing the ball or giving away a Touchdown if he goes Stupid.
He also has Loner, meaning he has a 50% chance of eating your rerolls. Without Block and with Loner, he is very unreliable when hitting people.
If the ball ever gets loose from your opponent (and it should do with Nurgle - that's your job), get your Beast on it immediately. This will really mess up Dodging teams, and makes life very hard for Strength teams too.
I tend to get Stand Firm on mine as a first skill, to make him near impossible to push away once he is lodged in somewhere. After that Guard is a good pick. Break Tackle is very good for stopping him getting tied up by one crappy opponent. He can also try to shove his way into cages with it and get his Tents around the ball carrier.
On Doubles Block is excellent because it makes his hits less risky and also keeps him stood up and in the way. Pro is also good (for rerolling Stupid). Alternatively you can get him Claw, giving him the Claw + Mighty Blow combo. This will make him very dangerous and a good killer, but it's a dubious skillup for the reasons above - he should not really be hitting often. He is not a Minotaur, and trying to use him as such will usually ruin your game.
Pestigor
Number Limit: 1-4
Cost: 80,000
Movement: 6
Strength: 3
Agility: 3
Armour Value: 8
Normal Skill Access:
General
Strength
Mutation
Starting Skills/Traits:
Horns
Nurgle's Rot
Regeneration
Suggested Skills:
Extra Arm
Sure Hands
Two Heads (very good for ball carriers)
Big Hand (for a ball retriever, preferably with +AG)
Block
Wrestle
Tackle
Pestigors are very, very useful. Rotters make reasonable ball carriers with AG 3, but they are slow. Pests give a much needed speed boost and with Sure Hands or Extra Arms make perfect carriers. They are also tough with Regenerate and with extra skill access and no Decay, they are far preferable to Rotters.
You can also go the "killy" route and take Block, Mighty Blow, Tackle, Claw, Piling On and so on, but I prefer to leave that stuff to the Warriors. And if you want pure killing power, Chaos is likely a preferable team in the first place.
Pestigors are also very expensive for what they are. I usually take two until the team has some skills (in TV matchmaking anyway). This ensures you are not enormously outskilled by your opponent's team too fast.
Since Nurgle tend to lack Tackle early on (another big weakness), I like to build a Pestigor with Wrestle, Tackle and perhaps Strip Ball. Wrestle in particular acts as a kind of "alternate Tackle" early on for you.
This gives you someone you can leave in the backfield - with Horns Pests Blitz with +1 Strength, essentially making them Strength 4 on Blitzes.
Not only is this great if you're cornered in possession, but it's also very useful for Wrackling down Catchers and the like as they sneak into your backfield. Then you can get your Rotters to stamp on them, or wrap some slimy tentacles around the ball!
The lads!
Nurgle Summary:
Nurgle are one of my favourite teams in the game. For all their strengths however, they can be very hard to play consistently with. One tiny mistake can mean the difference between winning or losing. I don't enjoy such a good record with them as I do with teams like Orcs and Norse.
Even so, they are rewarding to play when things go smoothly, have a lot of room for development and watching your skills make your opponent's turn absolute hell is a joy!
Now get out there and infect some pointy-earred pansies!
Sunday 22 May 2011
Themes in Pulp Fiction
*Contains spoilers*
After finally watching the legendary Pulp Fiction today, I must conclude that it's now pretty high up on my "favourite films" list.
Not only is the film absolutely studded with stars but an unusual narrative method (typical of Tarantino), intriguing characters and really great dialogue makes the film an absolute pleasure to watch.
I've noticed films I like the most tend to be unorthodox and genre-busting. Pulp Fiction certainly fits those labels. It really is impossible to categorise - one minute you'll think you're watching a black comedy, then the next scene cranks up the tension like a spot-on Thriller. Then suddenly you'll be hit with the comedy again. While you're still laughing, something happens to knock the wind out of you and make you think a bit. Then you're laughing again.
Like the cheap stories from which it takes it's name, it's crammed with tales from beginning to end that can change tempo like this in the blink of an eye. It's like a whole bunch of narratives were taken and then linked beautifully using the same characters. I think the title is less a direct reference to those "trashy" paperbacks and more a hinting of the strange grittiness attached to the story.
While undoubtedly violent (and definitely heavy on the cursing), the film seems to use these two assets to full effect rather than throwing them around for the hell of it.
The film felt very noir-esque in parts, with dialogue so dramatic it bordered deliciously on being surreal. It defies the noir label though, and is instead an altogether different beast. Noir is merely one style it wears like an item of clothing and casts off when suited.
I found the film to both be immensely sad (in the specific case of one character), and yet uplifting as a net emotional effect. The themes only really hit you when you sit back and think about what you just watched.
It's definitely structured for this retrospective effect, which I think is a great credit to Tarantino's abilities. Shot in non-chronological order, you will struggle to remember what happened exactly when even after watching - then you want to watch again to confirm whether your ideas and theories on the meaning of the film are correct.
*Spoilers from this point on*
Now that I think about, the central core of Pulp Fiction lies in the revalations that each character throughout the movie experiences about themselves. These shining moments of clarity (or lack thereof) both control the characters' fates and define their personalities.
Take Jules, the most obvious example. He starts out as a hitman capable of pondering such details as what burgers are named in France, but is apparently oblivious to the horrific nature of the murders he commits. The irony to his life and what is actually important in it seems to dawn on him slowly as the film progresses.
His spiritual awakening is crowned in his final last glorious moment in the diner. I think Jackson deserved an Oscar for his performance here, nomination be damned. His delivery of that speech ("You are the weak. And I am the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin'...I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.") seems to suddenly bring the chaotic shifting of the film to a grinding halt. Balance is restored with Travolta's Vincent Vegas character giving a quick laugh before the credits, but the haunting quality of that dialogue and the piercing look in Jackson's eyes stays with us.
Jules' introspection not only seems to give him a new reason to exist, but it also gives the film it's reason to exist.
However, this soul-searching is not limited only to Jules. Look at Bruce Willis' character, Butch.
Butch starts the film apparently morally corrupt - he visits Jules and Vincent's mob boss Marsellus (Ving Rhames) in order to throw his next boxing match for money.
However, he then fights the match anyway and wins, accidentally killing the other man in the process. Having craftily bet on himself, he gets the money for both throwing the fight and winning it, tremendously pissing off Marsellus. When informed of the man's death, Butch apparently doesn't care.
His crowning moment of change comes when later trapped in the lair of some demented rapists. Having freed himself, his enemy Marsellus is still trapped and is being horribly violated off camera.
Butch pauses at the door, his freedom in front of him, and we see in his eyes that he is having his "Jules" moment. Now comes the deciding factor, the decision on what he will be for the rest of his life. He sees past his grievance with Marsellus and redeems himself by returning to save him from a greater, pervading evil.
Jules goes from shouting his Biblical reference and then executing someone coldly to reciting it remoresefully and almost sorrowfully in his last scene.
Similarly, Butch's unpleasant attitude is gone when he last speaks to his girlfriend. The rage is gone from his demands and he no longer seems tortured. Even from the sound of his voice we can hear that perhaps he has learned something more important to him than all that money
Lastly there is Vincent and Marsellus' wife Mia (Uma Thurman), easily the two most tragic characters in the film.
Vincent is effectively Jules if he had never had his realisation. He is incapable of seeing the greater meaning to his life - or rather he seems to, but shuts himself out from it.
Vincent is in a bathroom at 3 very signifcant times:
- During the beginning of the holdup of the diner.
- When at Mia's place before she overdoses on Heroin.
- At Butch's flat, waiting for him, when Butch instead surprises and kills him with his own gun.
All of these times, he is reading a cheap comic, with the camera panning significantly to it after his death.
There have been many interpretations of this, including a rather interesting feminist reading that can be seen on Wikipedia.
Personally, I haven't delved that deep into it, but I think the bathroom itself is a more simple metaphor for Vincent's isolation from the most important things that are happening all around him, just as he is isolated mentally from the most important things in life.
He chooses to go there and isolate himself almost unwittingly at crucial moments. While there, he engages himself in a trashy and cheap alternate reality. His life itself is exactly like what he is reading - ungrounded in reality and shallow, meaningless. Yet he does not realise.
He talks early in the film about the sensuous act of massaging a woman's feet, and yet we never see him in a relationship. The closest he gets is to Mia.
With Mia, we get the sense that they would be perfect for each other in a parallel dimension, which is partly what makes their last interaction strangely heartbreaking. After saving her from her OD, Vincent blows her a kiss (unseen by her) and then walks away alone.
When he is in the bathroom at her apartment, he convinces himself in the mirror to simply leave without getting any more intimate with her. The obvious explanation is he fears Marsellus' wrath, but more implicitly I believe he fears himself. He fears getting what he wants, because he doesn't understand it.
He loves Mia, but he can't even realise that. He just cannot get what he wants.
Ultimately, his same self-isolation and failure to comprehend life leads to his death at the hands of Butch. His existence is pointless and pathetic, just like the comic book, and the look of startled shock on his face before his demise tells us that that is his moment of clarity, sadly all too late.
Mia is hewn of the same material. She lives with Marsellus, but seems strangely troubled. She snorts coke like it's going out of fashion, her life similarly empty. She is at her happiest with Vincent, and yet is powerless to change her lonely destiny.
For a film apparently about the apathy and nihilism of modern culture and the sudden twists of fate that command life, Pulp Fiction has a strong undercurrent of the power of choosing one's own destiny that seems to belie all that came before.
That, I think, is the primary wonder of the film.
After finally watching the legendary Pulp Fiction today, I must conclude that it's now pretty high up on my "favourite films" list.
Not only is the film absolutely studded with stars but an unusual narrative method (typical of Tarantino), intriguing characters and really great dialogue makes the film an absolute pleasure to watch.
I've noticed films I like the most tend to be unorthodox and genre-busting. Pulp Fiction certainly fits those labels. It really is impossible to categorise - one minute you'll think you're watching a black comedy, then the next scene cranks up the tension like a spot-on Thriller. Then suddenly you'll be hit with the comedy again. While you're still laughing, something happens to knock the wind out of you and make you think a bit. Then you're laughing again.
Like the cheap stories from which it takes it's name, it's crammed with tales from beginning to end that can change tempo like this in the blink of an eye. It's like a whole bunch of narratives were taken and then linked beautifully using the same characters. I think the title is less a direct reference to those "trashy" paperbacks and more a hinting of the strange grittiness attached to the story.
While undoubtedly violent (and definitely heavy on the cursing), the film seems to use these two assets to full effect rather than throwing them around for the hell of it.
The film felt very noir-esque in parts, with dialogue so dramatic it bordered deliciously on being surreal. It defies the noir label though, and is instead an altogether different beast. Noir is merely one style it wears like an item of clothing and casts off when suited.
I found the film to both be immensely sad (in the specific case of one character), and yet uplifting as a net emotional effect. The themes only really hit you when you sit back and think about what you just watched.
It's definitely structured for this retrospective effect, which I think is a great credit to Tarantino's abilities. Shot in non-chronological order, you will struggle to remember what happened exactly when even after watching - then you want to watch again to confirm whether your ideas and theories on the meaning of the film are correct.
*Spoilers from this point on*
Now that I think about, the central core of Pulp Fiction lies in the revalations that each character throughout the movie experiences about themselves. These shining moments of clarity (or lack thereof) both control the characters' fates and define their personalities.
Jules
Take Jules, the most obvious example. He starts out as a hitman capable of pondering such details as what burgers are named in France, but is apparently oblivious to the horrific nature of the murders he commits. The irony to his life and what is actually important in it seems to dawn on him slowly as the film progresses.
His spiritual awakening is crowned in his final last glorious moment in the diner. I think Jackson deserved an Oscar for his performance here, nomination be damned. His delivery of that speech ("You are the weak. And I am the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin'...I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.") seems to suddenly bring the chaotic shifting of the film to a grinding halt. Balance is restored with Travolta's Vincent Vegas character giving a quick laugh before the credits, but the haunting quality of that dialogue and the piercing look in Jackson's eyes stays with us.
Jules' introspection not only seems to give him a new reason to exist, but it also gives the film it's reason to exist.
However, this soul-searching is not limited only to Jules. Look at Bruce Willis' character, Butch.
Butch
Butch starts the film apparently morally corrupt - he visits Jules and Vincent's mob boss Marsellus (Ving Rhames) in order to throw his next boxing match for money.
However, he then fights the match anyway and wins, accidentally killing the other man in the process. Having craftily bet on himself, he gets the money for both throwing the fight and winning it, tremendously pissing off Marsellus. When informed of the man's death, Butch apparently doesn't care.
His crowning moment of change comes when later trapped in the lair of some demented rapists. Having freed himself, his enemy Marsellus is still trapped and is being horribly violated off camera.
Butch pauses at the door, his freedom in front of him, and we see in his eyes that he is having his "Jules" moment. Now comes the deciding factor, the decision on what he will be for the rest of his life. He sees past his grievance with Marsellus and redeems himself by returning to save him from a greater, pervading evil.
Jules goes from shouting his Biblical reference and then executing someone coldly to reciting it remoresefully and almost sorrowfully in his last scene.
Similarly, Butch's unpleasant attitude is gone when he last speaks to his girlfriend. The rage is gone from his demands and he no longer seems tortured. Even from the sound of his voice we can hear that perhaps he has learned something more important to him than all that money
Vincent and Mia.
Lastly there is Vincent and Marsellus' wife Mia (Uma Thurman), easily the two most tragic characters in the film.
Vincent is effectively Jules if he had never had his realisation. He is incapable of seeing the greater meaning to his life - or rather he seems to, but shuts himself out from it.
Vincent is in a bathroom at 3 very signifcant times:
- During the beginning of the holdup of the diner.
- When at Mia's place before she overdoses on Heroin.
- At Butch's flat, waiting for him, when Butch instead surprises and kills him with his own gun.
All of these times, he is reading a cheap comic, with the camera panning significantly to it after his death.
There have been many interpretations of this, including a rather interesting feminist reading that can be seen on Wikipedia.
Personally, I haven't delved that deep into it, but I think the bathroom itself is a more simple metaphor for Vincent's isolation from the most important things that are happening all around him, just as he is isolated mentally from the most important things in life.
He chooses to go there and isolate himself almost unwittingly at crucial moments. While there, he engages himself in a trashy and cheap alternate reality. His life itself is exactly like what he is reading - ungrounded in reality and shallow, meaningless. Yet he does not realise.
He talks early in the film about the sensuous act of massaging a woman's feet, and yet we never see him in a relationship. The closest he gets is to Mia.
With Mia, we get the sense that they would be perfect for each other in a parallel dimension, which is partly what makes their last interaction strangely heartbreaking. After saving her from her OD, Vincent blows her a kiss (unseen by her) and then walks away alone.
When he is in the bathroom at her apartment, he convinces himself in the mirror to simply leave without getting any more intimate with her. The obvious explanation is he fears Marsellus' wrath, but more implicitly I believe he fears himself. He fears getting what he wants, because he doesn't understand it.
He loves Mia, but he can't even realise that. He just cannot get what he wants.
Ultimately, his same self-isolation and failure to comprehend life leads to his death at the hands of Butch. His existence is pointless and pathetic, just like the comic book, and the look of startled shock on his face before his demise tells us that that is his moment of clarity, sadly all too late.
Mia is hewn of the same material. She lives with Marsellus, but seems strangely troubled. She snorts coke like it's going out of fashion, her life similarly empty. She is at her happiest with Vincent, and yet is powerless to change her lonely destiny.
For a film apparently about the apathy and nihilism of modern culture and the sudden twists of fate that command life, Pulp Fiction has a strong undercurrent of the power of choosing one's own destiny that seems to belie all that came before.
That, I think, is the primary wonder of the film.
Friday 13 May 2011
Iniital Impressions: Crackdown 2
Being a new owner of an Xbox 360, I didn't play the original Crackdown much. I had the odd blast round a friend's place and found it fun.
Hence when I got the chance to get the sequel for a good price, I leapt at it.
Crackdown 2 sounds great on paper. You're a law enforcement "Agent" in the near-future, set to restore order to a chaotic city by any means possible.
Unfortunately, after a few hours of playing I'm rather underwhelmed by the story of the game. Crackdown 1 wasn't exactly a novel, but it seemed to have various gangs and factions as well as tasks such as assassinations that you had to carry out.
The sequel ditches that, and instead has two enemy factions: "Cell", a terrorist group who has sufficient power to actually control areas of the city completely and the "Freaks", weird lab abominations that devastate the city at night.
Now, as someone who enjoyed Prototype, this is starting to sound familiar - zombies and an enemy human faction (with Cell replacing Prototype's military enemies).
In addition to that there are also the Peacekeepers, your cop allies.
Unfortunately, this potentially interesting setup is destroyed by a clunky intro. Not only do we get next to no information of who Cell are or how the group works, but the whole concept of "Freaks" seems pretty ridiculous. Are we honestly meant to believe that a serious, professional leader of a law enforcement agency would dub ravenous monsters "freaks" as their official name? It's kinda laughable.
In addition, the monsters just aren't fun to fight. Unlike Prototype, where you could rip zombies to pieces with your own biological talons, Crackdown just lets you shoot them or beat on them a bit. It's more fun just to avoid them entirely and plough through in a car.
Cell baddies are fun to fight, however the lack of background info on them makes it seem a little pointless. The concept of a group of psychotic nutters banding together to take over a city is intriguing, but they're played in a totally one dimensional manner. The game only gives them the bare minimum of depth.
They will scream anarchist remarks ("You're going to get some of your own medicine, pig!") at you and cry out for help when shot ("I'm hit, arrrgh my leg!" brought a grin to my face as I kneecapped one with my rifle).
That brings me onto another thing - the locking system is a pain in the arse. Skirmishes are often frantic, with Cell guys hiding behind cover and their reinforcements roaring in with vehicles that look like they're straight out of Mad Max.
This gives a great atmosphere, but the target locking system can quickly make it frustrating. Sometimes you'll want to shoot a guy in the legs to stop him getting to a hiding spot, or hit his arm so that he can't fire back. Instead you'll randomly not be able to switch aim and you'll spend precious seconds being shot.
Other times I've been shooting away at a terrorist, tried to lock another and instead end up locking something totally random, like a civillian car driving the other end of the street. This is again, very frustrating.
However, I must say I'm enjoying the game overall. The sense of freedom is immense and there are simple pleasures to be had. Speeding in a police car, sirens blazing, slamming into a bunch of baddies and then leaping out of the still-moving vehicle to pump the rest full of lead is very satisfying.
I look forward to getting my special abilities up and then making a more thorough (and most likely more positive) assessment of the game.
Hence when I got the chance to get the sequel for a good price, I leapt at it.
Crackdown 2 sounds great on paper. You're a law enforcement "Agent" in the near-future, set to restore order to a chaotic city by any means possible.
Unfortunately, after a few hours of playing I'm rather underwhelmed by the story of the game. Crackdown 1 wasn't exactly a novel, but it seemed to have various gangs and factions as well as tasks such as assassinations that you had to carry out.
The sequel ditches that, and instead has two enemy factions: "Cell", a terrorist group who has sufficient power to actually control areas of the city completely and the "Freaks", weird lab abominations that devastate the city at night.
Now, as someone who enjoyed Prototype, this is starting to sound familiar - zombies and an enemy human faction (with Cell replacing Prototype's military enemies).
In addition to that there are also the Peacekeepers, your cop allies.
Unfortunately, this potentially interesting setup is destroyed by a clunky intro. Not only do we get next to no information of who Cell are or how the group works, but the whole concept of "Freaks" seems pretty ridiculous. Are we honestly meant to believe that a serious, professional leader of a law enforcement agency would dub ravenous monsters "freaks" as their official name? It's kinda laughable.
In addition, the monsters just aren't fun to fight. Unlike Prototype, where you could rip zombies to pieces with your own biological talons, Crackdown just lets you shoot them or beat on them a bit. It's more fun just to avoid them entirely and plough through in a car.
Cell baddies are fun to fight, however the lack of background info on them makes it seem a little pointless. The concept of a group of psychotic nutters banding together to take over a city is intriguing, but they're played in a totally one dimensional manner. The game only gives them the bare minimum of depth.
They will scream anarchist remarks ("You're going to get some of your own medicine, pig!") at you and cry out for help when shot ("I'm hit, arrrgh my leg!" brought a grin to my face as I kneecapped one with my rifle).
That brings me onto another thing - the locking system is a pain in the arse. Skirmishes are often frantic, with Cell guys hiding behind cover and their reinforcements roaring in with vehicles that look like they're straight out of Mad Max.
This gives a great atmosphere, but the target locking system can quickly make it frustrating. Sometimes you'll want to shoot a guy in the legs to stop him getting to a hiding spot, or hit his arm so that he can't fire back. Instead you'll randomly not be able to switch aim and you'll spend precious seconds being shot.
Other times I've been shooting away at a terrorist, tried to lock another and instead end up locking something totally random, like a civillian car driving the other end of the street. This is again, very frustrating.
However, I must say I'm enjoying the game overall. The sense of freedom is immense and there are simple pleasures to be had. Speeding in a police car, sirens blazing, slamming into a bunch of baddies and then leaping out of the still-moving vehicle to pump the rest full of lead is very satisfying.
I look forward to getting my special abilities up and then making a more thorough (and most likely more positive) assessment of the game.
Thursday 31 March 2011
Movie Review: 300
Given that I usually enjoy the "titanic ancient battle" genre in general, I should technically love this film.
Why do I not, then?
The best I can describe it is that someone offers you a delicious steak sandwich. You bite into it and the bread is soft and fluffy, but the meat feels and tastes alarmingly like wet cardboard liberated from a tramp's living quarters.
300 is the wet cardboard of ancient battle movies. It's just bland, dull, predictable, brainless and above all fake. To sum this up, let me break it down into sections.
Presentation
The presentation is my least favourite part of the film - I don't think a single shot in the film was captured without the aid of CGI, if not completely constructed by CGI. It just sucks.
Even the scenes in which Leonidas (Gerard Butler) strides around Sparta all look like they were created completely by a computer. The simplest sets look like they've been airbrushed and edited and CGI'd to within an inch of their lives as opposed to being built of something real.
We see valleys, seas, hills, trees, all with lense effects and filters and virtual graphics. Even the Spartans themselves are created apparently out of a plastic mould, all walking around with the same chiselled granite torsos.
I wonder how much CGI was performed on the main cast too. One unintentionally hilarious moment, I paused because something didn't seem quite right about the lighting on the few characters stood in the foreground.
When I looked closer, their heads seemed to be shaded in differently to their perfect physiques. It was like a competently performed photoshop, but one that looks stupid nonetheless.
This is to ignore the dreadful battle scenes and the Persian hordes. If the Spartans come out of plastic moulds, the Persians must come off of a freaking mass production line.
There are about 3 types of Persian soldier in this film: Masked Man With Turban, Masked Man Without Turban and Immortals (Masked Men In Dark Clothing).
These faceless antagonists run at the Spartans like sausages leaping into a meat grinder. They exist merely to be eviscerated in slow-mo, fast-mo, in-between-mo and collapse in ridiculous sprays of unconvincing blood.
Now I'm aware that the film is hardly meant to go for realism (seeing as it depicts oracles as monsters and delights in other similar silliness), but the fight scenes are really a highlight of the CGI bullcrap.
Remember how I said Gladiator looked real, because the effects are real? Here is the opposite.
Typical combat scene: Identikit Persian #45409 charges in, gets hit by sword, does a 360 degrees backflip with CGI blood going everywhere (the "blood" is all perfectly spherical and never hits the ground, even when about 40 guys are beings stabbed) and then makes a landing that would be shunned at the Olympics.
Making every combat scene in a whole movie boring is actually quite an impressive feat, so I salute the effects team there. Perhaps if the film wasn't structured entirely around fighting it would be forgivable, but since that's the selling point AND the narrative of the film, having crap action sequences is quite embarrassing.
If you love films where not a single shot actually looks plausible in any way, you'll love this picture.
Story
So this movie is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel "300". If you've watched Sin City, you might be lured into thinking that 300 would have similar levels of weirdness and complexity. Sadly not.
No, this film is all about MANLY BELLOWING and MANLY SHOUTING and MANLINESS and MANLINESS THAT'S A BIT HOMOSEXUAL and not a lot else.
"Spartan" is used as a replacement for the word "badass", and is overused so much ("He kept his Spartan reserve", "We are Spartans!") that it's quite comical.
The Persian army is not elaborated on in any detail besides how evil they are. Which increases with every scene. Apparently the Persians don't just execute men, they execute them with obese disfigured guys with huge blades for arms. And they have pseudo-zombies as troops. Riiiiiight.
Sometimes the film tries to pretend that it's a little clever and knows about tactics. Leonidas repeatedly mentions the importance of a good Phalanx formation. This is then followed by the battle scene showing Spartans just wading in with no order at all, somehow striking down 4000 Persians each with a flick of the wrist because the script demands it.
Unlike in Gladiator, where the death of major characters feels sad and poignant, I found myself not giving a hoot about Leonidas' fate, or the fate of his men, because they're all such airheaded macho stereotypes that you could just replace them all with Arnold Schwarznegger. About the most deep exploration of emotions in this film is a closeup of someone's eyes...that's it.
The rest of the movie boils down to a silly, predictable tale of senate conspiracy, like a low-rent rip off of Roman politics. Oh, and boobs. We get to see boobs several times, but somehow even these have suspicious hints of CGI about them and fail to be interesting.
Overall rating: 2/5
When your film is about fighting and passion but fails at both, you know that you've done something wrong somewhere along the line.
[*][*][ ][ ][ ]
Why do I not, then?
The best I can describe it is that someone offers you a delicious steak sandwich. You bite into it and the bread is soft and fluffy, but the meat feels and tastes alarmingly like wet cardboard liberated from a tramp's living quarters.
300 is the wet cardboard of ancient battle movies. It's just bland, dull, predictable, brainless and above all fake. To sum this up, let me break it down into sections.
Presentation
The presentation is my least favourite part of the film - I don't think a single shot in the film was captured without the aid of CGI, if not completely constructed by CGI. It just sucks.
Even the scenes in which Leonidas (Gerard Butler) strides around Sparta all look like they were created completely by a computer. The simplest sets look like they've been airbrushed and edited and CGI'd to within an inch of their lives as opposed to being built of something real.
We see valleys, seas, hills, trees, all with lense effects and filters and virtual graphics. Even the Spartans themselves are created apparently out of a plastic mould, all walking around with the same chiselled granite torsos.
I wonder how much CGI was performed on the main cast too. One unintentionally hilarious moment, I paused because something didn't seem quite right about the lighting on the few characters stood in the foreground.
When I looked closer, their heads seemed to be shaded in differently to their perfect physiques. It was like a competently performed photoshop, but one that looks stupid nonetheless.
This is to ignore the dreadful battle scenes and the Persian hordes. If the Spartans come out of plastic moulds, the Persians must come off of a freaking mass production line.
There are about 3 types of Persian soldier in this film: Masked Man With Turban, Masked Man Without Turban and Immortals (Masked Men In Dark Clothing).
These faceless antagonists run at the Spartans like sausages leaping into a meat grinder. They exist merely to be eviscerated in slow-mo, fast-mo, in-between-mo and collapse in ridiculous sprays of unconvincing blood.
Now I'm aware that the film is hardly meant to go for realism (seeing as it depicts oracles as monsters and delights in other similar silliness), but the fight scenes are really a highlight of the CGI bullcrap.
Remember how I said Gladiator looked real, because the effects are real? Here is the opposite.
Typical combat scene: Identikit Persian #45409 charges in, gets hit by sword, does a 360 degrees backflip with CGI blood going everywhere (the "blood" is all perfectly spherical and never hits the ground, even when about 40 guys are beings stabbed) and then makes a landing that would be shunned at the Olympics.
Making every combat scene in a whole movie boring is actually quite an impressive feat, so I salute the effects team there. Perhaps if the film wasn't structured entirely around fighting it would be forgivable, but since that's the selling point AND the narrative of the film, having crap action sequences is quite embarrassing.
If you love films where not a single shot actually looks plausible in any way, you'll love this picture.
Story
So this movie is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel "300". If you've watched Sin City, you might be lured into thinking that 300 would have similar levels of weirdness and complexity. Sadly not.
No, this film is all about MANLY BELLOWING and MANLY SHOUTING and MANLINESS and MANLINESS THAT'S A BIT HOMOSEXUAL and not a lot else.
"Spartan" is used as a replacement for the word "badass", and is overused so much ("He kept his Spartan reserve", "We are Spartans!") that it's quite comical.
The Persian army is not elaborated on in any detail besides how evil they are. Which increases with every scene. Apparently the Persians don't just execute men, they execute them with obese disfigured guys with huge blades for arms. And they have pseudo-zombies as troops. Riiiiiight.
Sometimes the film tries to pretend that it's a little clever and knows about tactics. Leonidas repeatedly mentions the importance of a good Phalanx formation. This is then followed by the battle scene showing Spartans just wading in with no order at all, somehow striking down 4000 Persians each with a flick of the wrist because the script demands it.
Unlike in Gladiator, where the death of major characters feels sad and poignant, I found myself not giving a hoot about Leonidas' fate, or the fate of his men, because they're all such airheaded macho stereotypes that you could just replace them all with Arnold Schwarznegger. About the most deep exploration of emotions in this film is a closeup of someone's eyes...that's it.
The rest of the movie boils down to a silly, predictable tale of senate conspiracy, like a low-rent rip off of Roman politics. Oh, and boobs. We get to see boobs several times, but somehow even these have suspicious hints of CGI about them and fail to be interesting.
Overall rating: 2/5
When your film is about fighting and passion but fails at both, you know that you've done something wrong somewhere along the line.
[*][*][ ][ ][ ]
Sunday 27 March 2011
Movie Review: 12 Monkeys
12 Monkeys is one of those rare films that manages to mix a huge load of ideas, themes and different genres into one production and actually have it all work brilliantly.
It also manages to have an even more unusual quality - and that is that the film gets better every time you see it and absorb more of the plot.
The story primarily concerns a disasterous global event, and the run up to it. In the near future, all but 1% of Earth's population has been wiped out by a terrible virus. The remnants of humanity live in underground settlements that are a bizarre mix of high tech gear and dirty metal walls.
The main character, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a convict in the future. He is "volunteered" for tasks to aid humanity in order to apparently reduce the prison sentence he serves, though when we get to see him we gain the impression from his personality that whatever crimes he committed are quite far in the past.
The entire film is pretty ambiguous from start to finish, which is what makes it so fun to watch. One of the huge musings through the whole film is on the nature of sanity.
Cole's primary mission (other than a fabulously creepy data-collecting trip to the surface in a vacuum suit early on) is to use an apparently new technology - time travel - to go back to the time of the outbreak, 1996, and find out what caused it.
Instead, he ends up in 1990 by mistake, and is quickly put in a mental institution for his gibberings about the future. Here he meets Goines (Brad Pitt), another mental patient who hates consumerism and apparently is obsessed with animals "taking back the world". Goines naturally goes on Cole's list as a candidate for "plague causer", whether founded or not is hard to tell.
Pitt is often, like DiCaprio, exemplified as a "pretty face" actor. Here, however, he pretty much gives the top performance of the film.
Goines is poetic, twistedly logical and yet utterly insane. He'll typically start talking about his ideas to Cole and then get "agitated", spilling out a torrent of anti-establishment jargon while Cole watches with weary confusion. He contributes considerably to the film's disorienting tone with his incongruous witterings yet solid sentiment.
One of the best speeches of the film comes from a man (Frederick Strother) who inexplicably realises he is not sane. Dressed in a smart dinner jacket, he approaches Cole and leans towards him.
"I find myself on the planet Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate the barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though this is a totally convincing reality for me in every way, nevertheless Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going there, I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?"
And is he?
Most interesting about this speech is the use of "plague" and "unnamed realities", two things that strike an enormous resemblance with Cole's 'reality'.
This question of sanity bothers us all through the film. Cole hears voices that apparently come from his head (though the voice mockingly identifies itself as another convict sent back in time). The moods of the scientists in the future change every time he sees them - at one point they are interrogating him almost cruelly and berate his lack of success, at another they encourage him as though admiring his courage and resourcefulness.
The system of time travel itself seems almost arbitrary - at one point he ends up in WWI. Does this suggest that he's imagining it, and his chaotic mind flits from one "time" to another?
Is the "virus" scenario just Cole's personal "Planet Ogo"? Is he "mentally divergent"?
These questions are answered to some extent, but left to our own minds predominantly.
The story itself features a neat twist and I just love the ending. It's very sad but also hopeful. It leaves so much open for us to think about, that even though you don't know the exact conclusion to the story, you'll be thinking about each possible outcome for days after the credits have rolled.
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
It also manages to have an even more unusual quality - and that is that the film gets better every time you see it and absorb more of the plot.
The story primarily concerns a disasterous global event, and the run up to it. In the near future, all but 1% of Earth's population has been wiped out by a terrible virus. The remnants of humanity live in underground settlements that are a bizarre mix of high tech gear and dirty metal walls.
The main character, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a convict in the future. He is "volunteered" for tasks to aid humanity in order to apparently reduce the prison sentence he serves, though when we get to see him we gain the impression from his personality that whatever crimes he committed are quite far in the past.
The entire film is pretty ambiguous from start to finish, which is what makes it so fun to watch. One of the huge musings through the whole film is on the nature of sanity.
Cole's primary mission (other than a fabulously creepy data-collecting trip to the surface in a vacuum suit early on) is to use an apparently new technology - time travel - to go back to the time of the outbreak, 1996, and find out what caused it.
Instead, he ends up in 1990 by mistake, and is quickly put in a mental institution for his gibberings about the future. Here he meets Goines (Brad Pitt), another mental patient who hates consumerism and apparently is obsessed with animals "taking back the world". Goines naturally goes on Cole's list as a candidate for "plague causer", whether founded or not is hard to tell.
Pitt is often, like DiCaprio, exemplified as a "pretty face" actor. Here, however, he pretty much gives the top performance of the film.
Goines is poetic, twistedly logical and yet utterly insane. He'll typically start talking about his ideas to Cole and then get "agitated", spilling out a torrent of anti-establishment jargon while Cole watches with weary confusion. He contributes considerably to the film's disorienting tone with his incongruous witterings yet solid sentiment.
One of the best speeches of the film comes from a man (Frederick Strother) who inexplicably realises he is not sane. Dressed in a smart dinner jacket, he approaches Cole and leans towards him.
"I find myself on the planet Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate the barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though this is a totally convincing reality for me in every way, nevertheless Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going there, I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?"
And is he?
Most interesting about this speech is the use of "plague" and "unnamed realities", two things that strike an enormous resemblance with Cole's 'reality'.
This question of sanity bothers us all through the film. Cole hears voices that apparently come from his head (though the voice mockingly identifies itself as another convict sent back in time). The moods of the scientists in the future change every time he sees them - at one point they are interrogating him almost cruelly and berate his lack of success, at another they encourage him as though admiring his courage and resourcefulness.
The system of time travel itself seems almost arbitrary - at one point he ends up in WWI. Does this suggest that he's imagining it, and his chaotic mind flits from one "time" to another?
Is the "virus" scenario just Cole's personal "Planet Ogo"? Is he "mentally divergent"?
These questions are answered to some extent, but left to our own minds predominantly.
The story itself features a neat twist and I just love the ending. It's very sad but also hopeful. It leaves so much open for us to think about, that even though you don't know the exact conclusion to the story, you'll be thinking about each possible outcome for days after the credits have rolled.
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
Sunday 6 March 2011
Movie Review: Taken
*This review contains "spoilers" for a rather predictable plot!*
So I caught this movie for the second time on TV last night and the second watching really saw the film pulling itself to pieces for me.
Now, I hate to rant on a film starring Liam Neeson, who portrayed the lovable "Dad" in Fallout 3, but I think the problem with this movie is really the script.
He gives a pretty decent performance with what he's given, but the whole film is like power trip father-revenge pornography. The film is pretty much just "I AM A DAD, DAMMIT, AND SO I AM JUSTIFIED TO SHOOT PEOPLE!11oneone!"
The plot concerns a CIA agent named Bryan (Neeson) whose daughter is kidnapped by an Albanian Mafia group. The group specialises in prostitution and Neeson's character is promptly told in dramatic fashion that he'll probably never see her again within a few days.
Anyway, this setup is all pretty irrelevant, the entire story of the film basically boils down to "Dad murders lots of bad men, happy ending." There's essentially no character development aside from "I'm pissed off, where is my daughter?" and the typical whiny ex-wife character that gets 2 minutes of screen time.
The bad guys are all completely 1 dimensional amoral arseholes and exist only to spout dickish lines before they get executed in a suitably violent fashion by the enraged Neeson.
While it has trappings of a Thriller, it has the despoiled brains of an Action film.
Take the ending, which is absolutely ludicrous and kind of reminded me of Mirror's Edge. Neeson spends 90% of the film killing people, whether by snapping necks, beating them senseless, stabbing them or just substantially altering their blood-lead molar ratio.
He has no government backing for these vigilante murder sprees and makes next to no effort to cover his tracks, he just storms in and starts piling up the corpses. We even see the police after him at one point.
So when he kills the final bad guy, does he go down for life? Or maybe he gets a death sentence for the amount of carnage he wrought?
Err, no. Actually he just takes a leisurely stroll to the airport with his daughter and goes back home to live happily ever after. Let's ignore the 50 or so people he killed, they were bad after all and so there are no repurcussions...
There is also a kind of half-arsed attempt to make Neeson's character anti-heroish. Neeson plays the part with skill, and so this actually kind of works (such as in a rather unpleasant torture scene, easily the agent's most morally dubious act).
The problem is, there is no heart to it. The film poses no moral questions, without which the whole idea of an anti-hero is kind of pointless. One minute we are encouraged to think "Wow, Bryan is actually quite a merciless dickhead", but the rest of the time the film is back to "Bad people have to die 'cos they're bad."
The action itself is quite engaging, some of the scenes, such as a shootout and the conversation beforehand in a run-down block of apartments are pretty well done. In general the film is well choreographed.
That's the only thing really that lets me save the rating a bit to 2.5/5 (rounded to 3).
If you watch it as a brainless action flick it's kind of entertaining, just don't be lured in by the false pretense that it's anything deeper, because you'll be disappointed.
It's also quite amusing how xenophobic Taken is. Literally all but one foreign character is portrayed as some kind of corrupt tosspot. Uncle Sam's people are almost all intelligent and helpful, but every French, Albanian or Arabic person is of course a complete dick, if not an outright bad guy (which they normally morph into as the film progresses).
Still, Hollywood has long been like that, so it's no real surprise.
2.5/5 --> 3/5.
[*][*][*][ ][ ]
So I caught this movie for the second time on TV last night and the second watching really saw the film pulling itself to pieces for me.
Now, I hate to rant on a film starring Liam Neeson, who portrayed the lovable "Dad" in Fallout 3, but I think the problem with this movie is really the script.
He gives a pretty decent performance with what he's given, but the whole film is like power trip father-revenge pornography. The film is pretty much just "I AM A DAD, DAMMIT, AND SO I AM JUSTIFIED TO SHOOT PEOPLE!11oneone!"
The plot concerns a CIA agent named Bryan (Neeson) whose daughter is kidnapped by an Albanian Mafia group. The group specialises in prostitution and Neeson's character is promptly told in dramatic fashion that he'll probably never see her again within a few days.
Anyway, this setup is all pretty irrelevant, the entire story of the film basically boils down to "Dad murders lots of bad men, happy ending." There's essentially no character development aside from "I'm pissed off, where is my daughter?" and the typical whiny ex-wife character that gets 2 minutes of screen time.
The bad guys are all completely 1 dimensional amoral arseholes and exist only to spout dickish lines before they get executed in a suitably violent fashion by the enraged Neeson.
While it has trappings of a Thriller, it has the despoiled brains of an Action film.
Take the ending, which is absolutely ludicrous and kind of reminded me of Mirror's Edge. Neeson spends 90% of the film killing people, whether by snapping necks, beating them senseless, stabbing them or just substantially altering their blood-lead molar ratio.
He has no government backing for these vigilante murder sprees and makes next to no effort to cover his tracks, he just storms in and starts piling up the corpses. We even see the police after him at one point.
So when he kills the final bad guy, does he go down for life? Or maybe he gets a death sentence for the amount of carnage he wrought?
Err, no. Actually he just takes a leisurely stroll to the airport with his daughter and goes back home to live happily ever after. Let's ignore the 50 or so people he killed, they were bad after all and so there are no repurcussions...
There is also a kind of half-arsed attempt to make Neeson's character anti-heroish. Neeson plays the part with skill, and so this actually kind of works (such as in a rather unpleasant torture scene, easily the agent's most morally dubious act).
The problem is, there is no heart to it. The film poses no moral questions, without which the whole idea of an anti-hero is kind of pointless. One minute we are encouraged to think "Wow, Bryan is actually quite a merciless dickhead", but the rest of the time the film is back to "Bad people have to die 'cos they're bad."
The action itself is quite engaging, some of the scenes, such as a shootout and the conversation beforehand in a run-down block of apartments are pretty well done. In general the film is well choreographed.
That's the only thing really that lets me save the rating a bit to 2.5/5 (rounded to 3).
If you watch it as a brainless action flick it's kind of entertaining, just don't be lured in by the false pretense that it's anything deeper, because you'll be disappointed.
It's also quite amusing how xenophobic Taken is. Literally all but one foreign character is portrayed as some kind of corrupt tosspot. Uncle Sam's people are almost all intelligent and helpful, but every French, Albanian or Arabic person is of course a complete dick, if not an outright bad guy (which they normally morph into as the film progresses).
Still, Hollywood has long been like that, so it's no real surprise.
2.5/5 --> 3/5.
[*][*][*][ ][ ]
Sunday 20 February 2011
Great Movie Scenes: Fargo, the "TV Scene"
*This highlight contains spoilers for the movie Fargo*
So I reviewed Fargo a few days back and rewatched it yesterday to see if I picked up on anything new. I did.
Somehow I totally missed a really brilliant scene that I think emphasises just how hot the Coens are on details that are easy to miss. It's only around a minute long, but that minute conveys so much.
Right after an amusing interlude in which cop Marge Gunderson interviews two dim-witted prostitutes, the scene cuts to a zoomed out shot of a snowy shack. Inside Gaear and Carl are waiting with the kidnapped Jean for a ransom call.
Even from the location shot we can hear Buscemi's Carl muttering insults at the TV set in the cabin. As the film's wonderfully calm soundtrack plays in the background, the camera moves inside.
From there the view passes from Carl banging the TV and becoming increasingly infuriated, back to Gaear (who is sitting silently, almost as if catatonic) and then on to Jean, who is also quiet but breathing quickly as though scared, a bag over her head.
These shots repeat themselves, zooming in further on each character slightly. As the scene progresses, Carl's lamentations grow more desperate.
"There's nothin' to do!" he cries helplessly. "F**kin' TV won't even...come on, baby! Plug me inta the ozone! F**kin' shit box!"
All through the scene the background music proceeds with contradictory gentleness, building in volume as the camera finally begins zooming in on the malfunctioning TV screen. As we zoom in, Carl's profanity gets worse and worse until he is apparently screaming at the TV in an uncontrollable rage ("F**K! F**K!!").
The TV suddenly gets a picture and the music and yelling stops immediately - a beetle in a nature documentary scuttles around, and the view zooms out to show that the TV is located in the room of Marge, who is happily cuddling up to her husband.
The first time I saw the scene, I really, really laughed. Buscemi's ability to make his character so ludicrously irate over such a trivial affair is really convincing. Stormare's Gaear is so zoned out and disinterested that he highlights this really well.
Then I got to thinking - other than for the amusement factor, why was this scene included? Why was the music chosen for this scene?
The music is a haunting violin piece that plays recurringly throughout the film. Here it contradicts Carl's screaming and at the same time invites us to speculate a higher purpose to the events shown.
Then I realised - the scene is actually very significant in determining the moral compass of the story and comments on the personalities of the characters. In that 40 seconds to a minute, this small scene sums up everything that makes the movie great.
Buscemi's character throughout the film becomes increasingly violent, erratic and uncaring. Not only does this scene foreshadow his eventual fate and the disintegration of any humanity he had, it also throws light on the state of his life and Marge's quote at the end of the film (see the review).
Carl's life is so empty and futile that he just loses it if he can't watch TV. He isolates himself from what he seems to crave (company) by picking a silent brute for a partner and gagging his hostage. He sleeps with call girls throughout the film, apparently unable and unwilling to emotionally commit to a woman. In a way, I think he's perhaps one of the most tragic characters in the story, he's just so pathetic.
Gaear, meanwhile, is (to quote Ebert), a "sullen slug". He'd be just as happy with the TV broken as fixed. He's happy not to talk to anyone. If you annoy him, he's happy to kill you. We can't even imagine what he'd want to spend the ransom money on, because he doesn't even seem to have a shred of human normality in his being. He doesn't have a life at all.
Both of them ignore Jean completely in this scene, showing the fundamental selfishness and lack of empathy they both have for other human beings. It is also, interestingly, the first and only time we see Jean after the kidnapping and before Gaear callously kills her off-screen.
As for what's on the screen - a beetle in Marge's house, on a nature show. Carl cannot pick the reception for this programme up. Does that suggest that his actions are fundamentally against the natural way of things? I think they certainly highlight another disconnect between people like Carl and Gaear and "functioning" society.
The narrator explains that the beetle is "carrying a worm back to it's nest", a striking parallel with the kidnapping which I think is meant to encourage this train of thought.
Marge by contrast is happy simply being with her husband, and eventually decides she is going to sleep. She has no need for the TV, or the material desires that it represents.
Ironically, the guy who gets to watch the TV in the end is the disinterested Gaear.
That so much inferrence can be put into a single minute of film is pretty remarkable.
Great film, great scene. Here's the YouTube recording:
So I reviewed Fargo a few days back and rewatched it yesterday to see if I picked up on anything new. I did.
Somehow I totally missed a really brilliant scene that I think emphasises just how hot the Coens are on details that are easy to miss. It's only around a minute long, but that minute conveys so much.
Right after an amusing interlude in which cop Marge Gunderson interviews two dim-witted prostitutes, the scene cuts to a zoomed out shot of a snowy shack. Inside Gaear and Carl are waiting with the kidnapped Jean for a ransom call.
Even from the location shot we can hear Buscemi's Carl muttering insults at the TV set in the cabin. As the film's wonderfully calm soundtrack plays in the background, the camera moves inside.
From there the view passes from Carl banging the TV and becoming increasingly infuriated, back to Gaear (who is sitting silently, almost as if catatonic) and then on to Jean, who is also quiet but breathing quickly as though scared, a bag over her head.
These shots repeat themselves, zooming in further on each character slightly. As the scene progresses, Carl's lamentations grow more desperate.
"There's nothin' to do!" he cries helplessly. "F**kin' TV won't even...come on, baby! Plug me inta the ozone! F**kin' shit box!"
All through the scene the background music proceeds with contradictory gentleness, building in volume as the camera finally begins zooming in on the malfunctioning TV screen. As we zoom in, Carl's profanity gets worse and worse until he is apparently screaming at the TV in an uncontrollable rage ("F**K! F**K!!").
The TV suddenly gets a picture and the music and yelling stops immediately - a beetle in a nature documentary scuttles around, and the view zooms out to show that the TV is located in the room of Marge, who is happily cuddling up to her husband.
The first time I saw the scene, I really, really laughed. Buscemi's ability to make his character so ludicrously irate over such a trivial affair is really convincing. Stormare's Gaear is so zoned out and disinterested that he highlights this really well.
Then I got to thinking - other than for the amusement factor, why was this scene included? Why was the music chosen for this scene?
The music is a haunting violin piece that plays recurringly throughout the film. Here it contradicts Carl's screaming and at the same time invites us to speculate a higher purpose to the events shown.
Then I realised - the scene is actually very significant in determining the moral compass of the story and comments on the personalities of the characters. In that 40 seconds to a minute, this small scene sums up everything that makes the movie great.
Buscemi's character throughout the film becomes increasingly violent, erratic and uncaring. Not only does this scene foreshadow his eventual fate and the disintegration of any humanity he had, it also throws light on the state of his life and Marge's quote at the end of the film (see the review).
Carl's life is so empty and futile that he just loses it if he can't watch TV. He isolates himself from what he seems to crave (company) by picking a silent brute for a partner and gagging his hostage. He sleeps with call girls throughout the film, apparently unable and unwilling to emotionally commit to a woman. In a way, I think he's perhaps one of the most tragic characters in the story, he's just so pathetic.
Gaear, meanwhile, is (to quote Ebert), a "sullen slug". He'd be just as happy with the TV broken as fixed. He's happy not to talk to anyone. If you annoy him, he's happy to kill you. We can't even imagine what he'd want to spend the ransom money on, because he doesn't even seem to have a shred of human normality in his being. He doesn't have a life at all.
Both of them ignore Jean completely in this scene, showing the fundamental selfishness and lack of empathy they both have for other human beings. It is also, interestingly, the first and only time we see Jean after the kidnapping and before Gaear callously kills her off-screen.
As for what's on the screen - a beetle in Marge's house, on a nature show. Carl cannot pick the reception for this programme up. Does that suggest that his actions are fundamentally against the natural way of things? I think they certainly highlight another disconnect between people like Carl and Gaear and "functioning" society.
The narrator explains that the beetle is "carrying a worm back to it's nest", a striking parallel with the kidnapping which I think is meant to encourage this train of thought.
Marge by contrast is happy simply being with her husband, and eventually decides she is going to sleep. She has no need for the TV, or the material desires that it represents.
Ironically, the guy who gets to watch the TV in the end is the disinterested Gaear.
That so much inferrence can be put into a single minute of film is pretty remarkable.
Great film, great scene. Here's the YouTube recording:
Saturday 19 February 2011
Movie Review: Fargo
So, yet another review ( I will really have to get back to Blood Bowl soon!) and yet another "Coen brothers" movie.
Fargo is quite similar in terms of themes to No Country For Old Men, yet also reminds me of a Shakespearian play in terms of the tragedies that seem to befall practically every character in the story.
Just like NCFOM it focuses on a merciless, senseless evil in a traditionally laid-back, moral rural setting and the impact such an invasion of darkness has on the casual observer.
Similarly, Fargo also has elements of dark comedy. I'd say it goes further than NCFOM in that regard (which is more thrillery all around) and goes into the territory of all out black comedy in places.
One point, in which a character screams incredulously "I got f**kin' SHOT! I got f**kin' shot IN THE FACE!" made me burst out laughing. It's peculiar that I can't pin down exactly why that scene is so funny, but the delivery and the context of the line (as well as the response of the other party) just showcases the edge on things perfectly. The events that unfold are so outrageously grim at points and so extreme that the instinct they grab hold of is the instinct to laugh.
The cast of this film are universally fantastic in their roles. Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi deserve a special mention as characters Gaear Grimsrud and Carl respectively. The two are a great double act.
Carl is cowardly, anger-prone, nervous, loserish criminal and yet is more human than his partner. He can't seem to stop talking. We sense there is a shred of
humanity in him despite his unpleasant nature, particularly after the first death on screen.
Gaear Grimsrud has no such human spark. He hardly ever speaks throughout the film (much to Carl's annoyance) unless it's to make a threat or deliver a statement matter-of-factly.
He's a heavily built, intimidating man, yet also gives the impression that he is somewhat mentally slow - a brute in every sense of the word. Below this exterior there lies mystery.
His name doesn't sound American. Unlike Carl, he hardly ever begins yelling or getting angry - he simply kills people who anger him instead. He's like Anton Chigurh if he was obsessed with pancakes, less intelligent and a lot less professional.
He doesn't approach that almost metaphysical level of evil, but he has an animalistic, brutal simplicity that makes him a great villain.
Buscemi's character morphs throughout the picture. He starts off slimy, unpleasant and yet more eloquent than his partner, then slowly shifts towards losing that spark himself. In a way he seems to mingle with Gaear's personality - he loses any morals he may have had, while Gaear ends the film the more coldly rational of the two.
The plot itself is interesting. It's impossible to go into detail without spoiling it, but it concerns a car salesman named Jerry (William H. Macy) trying to prop up his financial situation by having his own wife kidnapped. Needless to say his hiring of Carl and Gaear to carry the task out is very ill-advised, and the whole plan quickly goes awry. It's hard to say who is more pathetic - Jerry or the criminals.
There are many parallels in the story between seemingly unrelated characters that show up in many different sub-plots, another nice trait of the film.
Following a trail of corpses and carnage is Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), a pregnant cop in Brainerd, Minnesota (the setting for much of the story) who tries to fathom the situation unfolding before her. She, as Tommy Lee Jones in NCFOM, has a great line near the end of the film that provides some redemption for all that we see before.
So Fargo is a strange beast. It's a crime film, a comedy film and a strangely poignant tale all rolled into one. There is a brilliant irony to the story too that you will only get once you see it.
I'll leave you with one of Marge's quotes: "[It was all] for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well...I just don't understand it."
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJUvPZI3Cr4
Fargo is quite similar in terms of themes to No Country For Old Men, yet also reminds me of a Shakespearian play in terms of the tragedies that seem to befall practically every character in the story.
Just like NCFOM it focuses on a merciless, senseless evil in a traditionally laid-back, moral rural setting and the impact such an invasion of darkness has on the casual observer.
Similarly, Fargo also has elements of dark comedy. I'd say it goes further than NCFOM in that regard (which is more thrillery all around) and goes into the territory of all out black comedy in places.
One point, in which a character screams incredulously "I got f**kin' SHOT! I got f**kin' shot IN THE FACE!" made me burst out laughing. It's peculiar that I can't pin down exactly why that scene is so funny, but the delivery and the context of the line (as well as the response of the other party) just showcases the edge on things perfectly. The events that unfold are so outrageously grim at points and so extreme that the instinct they grab hold of is the instinct to laugh.
The cast of this film are universally fantastic in their roles. Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi deserve a special mention as characters Gaear Grimsrud and Carl respectively. The two are a great double act.
Carl is cowardly, anger-prone, nervous, loserish criminal and yet is more human than his partner. He can't seem to stop talking. We sense there is a shred of
humanity in him despite his unpleasant nature, particularly after the first death on screen.
Gaear Grimsrud has no such human spark. He hardly ever speaks throughout the film (much to Carl's annoyance) unless it's to make a threat or deliver a statement matter-of-factly.
He's a heavily built, intimidating man, yet also gives the impression that he is somewhat mentally slow - a brute in every sense of the word. Below this exterior there lies mystery.
His name doesn't sound American. Unlike Carl, he hardly ever begins yelling or getting angry - he simply kills people who anger him instead. He's like Anton Chigurh if he was obsessed with pancakes, less intelligent and a lot less professional.
He doesn't approach that almost metaphysical level of evil, but he has an animalistic, brutal simplicity that makes him a great villain.
Buscemi's character morphs throughout the picture. He starts off slimy, unpleasant and yet more eloquent than his partner, then slowly shifts towards losing that spark himself. In a way he seems to mingle with Gaear's personality - he loses any morals he may have had, while Gaear ends the film the more coldly rational of the two.
The plot itself is interesting. It's impossible to go into detail without spoiling it, but it concerns a car salesman named Jerry (William H. Macy) trying to prop up his financial situation by having his own wife kidnapped. Needless to say his hiring of Carl and Gaear to carry the task out is very ill-advised, and the whole plan quickly goes awry. It's hard to say who is more pathetic - Jerry or the criminals.
There are many parallels in the story between seemingly unrelated characters that show up in many different sub-plots, another nice trait of the film.
Following a trail of corpses and carnage is Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), a pregnant cop in Brainerd, Minnesota (the setting for much of the story) who tries to fathom the situation unfolding before her. She, as Tommy Lee Jones in NCFOM, has a great line near the end of the film that provides some redemption for all that we see before.
So Fargo is a strange beast. It's a crime film, a comedy film and a strangely poignant tale all rolled into one. There is a brilliant irony to the story too that you will only get once you see it.
I'll leave you with one of Marge's quotes: "[It was all] for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well...I just don't understand it."
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJUvPZI3Cr4
Monday 7 February 2011
Movie Review: No Country For Old Men
No Country For Old Men is pretty close to being a "perfect" Thriller.
The movie, set in 1980, focuses on the convergence of the lives of 3 men in Texas. The story focuses on the escalating violence and immorality associated with propagation of the heroin trade at the time and contrasts it with "the old times".
One man is Llewyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an everyman character from humble origins who one day happens upon a drugs deal gone wrong in the middle of the desert. He encounters a dying dealer who begs for water - Moss doesn't have any, and instead checks to see if anyone else survived the incident.
Eventually he finds the last dealer dead under a distant tree. Next to him is a case containing $2 million.
Moss takes the money home, where he has an attack of conscience and goes back to the scene to give water to the dying man. This act of kindness ultimately gets him embroiled in a terrifying chase.
The second man is experienced Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a man who has been Sheriff since he was 25. Early in the film, he narrates his confusion on how the world seems to be changing, quoting an example of a very callous murderer he recently brought to justice.
He mentions with fondness how the "old timers" never had to carry guns on their belts - something that has changed enormously in recent years in his mind.
He has several excellent monologues in this vein which really sum up parts of the film nicely.
The third man is the enigmatic Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chirgurh is the character that really steals the show.
He is the hitman contracted by one of the drug factions to find the money taken from the deal (inside the case, unknown to Moss at first, a tracking device is hidden). Chigurh has an implaceable accent and is clearly not from Texas.
He is a completely merciless psychotic who is very, very good at his job. While he is undoubtedly unhinged, the most disturbing thing about the character is how efficiently and intelligently he carries out his murders.
After accepting the contract, he promptly decides to simply take the money for himself instead of returning it to his clients - and then he executes them calmly with a handgun before leaving the scene.
Chigurh also has his own twisted philosophy on life. He is obsessed with fate, and throughout the film we see several scenes in which he apparently decides whether or not to take the life of a character with a coin toss.
Take this pitch-perfect scene in which Chigurh is apparently antagonised by the small talk of a petrol station clerk:
Throughout the film, he becomes an almost supernatural force, silently killing anyone who he feels like.
His unusual choice of weaponry reflects his demented personality - at one point he fires at Moss indiscriminately (killing an innocent in the process) with a silenced machine gun. Many of his other killings are carried out with a silenced shotgun, a gun which mirrors his quiet-spoken but brutal personality perfectly.
Most creepy of all, however, is the "oxygen tank" an ill-fated policeman notes that he carries with him. It is a captive bolt gun which fires a pressurised cylinder used to kill cattle. Chigurh uses it to break the door locks of his victims with a sudden, soft hiss...and is not against using it against people either.
I've deliberately avoided plot details as discussing them too much ruins the film. Hopefully I have illuminated the characters (Chigurh especially) who are really fantastic.
The film is quite violent and I'm surprised it achieved a 15 certificate rating. Swearing is actually pretty low throughout the film.
Final Word:
If you want a Thriller with a real punch that raises a lot of questions by the end, No Country For Old Men is for you.
The plot will unfold in ways that you honestly can't predict.
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
The movie, set in 1980, focuses on the convergence of the lives of 3 men in Texas. The story focuses on the escalating violence and immorality associated with propagation of the heroin trade at the time and contrasts it with "the old times".
One man is Llewyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an everyman character from humble origins who one day happens upon a drugs deal gone wrong in the middle of the desert. He encounters a dying dealer who begs for water - Moss doesn't have any, and instead checks to see if anyone else survived the incident.
Eventually he finds the last dealer dead under a distant tree. Next to him is a case containing $2 million.
Moss takes the money home, where he has an attack of conscience and goes back to the scene to give water to the dying man. This act of kindness ultimately gets him embroiled in a terrifying chase.
The second man is experienced Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a man who has been Sheriff since he was 25. Early in the film, he narrates his confusion on how the world seems to be changing, quoting an example of a very callous murderer he recently brought to justice.
He mentions with fondness how the "old timers" never had to carry guns on their belts - something that has changed enormously in recent years in his mind.
He has several excellent monologues in this vein which really sum up parts of the film nicely.
The third man is the enigmatic Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chirgurh is the character that really steals the show.
He is the hitman contracted by one of the drug factions to find the money taken from the deal (inside the case, unknown to Moss at first, a tracking device is hidden). Chigurh has an implaceable accent and is clearly not from Texas.
He is a completely merciless psychotic who is very, very good at his job. While he is undoubtedly unhinged, the most disturbing thing about the character is how efficiently and intelligently he carries out his murders.
After accepting the contract, he promptly decides to simply take the money for himself instead of returning it to his clients - and then he executes them calmly with a handgun before leaving the scene.
Chigurh also has his own twisted philosophy on life. He is obsessed with fate, and throughout the film we see several scenes in which he apparently decides whether or not to take the life of a character with a coin toss.
Take this pitch-perfect scene in which Chigurh is apparently antagonised by the small talk of a petrol station clerk:
Throughout the film, he becomes an almost supernatural force, silently killing anyone who he feels like.
His unusual choice of weaponry reflects his demented personality - at one point he fires at Moss indiscriminately (killing an innocent in the process) with a silenced machine gun. Many of his other killings are carried out with a silenced shotgun, a gun which mirrors his quiet-spoken but brutal personality perfectly.
Most creepy of all, however, is the "oxygen tank" an ill-fated policeman notes that he carries with him. It is a captive bolt gun which fires a pressurised cylinder used to kill cattle. Chigurh uses it to break the door locks of his victims with a sudden, soft hiss...and is not against using it against people either.
I've deliberately avoided plot details as discussing them too much ruins the film. Hopefully I have illuminated the characters (Chigurh especially) who are really fantastic.
The film is quite violent and I'm surprised it achieved a 15 certificate rating. Swearing is actually pretty low throughout the film.
Final Word:
If you want a Thriller with a real punch that raises a lot of questions by the end, No Country For Old Men is for you.
The plot will unfold in ways that you honestly can't predict.
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
Sunday 6 February 2011
Movie Review: Equilibrium
So this film was on TV last night, and I figured I'd review it.
Set in a dystopian (near) future after WWIII, mankind has successfully eliminated all war, murder and other unpleasant elements of human nature. This is done by making everyone in society take a daily dose of a psychoactive drug named Prozium. Prozium apparently suppresses all emotion in those who take it.
Everything is watched over by an omnipresent Big Brother style figure named Father. The film borrows heavily from 1984 in it's style and ideas.
In combination with this drugging on a huge scale, all materials that may provoke an emotional reaction (art, music, literature and so on) are rated "EC-10" for emotional content. Anyone in possession of such contraband is summarily executed or arrested for interrogation (after which execution always seems to follow anyway).
These laws are enforced by "Clerics", highly trained agents who practice "gun kata" and use their deadly talents on "Sense Offenders" without hesitation.
Now, let me get one thing straight here: gun kata is one of the biggest flaws of the film. It's basically an excuse for some absolutely ridiculous action sequences. Action directors do not seem to understand that sometimes the occasional bit of shooting that makes sense is far more exciting than completely ludicrous gunfights that are physically impossible.
The principle of this fighting style seems to be ripped from the Matrix - "gun fu" in other words. We get a brief explanation from one character that the style trains a fighter that every possible angle at which he can shoot at and be shot at from is statistically predictable.
Hence a master of "gun kata" can supposedly land many shots on targets all around him without aiming simply by analysing where the most likely placements of enemies are. He can also dodge incoming fire using the same principle.
Quite how you can possibly calculate the exact probability of getting shot from a certain angle in a 360 degree 3d arc in the microsecond before someone can pull the trigger is never explained. Perhaps all Clerics actually have quantum supercomputers for brains and can see into the future too? :\
Clerics also seem incapable of fighting less than 6+ opponents at once. I have no idea how "predicting" bullet trajectories will do you any good when fighting 6 people with machineguns at point blank range, but apparently in this film such logic is irrelevant.
Anyway, this totally inadequate "explanation" basically means that the director can stage preposterous scenes like the one which opens the film.
Christian Bale plays John Preston, an elite Cleric. He walks into a building held by Sense Offenders, switches the lights out, and walks into a room full of them. He then simply stands in the middle of the darkened room staring straight ahead and begins gunning down everyone without even being able to see where they are. With pistols.
Despite the fact he is not even moving and his gun illuminates him clearly standing in the middle of the room all return fire (from machineguns nonetheless) misses him. It truly is an absolutely dumb scene, clearly meant to appeal to the "Whoaaa, duddddeee!" crowd.
Pretty much every action sequence in the film is the same bullshit, and there are around 4-5 such scenes. The only one that was remotely interesting was when he beats up a bunch of guys with his pistols and even that was totally over the top.
Anyway, Preston finishes up there and burns the original Mona Lisa, which was what the rebels were guarding. He catches his partner Cleric (Sean Bean) apparently skipping his drugging and sneaking poetry away to read. The interaction between them early on in the film is one of the better scenes by far.
From then on Preston himself manages to accidentally deprive himself of his dosage and feels emotion for the first time. The film proceeds to get quite interesting, but at every point I started getting intrigued one of the above stupid action scenes had to crash in with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Ultimately, the biggest failure in the plot in general is the unfeasability of the regime. There are several huge gulfs in logic: Preston is revealed early on to have allowed his wife to be arrested and killed for "Sense Offence".
Later in the film, he is accused of having "relations with a female". Wait, wut? So apparently you can have a wife, you just mustn't show emotion towards her? How does that work? How do you ever get married without having love in the first place?
Surely either everyone should be single, or the state should marry people on convenience in an emotionless society? And how about the kids he has? Why did he ever have a desire to have kids (or even to have sex) if he had no emotion?
Similarly, Preston's enemies (aside from one in particular) are all doped up, but still occasionally display anger, surprise, alarm and smugness...which suggests Prozium isn't exactly doing it's job properly, or the direction and scriptwriting is schizophrenic. I think probably the latter.
And if books and art are outlawed, how do you educate people? To free humanity completely from emotion, you'd have to deprive them of their jobs and education too. These issues are not tackled.
Overall I wanted to like the film, I really did, but the completely over the top action (which is curiously dull most of the time) is a bad habit that is hard to ignore. The indecision of the script on what it wants to be (pure action, thriller or musing on society) muddles everything and by the end no ideological statement seems to be made beyond "isn't a world like this shitty?"
Final Word:
It's a passable film and I think I'd watch it again if it was on. Ultimately though it isn't bold enough to drop the Matrix rip-off crap and as such it feels a bit like it sold its soul for cheap action scenes.
The film also meanders along ploddingly at times. It lacks that "oomph" needed to really make a movie watchable.
2.5/5
[*][*][ ][ ][ ]
Set in a dystopian (near) future after WWIII, mankind has successfully eliminated all war, murder and other unpleasant elements of human nature. This is done by making everyone in society take a daily dose of a psychoactive drug named Prozium. Prozium apparently suppresses all emotion in those who take it.
Everything is watched over by an omnipresent Big Brother style figure named Father. The film borrows heavily from 1984 in it's style and ideas.
In combination with this drugging on a huge scale, all materials that may provoke an emotional reaction (art, music, literature and so on) are rated "EC-10" for emotional content. Anyone in possession of such contraband is summarily executed or arrested for interrogation (after which execution always seems to follow anyway).
These laws are enforced by "Clerics", highly trained agents who practice "gun kata" and use their deadly talents on "Sense Offenders" without hesitation.
Now, let me get one thing straight here: gun kata is one of the biggest flaws of the film. It's basically an excuse for some absolutely ridiculous action sequences. Action directors do not seem to understand that sometimes the occasional bit of shooting that makes sense is far more exciting than completely ludicrous gunfights that are physically impossible.
The principle of this fighting style seems to be ripped from the Matrix - "gun fu" in other words. We get a brief explanation from one character that the style trains a fighter that every possible angle at which he can shoot at and be shot at from is statistically predictable.
Hence a master of "gun kata" can supposedly land many shots on targets all around him without aiming simply by analysing where the most likely placements of enemies are. He can also dodge incoming fire using the same principle.
Quite how you can possibly calculate the exact probability of getting shot from a certain angle in a 360 degree 3d arc in the microsecond before someone can pull the trigger is never explained. Perhaps all Clerics actually have quantum supercomputers for brains and can see into the future too? :\
Clerics also seem incapable of fighting less than 6+ opponents at once. I have no idea how "predicting" bullet trajectories will do you any good when fighting 6 people with machineguns at point blank range, but apparently in this film such logic is irrelevant.
Anyway, this totally inadequate "explanation" basically means that the director can stage preposterous scenes like the one which opens the film.
Christian Bale plays John Preston, an elite Cleric. He walks into a building held by Sense Offenders, switches the lights out, and walks into a room full of them. He then simply stands in the middle of the darkened room staring straight ahead and begins gunning down everyone without even being able to see where they are. With pistols.
Despite the fact he is not even moving and his gun illuminates him clearly standing in the middle of the room all return fire (from machineguns nonetheless) misses him. It truly is an absolutely dumb scene, clearly meant to appeal to the "Whoaaa, duddddeee!" crowd.
Pretty much every action sequence in the film is the same bullshit, and there are around 4-5 such scenes. The only one that was remotely interesting was when he beats up a bunch of guys with his pistols and even that was totally over the top.
Anyway, Preston finishes up there and burns the original Mona Lisa, which was what the rebels were guarding. He catches his partner Cleric (Sean Bean) apparently skipping his drugging and sneaking poetry away to read. The interaction between them early on in the film is one of the better scenes by far.
From then on Preston himself manages to accidentally deprive himself of his dosage and feels emotion for the first time. The film proceeds to get quite interesting, but at every point I started getting intrigued one of the above stupid action scenes had to crash in with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Ultimately, the biggest failure in the plot in general is the unfeasability of the regime. There are several huge gulfs in logic: Preston is revealed early on to have allowed his wife to be arrested and killed for "Sense Offence".
Later in the film, he is accused of having "relations with a female". Wait, wut? So apparently you can have a wife, you just mustn't show emotion towards her? How does that work? How do you ever get married without having love in the first place?
Surely either everyone should be single, or the state should marry people on convenience in an emotionless society? And how about the kids he has? Why did he ever have a desire to have kids (or even to have sex) if he had no emotion?
Similarly, Preston's enemies (aside from one in particular) are all doped up, but still occasionally display anger, surprise, alarm and smugness...which suggests Prozium isn't exactly doing it's job properly, or the direction and scriptwriting is schizophrenic. I think probably the latter.
And if books and art are outlawed, how do you educate people? To free humanity completely from emotion, you'd have to deprive them of their jobs and education too. These issues are not tackled.
Overall I wanted to like the film, I really did, but the completely over the top action (which is curiously dull most of the time) is a bad habit that is hard to ignore. The indecision of the script on what it wants to be (pure action, thriller or musing on society) muddles everything and by the end no ideological statement seems to be made beyond "isn't a world like this shitty?"
Final Word:
It's a passable film and I think I'd watch it again if it was on. Ultimately though it isn't bold enough to drop the Matrix rip-off crap and as such it feels a bit like it sold its soul for cheap action scenes.
The film also meanders along ploddingly at times. It lacks that "oomph" needed to really make a movie watchable.
2.5/5
[*][*][ ][ ][ ]
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