Archive for the 'Review' Category

08
Sep

Mercenaries 2: Broken to Greatness

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Review, Video Games, Consoles and Game Design

image I was a big fan of the first Mercenaries game. Although there had been a few previous attempts to use and recreate the mission-driven, vehicle oriented, “Sandbox” style gameplay of GTA3, Mercenaries was one of the first to successfully transplant it into a radically different genre. It was a logical leap, but by turning GTA’s metaphorical urban war-zone into a literal one, it gave the player a wider variety of (mostly military) toys to play with, along with bigger targets to blow up. And instead of your amoral actions just pissing off an ever present police the player had to deal with their own shifting loyalties to the different factions that inhabit the world. While it was a little rough around the edges, it was a genuinely unique attempt to move open-world gameplay one step further.

Three years and numerous delays later we finally have the next-generation sequel: Mercenaries 2. And the game is big mess. Buggy, unpolished, and a little threadbare, the game has all the elements of a colossal failure, and yet somehow, when it works, it works beautifully. You can see the game’s ass hanging out in the breeze, and yet it’s impossible not to find yourself noticing that, for all that, it’s a pretty gorgeous ass.

There’s nothing in this game that’s truly polished: Objects often float in the air, and characters get stuck in the walls. The AI is bone stupid, weapons don’t work quite the way they should, and the interface is a disaster of non-standard choices, combined with pure moments of frustration. But here’s the thing: It bends like a hot rubber band, but it almost never breaks. Do whatever you want within its world, take advantage of the glitches, cheat your way to victory, but the engine doesn’t ever totally collapse. It feels like the whole world is tilting over into an inevitable crash or dead end, bit somehow the game rights itself and keep on chugging along. And for a game where 99% of all the objects in the world can be blown up, that’s no mean feat.

If GTAIV is a Ferrari, clean, smooth, and fast, then Mercenaries 2 is the old Dodge truck, complete with cheap Earl Sheib paint job. It’s dependable and tough, even if you can still see the rust underneath.

And the game does feel old in places. Despite the glossy textures, it has a decidedly last gen feel. Characters slide around the world, rag dolls go ridiculously limp, and things that should be fully animated just aren’t.

image So why does it work? It’s clear that at some point the developers decided they’d make as much cool stuff as they could, then fix it just enough to make sure the game never breaks too badly. And while that sounds like a recipe for disaster I can’t help but wonder if it might be better if we didn’t have more games with this can-do aesthetic.

Don’t get me wrong, polish is important. And it’s probably true that for most developers failure on this scale would probably mean the game would never get released. But compare it to a failed AAA wannabe like Too-Human. It’s clear that at some point the developer of that game decided the best course of action was to simply remove what didn’t work, and the resulting game ended up being an obviously good idea that’s simply too full of holes to be fun.

In the end, there’s something almost magically old-school about Mercenaries 2. A kind of digital brashness that we see less far less of on the consoles than we used to on the PC. I can’t help but wish for more of it.

20
Jul

The Dark Knight reaches dizzying heights.

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Review, Film, Comics and Culture

image A friend of mine called me on Thursday to tell me that he’d just come out of the DC preview showing for The Dark Knight. He’s currently a writer, but at one time he was an up and coming film director. So he wasn’t just excited about the story, he was also thrilled by the cinematography. He kept talking about the depth of field, and how effective it was at making this a different kind of Batman movie.

And having seen the IMax version of the film myself, I have to say I agree with him. Along with all the other elements that make this a great movie, there’s a dizzying sense of vertigo; emotional and physical. You’ll find yourself gripping your arm-rests as you hang high above the streets. But even when it’s just two characters going face to face, you’ll never quite lose that sense that you’re constantly on edge, and about to fall into the yawning abyss at your feet. But what makes our hero heroic, is that he chooses to jump, and then discover if he has the strength he needs to survive the fall.

The Dark Knight is all about the abyss: The urban abyss, the depths of a man’s soul, the precipice of civilization, the edge of trust, the brink of belief… The characters in the film live in a world with superheroes and super-villains, but none of them sure exactly which side of the line they’re standing on, and how far they’ll fall once they’ve dropped over it.  Well, none of them expect for the Joker.

imageAnd Heath Ledger’s version of the character is as amazing as you’ve heard. As iconic villains go the Joker has always been a bit undefined. Yes, he’s maniacally murderous, and dangerously insane. But at the same time it’s hard to communicate just what makes him so dangerous, and it often seems that it’s more the other characters fear of him that makes him a true threat. After all he’s not a physical challenge for Batman, nor is he really all that smart, so if the Batman is still afraid of him there must be something really scary about him, right? I mean, there are people in the world who do genuinely horrific things each and every day. What makes this clown so special?

But in this film he’s a not just an intimidating psychopath, he’s a disease, and he wants to spread. He ignores all the rules, and it isn’t just a way for him to do evil things. Instead he wants to bend everyone to his madness, so that he can prove that he’s more than crazy, he’s pure. And what makes the film work is how well it layers and communicates that. Gotham City is a place where every inhabitant is corrupt to some degree, everyone is constantly making choices that put them into compromising positions. There’s barely a scene in the move that doesn’t acknowledge the impurity of of the people on the screen. And it forces us to confront the difficulty of looking up to the light when the darkness is yawning below our feet. And somehow everything becomes a metaphor for everything else, and that makes this movie tick.

I’ve long believed that one of the greatest strengths of genre fiction is its ability to throw the audience into a completely crafted reality. In science-fiction and fantasy there is no way to know what lies beyond the edges of the story that’s being told. That’s what drives us seek out more of the story; the desire to uncover the larger reality. And in The Dark Knight don’t just want to know more about the characters, we want to learn about the world they inhabit, and be sure that this isn’t quite the same as our world, because as bad as our world is, Gotham is worse.

But Nolan is smart enough to play with that tension. On a physical level this version of Gotham City is a much more real place than any incarnation we’ve seen before. But what happens inside of it isn’t. It’s an opera of sorts. Driven by real emotions, but still with larger than life situations, and incredible consequences. The choices the characters make will determine their future, and the fabric of their reality, and they know it. They truly believe that it’s what they decide to do that makes the difference. It may not be real, but it isn’t exactly a fantasy either.

There are already some people who are claiming that the film is over-hyped. And while it’s not a perfect movie, it’s an obvious masterpiece of genre fiction, blending together storytelling and action in a way that elevates both to a new level. The fact that it’s going to be a box office monster is proof that comic-book movies are changing the game. They are, when they work, dragging cinema back from the brink of pure spectacle. They are telling great stories: allowing blockbusters to move beyond the empty cliches that ironically, comic books have usually been associated with.

14
Jul

Hellboy II: Tell me something good

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Review, Fantasy and Film

image I can review this movie in a single sentence: There are many of wonderful and magical things about Hellboy II, but unfortunately the story isn’t one of them.

There. Done. So long!

Or maybe I could go a bit beyond that and talk about how amazing the character designs are, and how impressive it is to see a film that is based around building something out of the elements of classic fantasy rather than the ridiculous mish-mash of maniacal horror villains that have served us as the basis of most non sci-fi genre films made in the last half century. After all, aren’t the monsters from Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and a hundred other modern horror films also fantasy characters? They’re not really real, that’s for sure. And yes, they’re homicidal maniacs, but in the end they’re cut from the same cloth as vampires, werewolves, trolls, and a hundred other things that have gone bump in the night for over a thousand years.

Hellboy II is different though. It’s menace comes out of the same tradition as Lord of the Rings. They’re creatures from a world that exists at a broken angle just outside of our own. Beasts rising out from the cracks in the mirror. On that level alone there are enough fresh ideas in this film to make it worth seeing, even if the story its trying to tell is weak, disjointed, and just plain broken.

Lawrence Miles, a most excellent writer, recently posted something about the new Doctor Who episodes that I think resonates perfectly with Hellboy II (and is probably worth a post all by itself):

Any CGI monster is by definition going to be regarded as a Special Effect rather than a natural part of the story. The advantage of a “real” monster, whether it’s a Dalek, a gasmask-zombie, or even a Muppet, is that it stops being bizarre after the first couple of minutes. The audience begins to treat it as a normal element of the story-world, and accepts it as a given fact, which means that we find the programme much more engaging. Whereas the point of a computer sprite will always be to make the viewer say “gosh, wow, look!”, and the result of this is usually a series of set-pieces in which the episode shows off the CGI as much as possible whether we care about it or not.

And with HB2 you get both practical and CGI creatures. The real-world creations walk, lumber, and stagger around. Even Hellboy himself is by and large a suit, with the actors face peering out from underneath the red paint, grinning with a set of large white teeth. Added into this group of heroes is Johan, a Prussian gasbag, whose containment suit costume is a prop of such gorgeous artistry that I often found myself simply admiring its hundreds of tiny details while the story fell to pieces around it. Beyond the director’s obvious understanding of the nature of fantasy, it’s that kind of attention to minutia that clearly makes Del Toro the right man to handle the Hobbit.

image It’s also used to build up the backbone of the story, with multiple emotional arcs being centered around the relationships between the different oddities inhabiting the story and the rest of the human race. Even the human characters are monsters to be shunned by the normal people. It’s a powerful idea, but like much of the film’s narrative, it’s only used as shorthand, and then discarded once its work is done.

The CGI spectacles are definitely eye-catching, with one big monster in particular reminding me of something straight of Miyazaki. It’s a simply breathtaking creation (even if its weak-point is a videogame trope straight out of the ending of Half-Life). But again, the narrative lets us down: When the villain chides Hellboy for wanting to kill it you’re right there with him, wondering why he would want do that to something so magnificent and grand. But if you take a second to think about it, you realize that it was the villain himself who unleashed it after our hero, commanding it to kill him. It’s a juicy moral dilemma that the film utterly avoids sinking its teeth into.

The movie’s gorgeous tapestry is riddled with hundreds of these little plot holes, leaving a film that delivers exceptional moments, but never bothers to earn them. Instead, when it wants you to feel something it simply holds you down and pours the emotions straight into your throat, like a bottle of emotional castor oil.

And oddly enough, maybe in the end you do feel a little bit better walking out of the theater than you did walking in. But it still leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth.

10
Jul

Gotham Knights: Batman on Stilts

By Drew 0 Comments
Categories: Review, Anime, Film and Comics

I’ve been looking forward to this new slice of animated Batman for a while now.  That’s for any number of reasons, including a long standing enthusiasm for anime, along with a hopeful enthusiasm over the idea of extending a film franchise through the use of secondary media, such as films and games.

The Matrix tried this trick first, throwing every variety of geek media at their Intellectual Property, including a canonical massively multiplayer game that managed to employee Laurence Fishburne just long enough to kill Morepheus for realz.

image Still, I was hoping Batman: Gotham Knight could be something more. After all, comic books are the foundry from which modern continuity worship was forged. So why not expand the world of the Batman film by getting some of the modern masters of Japanese animation to work with some top comic writers and make the magic happen? And hey, what if we through in the voice acting of Kevin Conroy, the man who has provided the premiere animated voice of the Batman for almost two decades? What could possibly go wrong?

The fact that the whole project falls flat on its face doesn’t seem to be anyone’s fault in particular. The synergy of all this talent that completely fails to occur, and it ends up dooming the whole thing to being a mediocre exercise at best. The dialog seems wooden, and miss-matched with the gorgeously trippy animation. The stories meander, clearly unable to take advantage of their connection to the film, leaving them to feel disconnected and tentative, if not downright silly. While you can see how this would work on the comic page, some of the vignettes end up being silly. And adding insult to injury, Kevin Conroy’s iconic interpretation of the Dark Knight seems poorly matched to the radical interpretations of the character designs.

It all feels a bit goofy, which, ironically, is exactly the emotion that Batman Begins managed to banish from its earnest interpretation.

As an appetizer Gotham Knights manages to be a little sweet and salty, but doesn’t do anything to whet your appetite for the cinematic main course that’s arriving in theaters next week.

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