Man, it's a slow month of DVD releases. Once you've watched the big ones: The Avengers, Cabin In The Woods, etc., you are really starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. And so it was that I ended up with two movies in my hands. Chernobyl Diaries (one I was at least mildly interested in thanks to Oren Peli's name on the cover) and Friends With Kids (one I had no interest in but my housemate wanted some thing else to watch). Since neither of these films are worth a full, detailed review, I'm going to hit them both on the head. Let's start with the better of the two: Chernobyl Diaries.
I gotta admit, I was pretty pumped for this. Not only was this the first film Oren Peli has written since the first Paranormal Activity (one of my favourite horror films of the last ten years) but nowhere near enough creative media has used Chernobyl as a location. STALKER proved that Chernobyl can be a scary fucking place and I was looking forward to what Oren could do with the location. We've got the pretty typical set-up, young hot kids on euro trip decide to up the ante with an "extreme" tourism trip to Chernobyl. You've got the assertive one, the cautious one (who happen to be brothers), the hot, tough heroine, the dumb, bland blonde, the mysterious tour guide and two foreigners (an Aussie and his Russian girlfriend). Doesn't really sound that exciting, but Oren's deceit is turning horror conventions on their head, so I was still pretty pumped to see where this was going. The first thing Chernobyl Diaries gets right is the location and atmosphere. From the first moment you see Chernobyl and Pripyat you can feel the horror of what happened here. The oppressive death and decay of the fallout ridden wasteland, the silence, the decaying husks of abandoned buildings left to what little of nature survived. I got a little excited seeing the theme park and ferris wheel where you hold out for extraction in Modern Warfare, or the big plaza that you battle through on the way to your final destination in STALKER. And for about 70% of the movie, that atmosphere remains. The first few scares are powerful, and the feeling of claustrophobia and isolation works well. Outside of some of the mutated animals, who or what is stalking the tourists is not revealed right until the very end, as it should be. We can some fantastic 'something moving or standing in the distance' shots, as well as an incredibly tense kitchen scene. The deaths all occur off-screen as well, which is a nice change. There's very little gore in the entire film. Mixed with some fantastic cinematography, I was ready to give this a big thumbs up. And then came the last act, and everything fell apart. The few remaining heroes are chased into this creepy fallout shelter, deep underground and everything looks set up for a cool reveal of the creatures as these people driven mad by having to survive deep underground. There's also one fantastic scare here, too. And then the creatures start to come out into the light and I'm not going to spoil it, but they are not scary. Anyone whose played STALKER knows how terrifying the scuttling, gas-mask wearing snorks, or the invisible, vampiric bloodsuckers were, but there's no such creativity shown here. From the initial trailers, I thought this was actually a good, old-fashioned ghost flick, but I really was left bewildered and disappointed by the final act. The story just ends. No real answers, just bam, done. Finished. This feels especially disappointing because the first two thirds of the film were fantastic. I can only imagine what happened to Oren's script. Perhaps the butchering's is why he decided not to direct it himself. I don't know. While not an awful film, the final act stops me from truly being able to recommend this film. Mix in some questionable acting and you've got two-thirds of a good horror movie. Really only recommendable to die-hard horror fans.
Alright, let's make this quick. Friends With Kids is written, directed, produced by and starring Jennifer Westfeldt and boy, can you tell it. Let me some up this movie in one sentence: she never, ever shuts up. This film is just an endless dialogue dump. And not even interesting dialogue. Alright, so Jen and Adam Scott's character are friends who share a kind of platonic relationship. Both their friends are in couples. We have Chris O'Dowd (of IT Crowd fame and one of the only funny people in this movie) and Maya Rudolph, and Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm (only in this film because he's with Jennifer in real life, but thankfully doesn't phone it in). We start the film with them all getting together, happy as Larry. They talk. We jump forward four years. It seems both couples now have kids and neither take it well. To buck the trend, Adam and Jen decide to have a kid together, share the parenting role, but continue to date other people. I wonder where this is going. God, this movie is just fucking predictable from end to end. Damn near nothing happens. I'm not kidding, the film takes place over six fucking years, but almost nothing dramatic or interesting happens. There's this weird dramatic tension towards the end, but it disappears as fast as it appears. Jen seems to forget there's anyone else in this film but her and her vision. The friends only turn up four times, for a total screen time of about 20 minutes. I'm serious. There nothing but a convenient plot device, completely neglecting the acting potential of the four. Thankfully, Adam Scott delivers a great performance almost convincingly selling this bullshit. Jennifer herself is ok, but criminally unfunny. She's got this "oh I'm so awkward" stumbling thing always going on, but unlike someone like Zooey Deschanel there's no subtlety or variation to it. Thankfully, both Adam Scott and Chris O'Dowd have some generally funny lines, but they're not enough to elevate this film about self-indulgent shit. This could have been a 30 minute play, and it would have been decent. But film is a visual medium and endless dialogue with nothing to watch is just boring. People talk, then they talk some more somewhere else, then they talk some more somewhere else, then someone else talks. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. This is one woman forcing her frankly confused and completely cliche message all over us. Avoid this shit unless you enjoy endlessly screaming at the screen "Oh my God, would you just shut the fuck up and do something!?"
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2012
You're Doing It Wrong - Medal of Honor
I'd like to introduce a new section. This is an idea I've had for a while but haven't had the time to put it all together. This first one is actually written by a friend of mine, who has asked to remain anonymous as he did it as a favour for me last minute. Oops, did I say he? I meant she. Or they. Them. It. Ahhh, anyway, check out "You're Doing It Wrong", written today by Alan Smithee.
Alright, Medal of Honor: Warfighter. With a name that fucking awesome, what could possibly go wrong? This is some authentic shit, apparently. See, in real life, soldiers are controlled by mysterious puppet masters that line up all their shots for them, because God doesn't want America to miss. Also, in real life you can take a .50 calibre sniper round to the chest and just shrug it off. Multiple times. Alright, I know what you're thinking. Real life isn't fun. I agree with you. Real life sucks, that's why we play games. This is not military sim, this is an action fps. I'm not here to talk about how EA's marketing department fucked up with this game, I don't have the time or patience for that. Instead, I'm going to outline the ways in which Warfighter fails as a sequel. This is MoH vs MoH:WF.
Let's talk openings. The first Medal of Honor began with a bunch of chatter outlining the events leading up to 9/11, as well as the military intelligence's response, before dropping the player straight into the heart of Iraq. Straight up, we meet the first of our three groups of main characters - SEAL Team Neptune. We play as Rabbit, a man with a bizarre taste in auto-tuned Arabian pop. Within the first five seconds, every character is presented with at least the broad strokes of personality. Joining Rabbit are Voodoo, Mother and Preacher (the least interesting of the bunch). In Gunshooter, we open up with a cutscene of somewhere, and two mysterious dudes emerging from the water. The sneak up behind a guy and we're instantly thrust into a first person view of the back of a guys head. 'Press Mouse 1 to shoot" we are told. No need to even do anything else. In fact, we can sit here all day if we want to. So go ahead, click. Bam, dead guy. Satisfied? Well, don't sit still for too long, the game has some more parts for you to watch. And that's basically the intro mission in a nutshell. You literally have to do three things. Click the mouse to kill a guy you can't miss. Press F on a truck to plat a bomb. And shoot at a chopper that you can't miss as long as you stand in the right spot. And run a bit. Compare that with MoH, where right from the start you're thrown into a hostile village and have to fight your way to free a hostage. There's no handholding; you want to save the guy, you're going to have to kill everyone in your way. Sure, your team will help some, but the onus is on you to play the game. BTW, the guy you play as in Bulletuser is Preacher AKA MR. Two Lines of Uninteresting Dialogue from the first game. Great choice, guys.
Another big problem that Cutscenewatcher has over it's predecessor is a massive focus on set pieces. There are maybe two, maybe three 'setpieces' in the first game. If that. Bombexploder has a new setpiece every five seconds. You thought Call of Duty was bad? There are more set pieces in the first two missions of Doorfighter than there are in the entirety of MW1. Wrap your head around that. The setpieces in the first game were used to either create dramatic tension (such as the feeling of helplessness as hundreds of Taliban rush your crumbling defensive position) or to relieve tension (the following helicopter mission). Here, it's the equivalent of some guy flashing you in the back street. I don't care how big his cock is, I saw it the first time. now it's just getting ridiculous.
Let's talk villains. In The first game, there really wasn't an overall villain. It starts out as you trying to wipe out the Taliban as revenge, but quickly devolves into a desperate struggle to rescue your friends and get the hell out of dodge. The enemy was as much the location as anything else. Or maybe that stupid army general that seemed more interested in guts and glory over brains. Arabkiller tries to have a more present villain, even setting the tutorial mission as a terrorist training under him, but it ultimately fails as you never really feel the villains presence. His lackey gets some strong screen time and the only genuinely effective moment in the game, but even then he's given no back story outside of "evil guy", so who cares. There's some attempt at a story about explosives or something, but it's lost in the endlessly shifting locations and objectives. In the first one, you never left the one mountain and you had a strong sense of place and purpose because of it. This one has you bouncing from Singapore to the Philippines to the Middle East and everywhere in between desperately trying to tie it all together cohesively. It's big conceit is that most of these missions are supposable based on real events but they lose their power when they are twisted together to fit a fictional story. Either go 100% real, or 100% fiction. Actually, I think the main enemy is doors. There are so many doors to brutalize in this game. In fact, Breachshooter devotes an entire mini-game mechanic to it. I'll let the boss talk about that more in his review, though. There's still more shit to trudge through.
Ok, let's talk graphics. Lensflareblinder was meant to be the big flagship for the Frostbite 2 engine. Did it work? Oh God, no. It's like the developers didn't even understand the fundamentals of the engine. There's almost no destruction and what little there is makes no sense. You can blast a guy through a metal sheet, but not through a cardboard box? You can't shoot through holes in cover but a block of concrete won't protect you from a grenade? It's nonsensical. not to mention it runs badly, the textures are shockingly low-resolution at times and the animations just look bad. Again, this is more a review thing but I thought it was worth mentioning as clearing using a proprietary engine was a big mistake for I'mruningoutofclevernames. The first one ran on Unreal Engine and while it came with the usual Unreal problems, it at least functioned as you would expect.
Alright, let's wrap this shit up. There's more I want to talk about, and even some things that Warfighter gets right, but the review is a better place for all that. I really love the MoH reboot, that's why Kyle got me to write this. We've often argued over who likes it more. I just can't believe that this sequel was made by the same team. Everything the did right in the first game is gone. everything they did wrong in the first game is worse. Outside of a few story beats and one original mechanic, the game is a total, abyssal failure. It was buggy to the point of broken at launch and doesn't run much better since the colossal patch. It's insulting to the lives of the soldiers it's meant to be respecting and it doesn't know what it wants to be. Where is the market for this game? It's too flashy for authentic crowd, it's too me-too-try-hard for the Call of Duty crowd, it's multiplayer isn't good enough to win over the Battlefield crowd and with black Ops II out now and blowing it out of the water, why does this even exist? At least the first one had a market. It was a slower paced, cerebral shooter that was more interested in being a war drama than an action film. because of this, it didn't sell well. It was accused of being a lifeless shooting gallery by people who would rather have things blowing up in their face all the time. Well,a re you happy? You made this, MoH detractors. Danger Close listened and made the game they thought you wanted. Are you happy now? You're Doing It Wrong, guys. Stop destroying originality. You did it MoH, you did it to Sleeping Dogs, you did it to Spec Ops. Don't bitch about CoD if you want to shoot down anything that isn't CoD. That is all.
PS Has no one at Danger Close seen women or children before? Because whatever those abominations are in game, they are not women or children.
PPS Seriously, never use Preacher again. With so many interesting character to choose from from the first game, you choose the one guy with a personality of mud. Great job.
PPPS Thank you, Treyarch, for continuing to revolutionise and innovate Call of Duty while Infinity War seems happy to make the same game over and over.
Alright, Medal of Honor: Warfighter. With a name that fucking awesome, what could possibly go wrong? This is some authentic shit, apparently. See, in real life, soldiers are controlled by mysterious puppet masters that line up all their shots for them, because God doesn't want America to miss. Also, in real life you can take a .50 calibre sniper round to the chest and just shrug it off. Multiple times. Alright, I know what you're thinking. Real life isn't fun. I agree with you. Real life sucks, that's why we play games. This is not military sim, this is an action fps. I'm not here to talk about how EA's marketing department fucked up with this game, I don't have the time or patience for that. Instead, I'm going to outline the ways in which Warfighter fails as a sequel. This is MoH vs MoH:WF.
Let's talk openings. The first Medal of Honor began with a bunch of chatter outlining the events leading up to 9/11, as well as the military intelligence's response, before dropping the player straight into the heart of Iraq. Straight up, we meet the first of our three groups of main characters - SEAL Team Neptune. We play as Rabbit, a man with a bizarre taste in auto-tuned Arabian pop. Within the first five seconds, every character is presented with at least the broad strokes of personality. Joining Rabbit are Voodoo, Mother and Preacher (the least interesting of the bunch). In Gunshooter, we open up with a cutscene of somewhere, and two mysterious dudes emerging from the water. The sneak up behind a guy and we're instantly thrust into a first person view of the back of a guys head. 'Press Mouse 1 to shoot" we are told. No need to even do anything else. In fact, we can sit here all day if we want to. So go ahead, click. Bam, dead guy. Satisfied? Well, don't sit still for too long, the game has some more parts for you to watch. And that's basically the intro mission in a nutshell. You literally have to do three things. Click the mouse to kill a guy you can't miss. Press F on a truck to plat a bomb. And shoot at a chopper that you can't miss as long as you stand in the right spot. And run a bit. Compare that with MoH, where right from the start you're thrown into a hostile village and have to fight your way to free a hostage. There's no handholding; you want to save the guy, you're going to have to kill everyone in your way. Sure, your team will help some, but the onus is on you to play the game. BTW, the guy you play as in Bulletuser is Preacher AKA MR. Two Lines of Uninteresting Dialogue from the first game. Great choice, guys.
Another big problem that Cutscenewatcher has over it's predecessor is a massive focus on set pieces. There are maybe two, maybe three 'setpieces' in the first game. If that. Bombexploder has a new setpiece every five seconds. You thought Call of Duty was bad? There are more set pieces in the first two missions of Doorfighter than there are in the entirety of MW1. Wrap your head around that. The setpieces in the first game were used to either create dramatic tension (such as the feeling of helplessness as hundreds of Taliban rush your crumbling defensive position) or to relieve tension (the following helicopter mission). Here, it's the equivalent of some guy flashing you in the back street. I don't care how big his cock is, I saw it the first time. now it's just getting ridiculous.
Let's talk villains. In The first game, there really wasn't an overall villain. It starts out as you trying to wipe out the Taliban as revenge, but quickly devolves into a desperate struggle to rescue your friends and get the hell out of dodge. The enemy was as much the location as anything else. Or maybe that stupid army general that seemed more interested in guts and glory over brains. Arabkiller tries to have a more present villain, even setting the tutorial mission as a terrorist training under him, but it ultimately fails as you never really feel the villains presence. His lackey gets some strong screen time and the only genuinely effective moment in the game, but even then he's given no back story outside of "evil guy", so who cares. There's some attempt at a story about explosives or something, but it's lost in the endlessly shifting locations and objectives. In the first one, you never left the one mountain and you had a strong sense of place and purpose because of it. This one has you bouncing from Singapore to the Philippines to the Middle East and everywhere in between desperately trying to tie it all together cohesively. It's big conceit is that most of these missions are supposable based on real events but they lose their power when they are twisted together to fit a fictional story. Either go 100% real, or 100% fiction. Actually, I think the main enemy is doors. There are so many doors to brutalize in this game. In fact, Breachshooter devotes an entire mini-game mechanic to it. I'll let the boss talk about that more in his review, though. There's still more shit to trudge through.
Ok, let's talk graphics. Lensflareblinder was meant to be the big flagship for the Frostbite 2 engine. Did it work? Oh God, no. It's like the developers didn't even understand the fundamentals of the engine. There's almost no destruction and what little there is makes no sense. You can blast a guy through a metal sheet, but not through a cardboard box? You can't shoot through holes in cover but a block of concrete won't protect you from a grenade? It's nonsensical. not to mention it runs badly, the textures are shockingly low-resolution at times and the animations just look bad. Again, this is more a review thing but I thought it was worth mentioning as clearing using a proprietary engine was a big mistake for I'mruningoutofclevernames. The first one ran on Unreal Engine and while it came with the usual Unreal problems, it at least functioned as you would expect.
Alright, let's wrap this shit up. There's more I want to talk about, and even some things that Warfighter gets right, but the review is a better place for all that. I really love the MoH reboot, that's why Kyle got me to write this. We've often argued over who likes it more. I just can't believe that this sequel was made by the same team. Everything the did right in the first game is gone. everything they did wrong in the first game is worse. Outside of a few story beats and one original mechanic, the game is a total, abyssal failure. It was buggy to the point of broken at launch and doesn't run much better since the colossal patch. It's insulting to the lives of the soldiers it's meant to be respecting and it doesn't know what it wants to be. Where is the market for this game? It's too flashy for authentic crowd, it's too me-too-try-hard for the Call of Duty crowd, it's multiplayer isn't good enough to win over the Battlefield crowd and with black Ops II out now and blowing it out of the water, why does this even exist? At least the first one had a market. It was a slower paced, cerebral shooter that was more interested in being a war drama than an action film. because of this, it didn't sell well. It was accused of being a lifeless shooting gallery by people who would rather have things blowing up in their face all the time. Well,a re you happy? You made this, MoH detractors. Danger Close listened and made the game they thought you wanted. Are you happy now? You're Doing It Wrong, guys. Stop destroying originality. You did it MoH, you did it to Sleeping Dogs, you did it to Spec Ops. Don't bitch about CoD if you want to shoot down anything that isn't CoD. That is all.
PS Has no one at Danger Close seen women or children before? Because whatever those abominations are in game, they are not women or children.
PPS Seriously, never use Preacher again. With so many interesting character to choose from from the first game, you choose the one guy with a personality of mud. Great job.
PPPS Thank you, Treyarch, for continuing to revolutionise and innovate Call of Duty while Infinity War seems happy to make the same game over and over.
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