Falling Skies Finale - saving the world with a whimper, not a bang

Falling Skies was never without problems. The main character was forever speechifying in a way that could be boiled down to "USA! USA! USA!" and few opportunities were passed up to revel in American exceptionalism.

It's perhaps fitting that one of the characters gets so fed up with Tom Mason that he tries to kill him and sets off on his own because he's sick of listening to him... but at least the show didn't overstay its welcome.

There seemed to be a rather marked downturn in budget for this final season and while it's clear that Falling Skies was never cheap to make it clearly suffered from aspirations for a Hollywood blockbuster but on a TV show's budget.

Most perplexing though, is that the enemy for the entire show had one CRITICAL weakness - kill their queen (let's just call her Sarah Kerrigan) and they ALL die. All of them. Literally turning to ash. As this show rejoices in historical parallels to the American Revolutionary War... this would be like George Washington crossing the Atlantic, killing King George and that just destroying the entire British army.

It seems particularly baffling as prior to that magic bullet, things had been parsed in very much a resistance type way. The enemy was on the back foot after a series of hard won tactical victories... and then they allude to how the Queen is basically going to allow them to win (somehow) but all it takes is for the magical ER doctor Tom Mason to use a magical bioweapon grenade to kill her and commit genocide.

"LOLWUT?!" As the Internet is wont to say.

Was this supposed to be a climactic showdown? It felt as though someone suddenly got told "We're not getting another season." and it was 4:30pm on a Friday and they went "Oh, uh - then he uses this biological grenade thing and it kills all the aliens forever. The end."

Oh, wait - they had to do a bit more masturbatory "USA! USA! USA!" at the end. Naturally.

It just seemed to be an ending rather anathema to the whole programme's thesis.

Pillars of Eternity

There have been many who have argued that there has been a trend to simplify and streamline away much of what used to make RPGs so immersive and hearkening back to games as relatively recent as Baldur's Gate 2 or even Dragon Age: Origin, there is certainly an argument to be made that games now have dropped complexity in the name of accessibility - the results of which have been hit or miss.

This is what has spawned the cRPG subgenre. Games that seek to recapture the look and feel of the Baldur's Gate/Diablo 2... well, seemingly more Baldur's Gate as they owe more to the D&D inspired RPGs, whereas Diablo was always a hack-n-slash.

The first thing to say of Pillars of Eternity is that it effortlessly recaptures the feeling of Baldur's Gate in general look and feel... The game does trick you by seeming to offer voice actors and then making it rather obvious that they are going to be used only sparingly. That's OK but it just highlights how integral voice work has become to modern gaming.

As to the combat... perhaps action RPGs have spoilt me but it just felt like busy work (that said, Dragon Age: Inquisition fighting felt like busy work). You're stuck with D&D style fighting too so... forget mana bars or whatever - you get abilities that can be used a finite amount of times. These will recharge between combat or when you sleep and when you're out in the wilds, you can only sleep with camping supplies annnnnnnnnnnd you can only carry a fixed number of those (upgradable with some skills)... as this is the easiest way to regain health (unless you want to start dabbling in the now mandatory crafting system), you can find yourself tediously shuffling back and forth to inns a lot, which kind of kills the pace of dungeon crawling.

Perhaps it's just nostalgia but Baldur's Gate combat usually felt more interesting too and seldom as unrewarding...

I will give credit to Obsidian Entertainment for creating their own world but that creates some problems in itself - mostly the fact they apparently chose a Welsh and/or Gaelic name generator for everything. Imagine if Lord of the Rings had the first 30-40 minutes of people talking about things with Elven names and you'll get a feel for the kind of barrier Pillars of Eternity throws at you. It's as if it's daring you to give up because you don't want to wade through these gobbledygook names.

Once you manage to penetrate that though, it's not so bad. It's not exactly a world which will make you gasp at is originality but it works well enough. The story is serviceable, although it suffers from leading you along and then just the "TIME FOR EXPOSITION!" in the final act. Granted, it's hard to hint at revelations in these kind of games and those among you familiar with the tropes of science fiction and fantasy will probably have your suspicions but the twist is still neat...

The game's ending also feels like a direct response to Mass Effect 3's clusterfuck...

It was a serviceable game but really only serves to remind me that things have moved on. Given that the Baldur's Gate games are being re-released, it seems strange to want to recapture nostalgia and those more cynical might see cRPGs as a means to justify dramatically reduced production costs... although, if they allow smaller developers a chance to enter the marketplace, then there's nothing wrong with that.

Only recommended for those that actually played the likes of Baldur's Gate and truly want to have something which doesn't feel a need to hold your hand.

Jupiter Ascending

A film where a mostly oblivious humanity is little more than cattle to be harvested by a cold, calculating and far more technologically advanced civilisation - where people with what amount to superpowers have fights over a special individual who unwittingly holds the fate of the world in their hands... Gosh, how would you ever know this was a film by the Wachowskis?!

What's most surprising about this film though, is that it's NOT an adaptation of a young adult novel. It clearly owes much to the recent successes though, as the eponymous Jupiter is the chosen one - who is swept up into a galaxy spanning adventure, where everyone needs her but she has almost no agency.

The reasons for her being the chosen one are even more hilarious than usual. Despite being a highly technological society, apparently this galaxy spanning civilisation is practically religious about DNA and what amounts to reincarnation exists... and so, Jupiter is what amounts to the prophesied reincarnation of the matriarch of what amounts to this universe's interstellar equivalent of big pharma.

And, if you hadn't already guessed from the Matrix reference earlier, humanity (existing on presumably hundreds or even thousands of planets) is harvested for the purposes of a super duper youth formula that allows people to live for tens of thousands of years - so long as they're alright with entire planets, whole CIVILISATIONS just being erased from existence so they can go on living.

That might actually be an interesting idea for a film if it was explored but the film is far more interested in Jupiter scrubbing toilets and being a damsel in distress. Say what you will about things like the Hunger Games and its myriad rip-offs but at least they understand that the heroine should DO something.

Jupiter spends most of her time being a credulous fool, waiting to be saved and getting saved. She's not tough, she's not clever, she's not strong - she just wants to make googly eyes at Channing Tatum, her genetically engineered half-dog protector (it's OK, she always liked dogs).

Anyway, after having recklessly endangered all of humanity JUST to save her extended family and been saved about a dozen more times by Channing Tatum - Jupiter is the heir to an interstellar empire (on account of reincarnation  allowing for you to write yourself into your will) and decides to just... go back to scrubbing toilets.

One might argue something about humility, except for the fact that Jupiter is ignoring however many billions of humans are still out there, being harvested when she is now eminently placed to help put an end to this. It would be like Frodo getting back from destroying the One Ring, finding Saruman running the Shire and going "That's cool, man. You gotta do your thing." Which is to say, as stupid as it is negligent.

She doesn't even THINK of doing it. There's no suggestion of alternatives and yet, we KNOW that she's one of the richest and most powerful people in the galaxy. OK, maybe explaining to the people of Earth that she owns their planet would be counterproductive but she's now afforded a place amongst the nobility (although, they seem to use companies/houses/nobility/royalty entirely interchangeably) and just goes back to cleaning toilets.

The heroes journey shouldn't be seen as the beall and endall of storytelling but to have a protagonist go through all their trial and tribulations, end up back where they began and just shrug and say "Back to scrubbing toilets!" with a smile on their face? Whether it's an attempt at a subversion of the genre or just idiot writing... well, given the rest of the film - idiot writing but it's just baffling as to how this could be considered a GOOD ending?

Arbitrary Animus

Assassin's Creed had a problem right from the get go (beyond even the snivelling pleas to not be offended because some of Ubisoft's best friends are black/Muslims/Templar/British) in that the "present day" was always linked in the most tenuous way to the actual story.

Outside of one rather clever moment at the end of Ezio's story, there's nothing to elevate the Animus beyond an increasingly irrelevant framing device. With the original trilogy concluded and the world saved, it seems little more than an after thought now - indeed, perhaps in line with the fact these games are now on a conveyor belt... there's not much of anything at stake anymore.

The much hyped (and then relentlessly slated) Unity wasn't even an artifact hunt, you were just looking for a body and (spoiler alert!) you could just have stayed at home but then, that's been a problem since the start. The denouement of the first game is finding the piece of Eden after a big ol' boss battle... and then you're back in the real world and everything is terribly anti-climactic.

It's also a problem because as is often the case, the Animus presents vast opportunities but ends up only being used to find the artifact of the week. Obviously, these searches tend to conveniently tie in with some historic struggle but... well, you somewhat undermine those events when the ONLY reason to experience them is to find the McGuffin.

Whereas AC1-3 let you go around and talk to people, check you e-mails and so on - and in the case of AC3, get a whole mess of backstory about the Precursors - AC4 bumped you down to a silent protagonist, who wandered around an office block between sessions and Unity does away with that entirely... you just get prompting from the Assassins on your mission objectives and occasionally the mandatory banter.

It's clear that the Animus has become an after thought, if not an active impediment to the way the franchise is proceeding. While Desmond was pretty flat, we had at least SOME investment in him and it meant we were invested in what was happening in the present day... It seems pretty obvious that this change of direction is a response to Ubisoft's desire to pump these games out but if that's the case, it seems like abandoning the framing device of the Animus and JUST telling the story would be far more sensible than demoting them to "peace of Eden hunt seven".

The Evil Within

If Shadows of Mordor is the best Assassin's Creed game since Revelations, then The Evil Within is the best Resident Evil game since... the last alright one?

There's so little to say about The Evil Within - you play a generic cop, with a generic backstory and you're fighting through a series of generic Resident Evil/Silent Hill settings. An insane asylum, a spooky village, a spooky mansion (wherein unethical experiments are being carried out and overly elaborate traps abound), some kind of underground industrial area, a deserted city... oh and a spooky corrupted church.

There are no real characters in this game - backstory is related exclusively to you by journal entries for your generic cop that you read before going to your "save game" asylum (no, really). This is also the place where you can upgrade your character and use keys you find to get more gear.

Your main enemies might as well be zombies but as this is 2014, they have to have SOMETHING to elevate them above being JUST zombies. So their eyes shine and you can blow half their head off and they'll keep coming. There's a LITTLE variety, you get fat ones (the game even TELLS you they have more health... and they say it's bad for your health), stabby ones, ones with masks and later on you get some Assassin's Creed cosplayers that can summon an insta-death creature.

The game does have a good number of bosses (although a few you'll face multiple times) but none of them are particularly exciting... and pretty much all of them amount to attack weak points for massive damage, you can use your "agony bolts" to do fancy things like freeze, shock or blind them (it's hard to tell if there's any material difference between as they're basically all different flavours of stun) but firing explosive crossbow bolts at their face seems generally a better use of your time and resources - although, obviously you can stun them and then use your shotgun, which you keep for close encounters.

Perhaps the most jarring aspect of the game (beyond the occasional sudden flip of camera angles when the game gives you instadeath runaway sequences) is the level transition. The game is - SPOILER ALERT! - all in the Matrix (kind of)... but (as oft seems to be the case), there's no particularly imaginative use of that, beyond one moment being in an asylum and the next a spooky village or windowless industrial complex.

That might be why, when a level ends, it feels the need to announce that you've finished it. There's no real point to that beyond explaining the transition.

With unremarkable gameplay, non-existent characters or plot... there's absolutely nothing to recommend this. It does the absolute bare minimum to hold your attention and you'll be waiting for an exposition dumb that never really comes - the ending seems to suggest some sequel baiting or DLC to answer some of the unresolved questions but with such a lacklustre and banal game... why would you care?

Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation is a game that gets the Alien franchise. Everything from the art design to the attitudes of the individuals and corporations speak of people who have not just an appreciation but an understanding of what the films (the first two, before it all went downhill) mean.

It's also a game which understands the survival horror genre... Even in its first incarnation, Dead Space put most of the emphasis on run and gun... yes, you sometimes had a situation where you'd be running low on ammo but it was ALWAYS expected that you'd shoot your way out of danger. Alien: Isolation is completely the opposite.

For most of the game, you're helpless. It takes a while for you to get your first gun - which you're very rarely going to have enough bullets for and even if you DO have bullets, the xenomorph just gets pissed off if you shoot it - although, a shotgun round at point blank range is enough to give it pause.

About two thirds of the way through the game you get the flamethrower, which evens up the playing field a little but all it does is make the xenomorph run away for a while and you really can't afford to waste the ammo.

Some games promote stealth by giving you extra XP points or rewards - this game does it by not killing you as much and on the highest difficult, this game is going to kill you plenty... Mostly because the alien is (mostly) a one hit kill and it is FAST. If it sees you, you're dead.

It's not the only danger though, you've got a bunch of human survivors who are either going to shoot you immediately or shoot you slightly LESS immediately and the creepy Working Joe androids... It all plays into shiny veneer of corporate hype over the gritty, dirty, noisy reality.

Sevastopol station perfectly encapsulates the feeling of a future full of broken promises. Sevastopol was a failed endeavour, in a backwater, peddling substandard androids and now in the process of being decommissioned... which is probably why they weren't best equipped to deal with a xenomorph infestation.

So, you're Amanda Ripley - the daughter of Ellen Ripley - and fifteen years after the events of Alien, you're still wondering what happened to your mum... so, you immediately head off when you hear that the flight recorder of the Nostromo has been recovered, along with your friendly android and a corporate lawyer.

You can't dock, so you have to go EVA and things IMMEDIATELY go tits up, when an explosion means you lose contact with your buddies and the ship. From there, it doesn't take long for you to realise that everything has gone to hell on the station but unlike Dead Space, the game doesn't immediately blow its load and have you grappling with a xenomorph.

It lets the tension build, as you find out that there has been a complete breakdown of law and order and everyone has adopted a very "everyman for themselves" attitude because of one certified grade-A alien killing machine but the build up to the reveal is nice, it lets the suspense build.

Unfortunately, once the xenomorph is revealed, it follows you around like a puppy - in that regard, the game could certainly have benefitted from a less is more approach but as soon as it turns up, it's on you like glue for the majority of the game and most of the time, it'll be sitting between you and your objective.

The fact that pretty much all of its attacks are instadeath, combined with the save mechanic (the game has very few checkpoints, the overwhelming majority of saves are done at savepoints but they're fairly liberally sprinkled through the levels... although, their gentle beeping will become a heavenly sound) can make that feel cheap, at times - especially when you've gone through a section three or four time, JUST to get chomped because the alien decided to turn around.

Of course, that's usually the trade-off in this kind of game - much of the tension is generated by the knowledge that the game isn't holding your hand by giving you checkpoints every five steps you go and when you finally get a break and manage to run through that door and lock it behind or get into the lift and mash the button, the sense of achievement and relief is that much more palpable.

Games with checkpoints make death little more than an inconvenience, psychologically at least - Alien: Isolation makes it meaningful and the inclination to hold your breath when you're hiding in a cupboard and an alien is right outside, as well as the way your heart races when you're on the last stretch to the end of a level.

Really, for a franchise which has just had the clusterfuck of Colonial Marines - this was much needed. The story COULD have been a little more involved and there's a tendency for characters to help Ripley only to conveniently get chomped before they might get to tag along... but that's kind of a staple of the horror genre.

The game does end with a shameless bit of sequel/DLC baiting but that seems to par for the course these days and really, while it's cheap - this was such a good game, more is really warranted and purely from a canon point of view - we know that Amanda Ripley dies of old age...

Strange that a developer synonymous with RTS games should be the one to break the run of bad Alien games with an FPS - strange and impressive. The whole game is like a love letter to the film but not in a gormless fanboy way.

Gotham is so bad, I think it gave me cancer

Gotham gives the impression of some subpar police show that was thrown back and told "You need a gimmick"... That gimmick? BATMAN! Kind of. Not really but you get the feeling someone said "Hey, Batman is popular and Batman fanboys are idiots that will lap up anything even remotely Batman related!" and with such a profound indictment of the bottomless, ruinous stupidity of fanboys - Gotham was greenlit.

It's quite possible doctorates will be penned on the terribleness of this show. For something to prime an audience on a show, it has one trick "HEY, YOU KNOW BATMAN STUFF?! Do you? DO YOU? DO YOU?!?!" because nothing else in the show is worth noting... well, nothing good.

The acting is wooden, the directing and editing is piss poor. We're supposed to believe that all these characters in Batman lore are interconnected from before the word go and hey, there's nothing wrong with re-imaginings but prequels are always a nightmare, even when well conceived and this is anything but that.

Catwoman witnesses the murder of Batman's parents, Jim Gordon (and Harvey Bullock) investigate. Montoya is tipped off it was a framejob (on Poison Ivy's father) by the Penguin, The Riddler works in the police department. Oh and obviously, they're all doing their schtick. Riddler riddles, Catwoman (a peri-pubescent youth) is flipping around the rooftops, Poison Ivy is always fondling plants, the Penguin starts out with an umbrella.

This stuff makes Smallville seem Shakespearean by comparison.  Even Arrow!

So bad it's awful.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

If there's one thing that gaming has done to death its WW2 and particularly Nazis because... who can resist killing Nazis? They're about as close as you get to pure evil in the real world but Wolfenstein: The New Order puts a new twist on things. Your protagonist is involved in a last ditch attack to try and stop the Nazi warmachine, gets knocked out - (actually, it's the third time he's KO'd but this time he's in a coma) and wakes up in the 1960s to find that the Nazis won.

The art design of this Nazi run alternate future is genuinely impressive - mixing the futuristic tech with the retro-60s look... Everything from the big clunky robots to the space shuttle, it all seems nicely coherent... and contributes nicely to that continuous oppressive feel the game has, although the subject matter helps in that regard too. This game doesn't shy away from some of the obvious issues when it comes to the Nazis - one of the missions even takes you to a labour camp but it doesn't really out-and-out confront it either but that works for it.

In this world, the Holocaust is only one of many atrocities visited upon the world by the Nazis - who nuked America, have ongoing labour camps (that are cremating people too weak to work) and are enacting genocide against Africa - the last real place to hold against Nazi rule but that's never really thrust in your face. It's a bit like Half-Life 2 in that respect, although it lets you read full news clippings and get actual audio logs - also, cutscenes.

As far as FPS go, this is rather old school. There are sections where stealth is possible and even advisable but there are other parts where the game flat out says - here's a bunch of Nazis, gotta kill 'em. That's actually entirely fair, you're not in Splinter Cell... you're a soldier, not a ninja... but the game does reward you  for different play styles, as well as giving you successive upgrades to guns... and shockingly, NO TWO GUN LIMIT!

Speaking of shocking - regenerating health is done rather different here. It's not just getting jam on your face or the screen going grey or red or whatever - you lose a wodge of health, it's gone until you get a health pack... of course, the game follows the recent trend of having protagonists who walk through firefights getting injured in cutscenes - in one scene, you're STABBED REPEATEDLY AND LEFT FOR DEAD... but you're fine. The next time that happens (yes, really - it's as bad as getting KO'd) it kind of cripples you... for a few seconds.

So, overall - a pretty fun game. It's a wonderful treat for old skoolers. It doesn't QUITE go back to old skool gaming but it at least pays homage and really, it's just a fun FPS. Which in this age of dull and dreary ones, is sadly exceptional.

Watch_Dogs wasn't worth the wait

You know what? There just isn't a lot to say about Watch Dogs. The best way to describe it is hollow.

At some point - perhaps - there might have been a good idea in there but all we've got in a very banal storyline (which doesn't even include the titular Watch Dogs) and the usual growly, angry and very stupid protagonist (although, obviously his stupidity is what's required to push the plot along) atop gutted GTA gameplay (and we're talking maybe Vice City and that's being generous) with a bunch of random stuff lifted from Assassin's Creed (including actual animations) tossed into the mix, with the addition of the hacking stuff which is mostly mini-games or used to make-up for the inability to fire weapons while driving (hence being sub-GTA as that's something it added several titles ago).

In fact, it's more likely that you can't shoot and drive as that would make the already somewhat extraneous hacking pretty much entirely irrelevant given that about half of your hacking abilities are for stopping cars. In actual combat, it's really only useful if the mooks are near the ubiquitous explodable items that are apparently integral to Chicago's infrastructure... and as soon as you go exploding something - there goes the element of surprise. Which means that - if you're playing on the highest difficulty, where all it takes to kill you is some harsh language - you're going to want to hold off doing that and just go for KOs or stealth kills if possible.

There ARE some interesting ideas used - finding the QR codes by getting the right camera... Using cameras to track down boxes... but the hacking mini-game itself gets old pretty fast... and really, it feels as if the game would have been better had it concentrated on large mission areas, rather than a whole open world. The experience is just so diffuse and while the game is pretty, it feels unfocused... although, with such a bland storyline - that's hardly surprising.

The worst part being that the game seems certain it has this complex mystery plot and when it finally does reveal what set in motion the events of the game, it's such a let down (and especially if you listen to the audio logs) that it makes it that much worse. It also has the bland main character - so we can all pretend we're him - who is surrounded by far more interesting characters... who really don't get nearly enough screentime.

Needless to say, the biggest question there is to ask when it's all finished is - what did they spend those extra eight months on? It certainly wasn't polish.

Bioshock Burial At Sea: Episode 2

Worthwhile DLC has always been something of a rarity but Bioshock Infinite's Burial at Sea Episode 1 was genuinely enjoyable... mostly because the original Bioshock (unlike Bioshock Infinite) never showed you Rapture before the collapse.

Burial  at Sea allowed you to wander around Rapture and get a feel for that city under the sea before it was exclusively the preserve of murderous freaks... which was a pleasant change of pace because, regardless of what people say about Bioshock - it's gameplay is not (and never was) "genre busting".

In fact, Bioshock Infinite marked a fairly substantial regression to the rather wearisome status quo of console gaming by way of Halo's seemingly inescapable two weapon limit and regenerating health - although, there's no regenerating health in Episode 2... but still a two gun limit, although it's rather more stealth orientated and even has a mode focused EXCLUSIVELY on non-lethal takedowns but as with the first episode, it's the NON-COMBAT sections which are that much more interesting.

The fights aren't particularly interesting and in fact for the vast majority of the time, you can effectively avoid them either by being stealthy or simply by running away or using your invisibility plasmid. In fact, you fight generic Rapture (and SPOILERS! Columbia) goons almost exclusively and are even denied the opportunity of a Big Daddy beatdown - the game puts you in an area with a Big Daddy and then goes "Yeah, you can't kill him."

There's one section where there is the arbitrary "kill x many goons to proceed" but that's pretty much the only time fighting is mandatory. The rest of the time stealth or speed are pretty much expected - on the higher difficulties just one hit can be enough to wipe out your health bar - and are helped with the new "peeping tom" vigor/plasmid and the ability to use vents.

The real problem - aside from the lacklustre gameplay - is the story... the ending of the first episode was good but it didn't lend itself to a continuation... and episode two seems to demonstrate that in spades, unfortunately mistaking a lot of technobabble and pseudo-philosophical navel gazing on the nature of choice as an alternative to characters and story.

Between that and some forced attempt to tie Bioshock Infinite to the original and trying to be entirely too clever (and failing) again... it's a rather unsatisfying finish to the franchise and while it's nice to return to Rapture (and Columbia) again... there's nothing of value added... Episode 1 succeeded because it offered an insight into what had been alluded to but never shown in Bioshock... Episode 2 just feels like it's riding coattails.

Ended these Clone War have

The Clone Wars (the animated show) was really the one redeeming feature of the entire sorry mess that was the Star Wars prequels, managing to offer fantastic action as well as an idea of what the new trilogy could have been, if not for George Lucas.

The Clone Wars (the CGI show) has - by contrast - been a pretty bumpy ride. The tone has - even within some of the story arcs - changed with sufficient speed to give you whiplash. Going from comedic japes with misfit bands of droids, to serious heroic self-sacrifice. Big space battles and lightsaber fights to tedious discussion of galactic finance and lawmaking.

It was - in essence - the same panoply of ill fitting ideas that were cobbled together to form the prequel films... the problem is that some of these stories really didn't need to be told... did the world NEED Jarjar centric episodes? It would seem someone out there - perhaps Jorge himself - thought so... and one might argue "but hey, Star Wars is for kids!" Uhuh... that'll be why we have lengthy discussion of the taxation of trade routes, complex (and oft nonsensical) political machinations and let's not forget genocide, implied rape and torture, dismemberment and child murder! Oh, sorry - YOUNGLING murder (that makes all the difference, dontcha know?)

The issue is really that there were glimpses of greatness in the Clone Wars but attention seemed to shift all too quickly or there was a radical shift in tone but you would think that with the last season, they'd at least go for some kind of grand finale... such as they could within the confines of the time frame... but no, there's just a lot of navel gazing about the imminent destruction of the Jedi.

Now, if this was coming out BEFORE Revenge of the Sith (and we didn't know about the upcoming Jedi massacre) then this might have some dramatic weight but... the only reason to watch this is because you're a fan and that means you know what's coming... and really, season six is pretty weak.

We KNOW that the Jedi aren't going to find out about the plan against them - although, the information they discover makes the whole "A PLOT TO DESTROY THE JEDI?!" bit in Episode III seem that much more idiotic but not by much because... well, it was already really stupid. It's just that after however many years of fighting, we have - near the end of the Clone Wars... the Jedi council going "You know, it IS kind of weird that a dead Jedi secretly commissioned the creation of a clone army that we JUST so happen to need to fight this war." Especially as the reason for finding said army was because of some elaborate machinations anyway...

It's all completely unnecessary set up for a film that came out nearly ten years ago... and it's not as if this is some complex backstory... Hell, compare the season 5 finale and this is just FLAT. In fact, bar an appearance in a vision absolutely no Ahsoka at all...

To sum up season six of The Clone Wars is easy - it feels like a bunch of ideas that had been deemed too lacklustre but ended up getting made for an unexpected final run.

Elysium: The Heaviest Handed Message

Neill Blomkamp is best known for District 9, a well received film with a none too subtle message about racism and the racial segregation of Apartheid... With Elysium, the message about healthcare and illegal immigration is less subtle than repeated punches to the groin...

Rich people live on the space station called Elysium where they have magical medical bays that can seemingly heal any injury short of death. Whereas - at least from what we see - Earth is grim and gritty. There's actually very little to say about the plot... because it's so generic and unimaginative.

Matt Damon is... well, Matt Damon. He's a small time crook, working a lousy job... he gets exposed to a lethal dose of radiation (no superpowers?!) and is told he has four days to live but obviously, if he gets to Elysium their magical medical bays can save him... so, he decides to do a job.

Fortunately for Matt, he chooses the guy that runs his lousy factory who is on Earth, which is apparently the best place to do coding... as he is the guy who coded Elysium and all it takes to change who the president of Elysium is putting back factory settings... The funny thing is, we see that this data is encrypted and LETHALLY protected. When does that become relevant? The end of the film. Everyone is able to tell what the data is though...

Oh and despite having a lethal dose of radiation sickness, Matt Damon is running around fine... The kind of radiation exposure he had should mean he's pretty much incapacitated in a matter of hours, regardless of what futuristic pain meds he's on... Anyway, the one last heist goes wrong because Jodie Foster needs the factory reset that is now in Matt Damon's brain... so, he's pursued and eventually turns himself in because his girlfriend and her daughter get captured.

Then he's taken to Elysium where he predictably escapes, fights a bit and then dies allowing everyone to become a citizen of Elysium... at which point it becomes apparent that Elysium has giant shuttles with HUNDREDS OF MAGICAL MEDICAL BAYS IN THEM.

Why are the greedy bastards hogging them all for themselves then?

For that matter, if people flying onto the station illegally are such an issue - why is it open plan? It's all rather silly and EXTREMELY heavy handed.

Total Recall - The Total Remake

Let's initially give the 2012 remake of Total Recall a pass on being a remake of the 1990 Arnie film and also for the somewhat questionable elements of the premise - namely the ability to construct "The Fall", a tunnel that goes through the CENTRE OF THE EARTH but not create more housing... With that out of the way, let's begin, shall we?

The film starts with textual exposition on the world before we cut to Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) having a dream about a mysterious woman (Jessica Biel) and him, trying to escape robots from Mass Effect. He wakes up to see his hot wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale) and bemoans his boring life. He's located in the "The Colony" (which is in Australia - but looks like a mix of Bangkok and Hong Kong if they got fused with Blade Runner on steroids and for some reason, has to commute to the United Federation of Britain which is the only other place in the world that is still habitable (because of some kind of nuclear/chemical/biological war at the end of the 21st century). As if living in a post-apocalyptic world wasn't bad enough, trouble is brewing between the UFB and the resistance (led by Bill Nye) - whose goals and motivations are never really explained beyond being there to oppose the UFB.

Quaid continues to express his discontent to his best friend Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) and mentions that he's thinking about going to "Rekall", to have memories implanted. Harry tells him that this is a bad idea but another co-worker says it was super special awesome! He also gets turned down for a promotion - despite having put in lots of extra work and his boss telling him that he's better qualified but the other guy got the job as he's from the UFB.

Quaid wastes some talking to Harry at a bar, where he again gets warned against going to "Rekall" and FINALLY, at the twenty minute mark (after a very random scene paying homage to the infamous three breasted woman in the original), Quaid gets to "Rekall" where we have a John Cho cameo that is pretty much wasted and something ACTUALLY happens.

So, seconds after Quaid is strapped into the chair - a bunch of soldiers burst in and shoot everyone except Quaid. He's able to Jason Bourne them to death (although, with direction and editing that not only doesn't induce seizures but actually allows you to see what's going on!) a second team turns up before he manages to escape and heads home to see his wife... who responds by trying to kill him. Marriage ain't what it used to be... She immediately spills her guts and tells him that their marriage is an implanted memory and she's a secret agent there to keep an eye on him before he runs off again.

A phone in his hand rings and an old friend - called Hammond - tells him that he needs to go check out an old safety deposit box and get rid of the phone. Apparently cutting a hand phone out is easy though, all you need is a piece of broken glass and it comes right out! So, he goes to get the safety deposit box which is full of all kinds of things that help progress the plot - namely a video of himself, telling him to go to his old apartment in the UFB... he doesn't seem to question how the video got to the safety deposit box despite the fact it ends with him GETTING CAPTURED.

As should be obvious, what happens next is another chase sequence (after a joke only people that have watched the original will get) this one feeling very Minority Report influenced with cars moving vertically as well as horizontally. During this long and rather dull sequence, Jessica Biel is able to turn up at JUST the right time to save Quaid but she gets injured (as she is but a weak and feeble woman) and he has to carry her to his old apartment. He activates a message from himself that basically explains that Quaid is actually Hauser, someone in the UFB who defected to the resistance and had a kill-code for the synthetics that Cohagen was going to use to invade the Colony - handy for the rebels!

Police are surrounding the building and Harry tries to convince Quaid that this is all just a delusion brought on by the memory implantation and that to escape, he has to shoot Jessica Biel for uh, some reason - it's not explained... Instead, also for no adequately explained reason, her tearing up leads him to shoot Harry in the face and despite the fact the opening scene of the film shows us that there exists a very effective non-lethal takedown, Quaid and Jessica Biel manage to escape (despite being surrounded) via another - you guessed it! - long and tedious chase scene involving Willy Wonka lifts. YAWN.

To give us a break from this, Quaid gets to see Bill Nye - sporting an American accent but we'll get to that shortly. They try and get the kill-code from Quaid but faster than you can say "IT'S A TRAP!" the storm troopers have busted in and killed everyone and Quaid's faux wife (who has been trying to murder him the whole film despite orders not to) and Chancellor Heisenberg (Bryan Cranston) are there for good measure. Heinsenberg delivers a big dollop of exposition, this was all just a means to kill Bill Nye and launch the invasion of The Colony. Sadly, there is no evil laugh... but he instructs his soldiers to restore Quaid to his original personality and to take Jessica Biel with him on his invasion of The Colony (because all invasions are led by politicians with dangerous rebels along for the ride).

Taking a leaf right out of the Doctor Evil handbook, everyone leaves except for a couple of guys... even though there is NO rush to invade The Colony and it would make a lot more sense to just sit here and make sure they restored Quaid to Hauser... but nope, they all leave and apparently Hammond was one to go above and beyond the call of duty because he's there and loosens Quaid's straps - what a stroke of luck!

Hammond gets shot when Quaid is freeing himself - too bad, so sad - and then rushes off to The Fall to rescue Jessica Biel and stop Chancellor Heinsenberg from invading The Colony. How best to achieve this? BOMBS! Lots of bombs. Shame no one in the resistance was clever enough to come up with such an ingenuous plan before... so predictable as ever, Quaid frees Jessica Biel and after a pointless fight scene to pad the already overly long run time - we get a fake-out where Quaid is unconscious and wakes up to Lori pretending to be Jessica Biel... no explanation as to why she didn't just kill him while he was asleep but that's it.

This film has a lot of problems but most of it comes down to the pacing and the flat characters. The chase sequences are quite often quite visually impressive but as the characters are so unengaging, there's just no real reason to care what happens. Farrell phones in his performance - spending most of the film looking surprised but neither Biel nor Beckinsale do much better, struggling to muster two facial expressions between them. Given that we take a full twenty minutes to get to the action part, this is especially inexcusable.

The pacing is also very off, this film is only two hours long but it feels a lot longer. Some scenes - such as when Quaid goes to Rekall - feel as if they're too short and the action scenes almost all feel overly long, becoming rather numbing... On top of this, there's no real sense of scale or anything at stake. We've no real idea who the resistance are or what they want, we just know the UFB are the cartoonish bad guys and that the invasion is bad... for some reason.

About all you can say is that it looks nice and even that is somewhat backhanded as the visual style is really just a collage of designs out right lifted from other better films. Even without comparison to the original, this is a subpar action film that just falls flat.

World War Z Trailer

Any fan of the zombie genre worth their salt will at least know of World War Z.. in a world where zombies are now an overused and somewhat tired (but still tremendously popular) monster, it actually offered an interesting take on the zombie apocalypse both in its scope and its narrative style. Rather than the usual, struggling-to-stop-the-infection or ragtag-group-of-survivors-must-reach-safety that have been done a hundred times a piece, it took the perspective of a writer chronicling the tales of people AFTER humanity had survived the catastrophic effect of the titular zombie war.

It's really the logical conclusion of the Romero ideal, where the slow moving zombies are merely an external means by which to expedite internal conflict. Except that this story plays out on a global setting and we're perceiving the world through a number of very different individual (and at times, unreliable) perspectives. In a genre which has inexorably moved toward the more immediately threatening running zombies since 28 Days Later, World War Z was a good way of showing a (relatively) realistic scenario for the way the slow mving undead might be able to almost destroy mankind.

So, naturally the film adaptation was ALWAYS going to be fraught with problems and the production seems to have done little but lurch from one disaster to another, enduring serious amounts of rewriting and reshooting - something that would almost certainly have sunk a film with a lower budget or less star power. Regardless of these problems, the trailer has just been released!

And while trailers are by no means a good way to judge a film, this seems judged to systematically disabuse anyone of the notion that this is based on the source material in anything but name alone. First of all, this is set  at the BEGINNING of a zombie apocalypse - not at its end. Secondly, these zombies are not the slow shambling kind - they're track and field zombies ON STEROIDS. Hell, these zombies look like they could outrun a car! Thirdly, from the looks of things... this isn't going to be a multi-faceted narrative, it's going to be a vehicle for Brad Pitt single handedly saving the world. That's not exactly surprising and is one of the reasons why an A-lister was always going to be a bad idea.

The most notable thing is how TERRIBLE the special effects in the trailer are - for a film with a budget of $125m you'd expect something good. If these are actual effects in the cut that is released... just, wow. We're talking about the kind of effects people cringed at in The Mummy and those looked better AND had the excuse of being from 1999. We're talking about zombies behaving like some kind of gigantic kind of giant ball that has properties of a liquid and a gas... it's truly bizarre and sticks out like a sore thumb. All the WORST excesses, everything that people complain about when it comes to CGI... this trailer seems to almost perfectly sum it up.

It's hard to know exactly what this film will be like but if this is the best it has to offer then it looks as if Paul W.S. Anderson is in for some stiff competition as regards bad big budget zombie films...

Forward Unto Dawn

With Halo 4 out this month, now is as good a time as any to mention the Forward Unto Dawn... part of the rather considerable pre-release hype... it's somewhere between a mini-series and a short film, covering events preceding any of the games right at the start of the human-covenant war with short interludes that show the increasingly rampant Cortana (stuck on the eponymous ship - or rather, half ship - with Master Chief following the end of Halo 3) at the start of each episode.

It does start out feeling a little bit generic but given the time they have, they actually do a pretty decent job with the characters and this definitely has the feel of the Halo universe. Also, for a fairly small production it's actually quite impressive. Not only do we get to see Elites and Hunters but also Master Chief himself in an actual Warthog.

This does somewhat highlight that it would be difficult to build a film around Master Chief - what makes him work as a protagonist of an FPS (being a bad ass of few words), makes him rather uninteresting as a character. There's no doubting his bad ass credentials here but as usual, he's just a big ol' power armour wearing glass of water, all of the interest really coming from the students.

A must for any Halo or sci-fi fan.

The End Of Dire Spy Schlock Hunted

And so, Hunted ends not with a bang but a "wow, that's eight hours wasted." You can't blame the hacks that wrote this drivel though - actually, you can and should - they did their best (which would have to work hard and buck up its ideas to aspire to be mediocre)  in this last episode to make this try and seem like it was all terribly clever.

The attempt to make Hunted look like some intelligent interweaving story is truly laughable as an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach would be underselling the desperation apparent here. The gangsta's son (Steve) wife didn't commit suicide - SHE WAS MURDERED! But wait! THERE'S MORE! She was murdered BY HIS HALF-BROTHER! Tyrone - the nefarious black guy that worked for Dave. At his father's behest, of course.

Still not sold on how clever this is?! What if they explain why gangsta dad is hellbent on getting this dam? Because his son (the one that got murdered) was murdered by Polyhedrous - one of the evil multi-national corporations - twenty years ago and he wants his revenge! Except that his plan is upset by the fact the blackmail material he had on Polyhedrous (who killed over six hundred people) is fake!

Luckily for our heroine, being drugged and then drowned isn't a serious setback to her, so she activates her Jesus powers to resurrect herself and murder gangsta dad - just in time for her boyfriend(ish) to come in and inject her with the antidote because obviously for her to shake off drowning AND poison THAT would break the suspension of disbelief! Oh and being drowned let her remember the pivotal(?) event from her childhood that links in to the whole Hourglass thing. Handy that!

Oh and Sam gets shot. Again but shockingly - DOESN'T DIE! AND SHE GETS HANDED A BABY! What a twist?

Starship Troopers: Invasion

The latest adaptation of the hugely influential Heinlein novel, Starship Troopers: Invasion is a bit of a mix of the various different adaptations that have been made over the years... perhaps the most notable difference from the best known iteration of the franchise - the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film - is that this is fully CGI and that the titular Starship Troopers are indeed wearing at least some kind of power armour.

This particular outing returns to main the characters from the 1997 movie, although several years on with the Federation still at war with the Bugs. The first thing to note about this film is that it's very limited in its visuals. If you feel that too many sci-fi films end up us as endless succession of identical corridors, this film will do little to disabuse you of that notion. We start out on a space station, move to a spaceship and then on to another spaceship and that's pretty much it. It's almost certainly due to budgetary constraints but it makes the  whole thing feel very limited - granted, the 1997 film was mostly set on a series of big ol' sandy planets but we had a number of different locations there... ravines, a fort and tunnels. Enough to give variety... and of course in the 1999 CGI TV show we had a number of substantially different places in each campaign.

Starship Troopers: Invasion offers us little more than the same metallic hallways and bland rooms every step of the way and while that isn't something that makes it inherently bad - it's very limiting and when you've got the ability to make any kind of world you want inside a computer it just feels a little disappointing.

Storywise, this runs with Carl being a creepy black ops type who steals Carmen's ship to run experiments that naturally pertain to Bugs and end up goin awry, killing everyone and leading to the eponymous invasion... there's not really anything remarkable in terms of story or character. It doesn't rely entirely upon the cookie cutter military cliches but it really doesn't matter as the power armour does precious little good and the weapons remain as useless as ever, so most of these characters are just meat for the grinder.

It's enjoyable as a standard sci-fi action piece, the CGI animation is actually fairly impressive (if lacking in variety) but it lacks the satirical kick that made the original film stand out from the crowd. You'd have thought someone would want to bring back the tongue-in-cheek propaganda stuff but admittedly, they'd probably feel somewhat out of place here as this is far more serious in tone than the often cartoonish Verhoeven film.

All-in-all, it's a good effort and not a bad way to spend ninety minutes and definitely something fans of the franchise (or sci-fi or creature feature fans for that matter) but there's nothing particularly iconic here... so, while even years on people will probably still remember some of the stuff from Verhoeven's gloriously over the top film, Invasion is something that is unlikely to be anything more than a series of long, grey corridors...

New Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Show - Revolution

With the Walking Dead about to return for a third season (that hopefully doesn't bore us to tears like season two) and Falling Skies having finished not so very long ago, it seems that the post-apocalyptic genre is in favour and here is Revolution to jump on the bandwagon.

The start is one of those horrible, badly written scenes that only ever happens on film or TV. Someone rushes home and makes an urgent phonecall - in this case, a husband and father rushes home and calls up his brother and knowing that time is short, starts in the middle of a sentence so that instead of imparting useful information to his brother, he can waste time spouting lines for use in the trailer. Needless to say, that "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO TURN OFF!" is probably the least useful thing to tell someone thirty seconds before the "The Blackout"occurs - pretty sure your brother would have worked that out.

Anyway, this isn't just a power cut or EMP or anything like that but rather something that leads to ALL electrical devices (and even car engines, apparently) no longer functioning. So, as one might imagine, electricity being the basis of all modern society, things go to hell pretty fast and within a decade massive numbers of people have died due to starvation, government has collapsed and now an agrarian society has arisen - with militias pushing people around.

The show starts with the idiot from the start getting killed because his son is even stupider than him. For no particular reason, the militia take him instead of his dead father. Well, obviously his father is dead so he wouldn't be much use but as this pertains to the power going out - why exactly would he be useful given that the reason his father is being taken is because the head of the militia suspects his complicity in the Blackout? Not only that but as we find out at the end of the first episode, the head of the militia is not just friends with the protagonist who got a call from his brother about the Blackout but was RIGHT NEXT TO HIM when he got the call, seconds before the lights went out... and yet it took him YEARS to piece this together?

Also, granted this IS a post-apocalyptic fallen society and it's established that only the magical USB necklaces are somehow able to activate technology but the producers of this show DO realise there's a lot of technology in-between medieval and modern day, right? Granted, there's the small fact that we've had the apocalypse and to restructure society but surely this is a great fucking excuse for steampunk? Or at least SOME use of steam? It has been over a decade and apparently the militia has thousands of men in it... you know what would give them advantage? TRAINS!

Not to mention how unspeakably awesome that would be, to combine the post-apocalyptic and steampunk genres. Granted, this is a TV show and I get the impression that it's probably already horrendously expensive and that having a steampunk theme in it would make it crazy but this is one of those issues that needs to be addressed. OK, maybe they can't get electricity working - they're a little fuzzy on why car engines don't work but just kind of toss it in - but there's a LOT of stuff that's relatively easy to make that ISN'T electronic... and it's not as if they burnt all the libraries down.

Anyway, the main protagonists are the cynical swashbuckler (because bullets are rare and people have resorted to the use of muskets) that shall be named McGuyver (he seriously looks like his brother... no mullet though) and the plucky daughter that is trying to save her brother. The brother gets his own story too, being abducted by Fring from Breaking Bad and there's also a former tech millionaire and mother who lost her kids who are hiding the magical USB necklace and serve to forward the mystery plot.

Perhaps the nicest thing in this show so far is that in the second episode, McGuyver is about to ice some guy that is after him because of the bounty on him (basically, he's now wanted for the same reason his brother was and Plucky dun goofed and blew his cover) and of course, Plucky goes "YOU CAN'T KILL HIM!" In a lot of shows, we'd get shown that of course, Plucky was right... somehow the guy would help them later on or something and we'd all learn the "love thy enemy" stuff.

What ACTUALLY happens is that not five minutes later, he's escaped and has set up McGuyver and is going to haul him off for his reward. Naturally, this leads to the guy ACTUALLY getting killed and Plucky having to realise she dun goofed. Also, the episode rounds out with her killing a guy in cold blood - flashing back to a scene during the first weeks after the Blackout where her mother killed a guy who was stealing food from her family.

So, if there's any hope for this show, it's that it's not going for the usual cookie cutter morality tale. Or at least, that it has the potential to be something other than that. The militia have certainly been established as the bad guys but we'll just have to see how that goes... the mystery plot has already shown us that people secretly with technology are being stalked by someone... and really, the people behind the Blackout are the worst mass murderers in history... so, we'll have to see how that goes.

BBC's "Hot" New Cliche Wrought Spy Thriller - The Hunted

Since the worst excesses of the James Bond era -  where over the top gadgets, ridiculously oversexualised names and an abundance of one liners, it feels as if the spy genre has been trying relentlessly to purge itself of anything like that... unfortunately, the pendulum has really swung too far the other way and has created a tiresome sea of similarity, into which the BBC has now hurled another wretched offering - The Hunted.

From pretty much the first moment of the show, you're going to notice the washed out colours and you should get used to it because it's constant. As is the cutting of the camera, the director and or editor are seemingly unable to allow a shot to last for more than three seconds at the best of times and as soon anything remotely interesting happens (don't worry, these moments are few and far between) the cuts start to become so rapid they mean you've little idea of what's going on. With one notable exception, where we see a gratuitous shot of someone having a syringe stabbed in their eye... but this is from the people that made Spooks, a show most people will remember for having a rather graphic death by deep fat fryer, so presumably this is attempting to ape that.

Washed out colours and ham fisted directing and editing aside, the story has our main character get shot TWICE in the first twenty minutes and yet, at no point is anything other than dull. A first episode really needs to grab you and yet, this was as dull as dishwater. The camerawork is so terrible that the action scenes - far from being exciting breaks from the awful dialogue are more likely to induce an epileptic seizure than actual tension.

And the dialogue really is poor. Another spy thriller cliche box ticked with the terse dialogue by various tight lipped characters... and it might be acceptable if it was just used occasionally to highlight stress and the rest of the time they talked like ACTUAL humans but these characters can't help but talk in soundbites and cliches.

There's no chance this can be a slow burner either, it's an eight parter... one doesn't really have time to burn anything but quickly when one is limited to eight one hour episodes... Really, there's just nothing to say about this show other than "don't bother". It has been done better in every conceivable way by others, so... there's no point in wasting time on this.

Cowboys & Aliens

Genre mixing and versus battles are all the rage these days. Pirates vs. ninjas, zombies vs. anything and now Cowboys vs. Aliens.

There REALLY isn't a lot to say about this film - it's very much a case of "does exactly what it says on the tin". You've got the Wild West setting with cowboys and injuns and then - BOOM! ALIENS!

Daniel Craig - with plot convenient/lazy writing amnesia and a bracelet that fires lasers - and Harrison Ford are the driving forces here but there's no real characterisation. Harrison Ford is a gruff cattle rancher with a pissant son (who gets abducted) and about all his character does is say that he looks at a native American guy is like his REAL son. Daniel Craig is suffering movie grade amnesia and is plagued with a severe case of flashbacks... it's nothing that hasn't been done a hundred times before and as always, it's just a case of the writer either not having the talent or inclination to write something better. He's a bad ass with a criminal past - that he can't remember - and the only weapon that works against the aliens.

After the aliens have abducted a bunch of people from the town, Indiana Jones and James Bond get a posse together and head out to find the aliens and that's really the meat of the film. We find out that the aliens are there FOR GOLD... which... doesn't really make a lot of sense. If you're capable of interstellar travel and can detect gold from orbit... why the hell do you want to waste all the time and energy of going down into a gravity well as big as Earth? Just go asteroid mining! And if you're thinking "aliens coming to Earth for our gold... that sounds familiar!" that'll be because it was the plot for the cinematic masterpiece known as Battlefield: Earth.

Also, the reason for the abductions is apparently because the aliens want to find out our weaknesses. This kind of thing always strikes me as silly. Unless you're going to develop biological agents SPECIFICALLY for humans, it really shouldn't be that hard to work out that humans are incredibly frail. We're meatbags that can die by falling down a flight of stairs - it's not like we're Kryptonians or Terminators, we die REAL easy. There is the insinuation that the aliens will also descend en masse to wipe humanity out - there's no explanation given, that's apparently just how these aliens roll.

So, naturally after following a wounded alien, they manage to find their ship and decide to engage in what might as well have been dubbed "operation suicide", which is basically most of the people riding around outside the ship and getting massacred by the nigh invulnerable aliens, that are apparently capable of just ripping people apart... all of this after they recognise that they want to keep to the high ground.

Naturally though, main characters are immune and Han Solo and James Bond are fine, aliens are killed and that's about it. Very average.