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.
Showing posts with label sci-fi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sci-fi. Show all posts
Friday, September 04, 2015
Monday, June 08, 2015
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?
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?
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
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.
Monday, March 31, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, March 28, 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
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.
Monday, November 12, 2012
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...
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...
Monday, October 08, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, June 15, 2012
John Carter Of Mars
John Carter of Mars - the live action Disney adaptation of the oldie timey work of the same name - is likely to be remembered for how catastrophically it tanked at the box office, putting it up there with other similarly high outlay/low return flops as Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire in the Disney hall of shame...
The thing is - as with Treasure Planet and Atlantis which between them pretty much killed off Disney's traditional animated features for a decade - John Carter of Mars... isn't bad. It's actually considerably better than either of those two offerings but it's really not good either.
There's nothing that sticks out as memorable beyond the visuals. Despite clocking in at two hours, there's no real investment in any of the characters and there's never any real suspense or tension. Not to mention that the fish out of water device isn't particularly well used - John Carter arrives on Mars and seems to work it all out pretty quickly and once a magical plot device (never explained) allows him to understand the language of the people on Mars, it's all pretty straight forward. The strange thing about the universal translator is that it doesn't translate the weird words and so, almost half the dialogue is people saying silly words or names.
There's nothing wrong with that occasionally but the words in question are just so ridiculous that it makes it hard to take it seriously... and the film plays it very straight, that alone makes the film feel rather stilted which is worsened by the pacing. Really, the two hour run time does drag and it feels as if this could have been cut down to ninety minutes and it would have been for the better.
It feels as if this really WANTED to be a kind of fun sci-fi romp - possibly in the manner of Pirates of the Caribbean - but it got bogged down in the source material. The plot is pretty straight forward - John Carter dicks around a bit to give us some minor character development and then ends up on Mars, find out he's super strong and can jump like a kangaroo on steroids and saves a princess...
This princess is not only hot (pretty much a given) AND a super science boffin (having discovered the "ninth ray", which is apparently super special awesome) but is also an accomplished sword fighting bad ass, so... she's a keeper. Anyway, evil shapeshifting monks want McNulty from The Wire to marry her, allowing them to rule the planet... or something, the motivations of the "Thurn" are never really explained beyond vague insinuation that once they've got a puppet ruler on Mars, they'll turn their attention toward Earth.
Anyway, John Carter and the princess run away from the four armed green guys, find out the plans of the evil shapeshifting monks (because apparently a race capable of instantaneous interplanetary travel don't know about passwords) and have the mandatory chases and escapes. It's all very paint by numbers and really, there's just nothing to set this apart from the crowd and the ending just feels like clunky framing with obvious sequel baiting for a sequel that will never come.
It's not good, it's not bad... it's just average and despite some nice visuals, it's easily forgettable. Something to watch when you're not really feeling like paying a lot of attention, really.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Let's give Terra Nova a pass on it being a show that described ITSELF as "Lost meets Jurassic Park". OK, so the temporal whatjamacallit let's them live in dinosaur land and because one of the idiots from Star Trek: Voyager (Brannon Braga) is the showrunner, it's vaguely explained with some technobabble that may or may not become critically important at some later juncture...
But let's examine the idiocy of the show itself, beyond the premise. Now we have our people from 2149 living 85 million years in the past, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth... because dinosaurs are cool! Now, the problem of the week in episode 1x07 is that a meteor went BOOM and caused an EMP - amazingly, this is actually something that even relatively small meteors can do! It's happened a few times and has taken down power grids etc.
This seems to be relatively common knowledge as both Colonel Badass and Data (the brainbox daughter of the protagonist) almost immediately identify it. The first problem we encounter is that while the EMP is created by the meteor "exploding" in an air burst above the ground, the remains still hit the ground and cause a "sonic shock" (presumably, a regular shockwave wouldn't be science fictiony enough). Now, as the barrier for Terra Nova is just wooden bars with great big gaps - this means everyone has to hit the ground... a solid barrier would at least have mitigated that and prevented any dangerous high speed projectiles being hurled into people.
The second - and more obvious problem - is that LITERALLY EVERYTHING has a computer chip in it. EVEN THEIR GUNS! This is a period which had a considerably higher level of meteor activity and yet they didn't think about this? Oh but they might have back-ups, you say! They do! Phew, problem solved! Oh, wait - no. The EMP is capable of slagging ANY circuit in range - active or otherwise... oh, they're kind of fucked then... Oh! No, of course not - they've got a machine to make replacements! Thank goodness all of Terra Nova hasn't been reduced to a pre-electronic age! Wait, what's that? The machine that makes replacement chips itself requires one that was melted by the EMP?! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Hilariously - and for the purposes of dramatic convenience - there is one guy in the whole colony that can fix microchips that have melted. It's the evil Ozzie bartender! Quite how he's supposed to fix something that has presumably melted is never explained - these days, if a CPU breaks... it's pretty much done and these are chips from 150 years into the future (and hence presumably even smaller and more complex), it seems unlikely that even a trivial problem could be fixed - least of all by a guy in a bar with no tools.
But the whole situation is made even MORE ridiculous when we have Colonel Badass pronounce that their perimeter - which is apparently will with microchipped landmines... OK... - is down and that any number of beasties could charge through the barrier like it wasn't there... NO FUCKING KIDDING! If only you came from the future and could somehow make... some kind of METAL WALL! Seriously, what is WITH these people? They've brought through dozens, if not hundreds of lovely prefab buildings, enough weapons and vehicle to supply a small army and a state of the art medical facility and as revealed in this very episode, the sum total of ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE (oh, don't worry - THAT was shielded from the EMP!).
Yet, at some point during the planning of this second chance for humanity someone thought they'd just skimp on the walls and just have a bunch of logs a full grown man could fit through - or a dinosaur the size of a full grown man! Oops! In fact, Colonel Badass actually decides that as they're down to a useless barrier and harsh language, they need another line of defence - which turns out to be a big ditch that they fill with petrol or some such and ignite with flaming arrows (naturally when handed a compound bow, Timecop knows EXACTLY how to use it - because... well, because he's a main character damnit! Having one of the minor supporting characters who actually might have been trained to use a bow is stupid!). Hey, you know what would be sensible? Maybe if you hadn't waited until the last minute to dig a ditch to stop the hundreds of different species of 40 tonne beasties that run around all over this place!
Of course, the EVIL Sixers use the crippling stupidity of the Terra Novans to try and get the magical box of McGuffin because the Spineosaurus was just a distraction while the Sixers sneak in to get the McGuffin. They go on to exposition that this surgical strike was clearly the result of a mole - not just the fact the box was in a cupboard and in the most obvious location possible. Which rather begs the question - the mole clearly knew exactly where the McGuffin was - it was easy to get to and there was no one guarding it... it seems a regular occurrence for kids to sneak out of the colony, so you'd assume that as it's essentially just locked in a stationary cupboard the mole could just break in and sneak it out - no need for a potentially dangerous diversion or surgical strike.
Idiotic.
But let's examine the idiocy of the show itself, beyond the premise. Now we have our people from 2149 living 85 million years in the past, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth... because dinosaurs are cool! Now, the problem of the week in episode 1x07 is that a meteor went BOOM and caused an EMP - amazingly, this is actually something that even relatively small meteors can do! It's happened a few times and has taken down power grids etc.
This seems to be relatively common knowledge as both Colonel Badass and Data (the brainbox daughter of the protagonist) almost immediately identify it. The first problem we encounter is that while the EMP is created by the meteor "exploding" in an air burst above the ground, the remains still hit the ground and cause a "sonic shock" (presumably, a regular shockwave wouldn't be science fictiony enough). Now, as the barrier for Terra Nova is just wooden bars with great big gaps - this means everyone has to hit the ground... a solid barrier would at least have mitigated that and prevented any dangerous high speed projectiles being hurled into people.
The second - and more obvious problem - is that LITERALLY EVERYTHING has a computer chip in it. EVEN THEIR GUNS! This is a period which had a considerably higher level of meteor activity and yet they didn't think about this? Oh but they might have back-ups, you say! They do! Phew, problem solved! Oh, wait - no. The EMP is capable of slagging ANY circuit in range - active or otherwise... oh, they're kind of fucked then... Oh! No, of course not - they've got a machine to make replacements! Thank goodness all of Terra Nova hasn't been reduced to a pre-electronic age! Wait, what's that? The machine that makes replacement chips itself requires one that was melted by the EMP?! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Hilariously - and for the purposes of dramatic convenience - there is one guy in the whole colony that can fix microchips that have melted. It's the evil Ozzie bartender! Quite how he's supposed to fix something that has presumably melted is never explained - these days, if a CPU breaks... it's pretty much done and these are chips from 150 years into the future (and hence presumably even smaller and more complex), it seems unlikely that even a trivial problem could be fixed - least of all by a guy in a bar with no tools.
But the whole situation is made even MORE ridiculous when we have Colonel Badass pronounce that their perimeter - which is apparently will with microchipped landmines... OK... - is down and that any number of beasties could charge through the barrier like it wasn't there... NO FUCKING KIDDING! If only you came from the future and could somehow make... some kind of METAL WALL! Seriously, what is WITH these people? They've brought through dozens, if not hundreds of lovely prefab buildings, enough weapons and vehicle to supply a small army and a state of the art medical facility and as revealed in this very episode, the sum total of ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE (oh, don't worry - THAT was shielded from the EMP!).
Yet, at some point during the planning of this second chance for humanity someone thought they'd just skimp on the walls and just have a bunch of logs a full grown man could fit through - or a dinosaur the size of a full grown man! Oops! In fact, Colonel Badass actually decides that as they're down to a useless barrier and harsh language, they need another line of defence - which turns out to be a big ditch that they fill with petrol or some such and ignite with flaming arrows (naturally when handed a compound bow, Timecop knows EXACTLY how to use it - because... well, because he's a main character damnit! Having one of the minor supporting characters who actually might have been trained to use a bow is stupid!). Hey, you know what would be sensible? Maybe if you hadn't waited until the last minute to dig a ditch to stop the hundreds of different species of 40 tonne beasties that run around all over this place!
Of course, the EVIL Sixers use the crippling stupidity of the Terra Novans to try and get the magical box of McGuffin because the Spineosaurus was just a distraction while the Sixers sneak in to get the McGuffin. They go on to exposition that this surgical strike was clearly the result of a mole - not just the fact the box was in a cupboard and in the most obvious location possible. Which rather begs the question - the mole clearly knew exactly where the McGuffin was - it was easy to get to and there was no one guarding it... it seems a regular occurrence for kids to sneak out of the colony, so you'd assume that as it's essentially just locked in a stationary cupboard the mole could just break in and sneak it out - no need for a potentially dangerous diversion or surgical strike.
Idiotic.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
The UK has a history of SCI-FI that is chequered.
In recent years about all there has been is Doctor Who and Primeval... which are respectively mostly good and rubbish.
But the BBC will keep trying... and so, OUTCASTS!
A show that is struggling to get as many cliches as possible!
It's post-apocalyptic, it's an off-world colony, they had a virus that killed only kids, that have clones, they blamed the clones for the virus that killed their kids, the clones weren't able to produce BUT NOW CAN and as we're all of two episodes in - you can imagine we'll get some pay off on the vague and mystical notion.
The horrible acting, dialogue and just general tedium does NOTHING to make this show good.
Did the BBC learn NOTHING from The Deep? This is just another car crash. It doesn't matter if you get the budget or the high profile actors if the script is rubbish - it's going to be a bad product.
Why, oh why must the business hate and belittle writers? THEY MAKE THE SHOW.
Perhaps there was nothing to ruin here.
In recent years about all there has been is Doctor Who and Primeval... which are respectively mostly good and rubbish.
But the BBC will keep trying... and so, OUTCASTS!
A show that is struggling to get as many cliches as possible!
It's post-apocalyptic, it's an off-world colony, they had a virus that killed only kids, that have clones, they blamed the clones for the virus that killed their kids, the clones weren't able to produce BUT NOW CAN and as we're all of two episodes in - you can imagine we'll get some pay off on the vague and mystical notion.
The horrible acting, dialogue and just general tedium does NOTHING to make this show good.
Did the BBC learn NOTHING from The Deep? This is just another car crash. It doesn't matter if you get the budget or the high profile actors if the script is rubbish - it's going to be a bad product.
Why, oh why must the business hate and belittle writers? THEY MAKE THE SHOW.
Perhaps there was nothing to ruin here.
Monday, April 05, 2010
Being the massive cultural phenemenon it is, changes in the actor of the eponymous Doctor of Doctor Who are inevitably burdened with people shaking heads and saying doom. So, when Matt Smith was announced - there was a great deal of clucking about him being a mere 27, the youngest Doctor ever.
Needless to say, the first episode Eleventh Hour has silenced many critics because Matt Smith and new head writer/executive producer Stephen Moffat kicked the living daylights out of everything that fanfic writing loser RTD ever did. He's energetic but not like a child sans ritalin (Tennant) and expressive but not gurning (Eccleston) and while it's just the first episode, there is no sense he's going to spend his whole time moaning about how he killed all the Timelords or how he's "so sorry" about absolutely EVERYTHING.
The episode starts right where The End Of Time left off, with the new Doctor, trying to stop the TARDIS crashing into Big Ben... amazingly, instead of crashing into slum council estate to a Billy Piper wannabe, we get him going into a village. A village that is not London... OR CARDIFF. Admittedly, the series has gradually moved away from the extreme constrictions of the first RTD season but this seems a a good fresh start and the Doctor running through a village is distinctly old school Who...
There's no pointless referencing of pop culture, gratuitous injection of homosexuality and no horrible cheesiness that makes you cringe... not to mention that technobabble and ridiculous fixes for problem are nowhere to be seen. In fact, the Doctor himself observes that he saves the day with no TARDIS and no sonic screwdriver. Which is a nice touch - a far more innovative solution to the problem presented than the Doctor simply babbling wildly while jumping around like a jack in the box with ADHD.
There's a great deal more subtlety to both the Doctor and his new companion, Amelia Pond. They are much more understate... the show does not feel as if it is going to lapse into slapstick or schmaltz and the second episode had a chance for both. It's the kind of subtlety that you'd never see in an RTD script and generally struggled to emerge under his auspices and the Doctor has yet to be venerated as some incredible and infallible person - one of the primary flaws of RTD's writing of the Doctor was that in all of three seconds, everyone would think he was the best thing since sliced bread... things with Amelia have been a little different as the Doctor kind of dicked her around a bit... and she's apparently running away from her wedding.
So, thinks are looking interesting.
Needless to say, the first episode Eleventh Hour has silenced many critics because Matt Smith and new head writer/executive producer Stephen Moffat kicked the living daylights out of everything that fanfic writing loser RTD ever did. He's energetic but not like a child sans ritalin (Tennant) and expressive but not gurning (Eccleston) and while it's just the first episode, there is no sense he's going to spend his whole time moaning about how he killed all the Timelords or how he's "so sorry" about absolutely EVERYTHING.
The episode starts right where The End Of Time left off, with the new Doctor, trying to stop the TARDIS crashing into Big Ben... amazingly, instead of crashing into slum council estate to a Billy Piper wannabe, we get him going into a village. A village that is not London... OR CARDIFF. Admittedly, the series has gradually moved away from the extreme constrictions of the first RTD season but this seems a a good fresh start and the Doctor running through a village is distinctly old school Who...
There's no pointless referencing of pop culture, gratuitous injection of homosexuality and no horrible cheesiness that makes you cringe... not to mention that technobabble and ridiculous fixes for problem are nowhere to be seen. In fact, the Doctor himself observes that he saves the day with no TARDIS and no sonic screwdriver. Which is a nice touch - a far more innovative solution to the problem presented than the Doctor simply babbling wildly while jumping around like a jack in the box with ADHD.
There's a great deal more subtlety to both the Doctor and his new companion, Amelia Pond. They are much more understate... the show does not feel as if it is going to lapse into slapstick or schmaltz and the second episode had a chance for both. It's the kind of subtlety that you'd never see in an RTD script and generally struggled to emerge under his auspices and the Doctor has yet to be venerated as some incredible and infallible person - one of the primary flaws of RTD's writing of the Doctor was that in all of three seconds, everyone would think he was the best thing since sliced bread... things with Amelia have been a little different as the Doctor kind of dicked her around a bit... and she's apparently running away from her wedding.
So, thinks are looking interesting.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Star Trek: Online had something of a rocky development but has finally finished its beta and is out.
The game breaks down into two sections - space and away missions. Most of the game is you flying around in your ship and ships come in three flavours: escort - damage per second, cruiser - tanks and science - doing buffs/debuffs. In much the same way, classes break down into tactical, engineer and science... which equates to much the same.
Your ship itself breaks down into the the equipment you have on the ship and the bridge officers you use - as well as bonuses your character gets for various starship abilities. Bridge officers provide abilities in addition to the ones you have yourself, the number and type being dictated by the class of ship you have. The abilities can do everything from increase weapon damage to improving the shields of fellow fleet members.
The obvious comparison as regards space combat goes is EVE online, things are considerably more dynamic in Star Trek: Online and you don't need to spend hours working out what kind of weapons are best for your class of ship and so on, not to mention that while in EVE online the destruction of your ship results in its permanent loss, in STO you respawn after 15 seconds. While this might kill the tension somewhat it also means that one can focus on playing the game without developing an ulcer, for fear that your new ship that cost hours of play time to buy and outfit will get destroyed because your connection decided to fail at an inopportune moment. Weapons are straightforwardly divided into energy weapons and torpedoes/mines - energy weapons like phasers and disruptors are better at damaging shields, torpedoes and mines damage hulls.
To make combat more interesting than the usual fare, shields are split into 4 sections and weapons are mounted front or aft and different weapons have different arcs of fire - with arcs of fire tending to be traded off against the damage per second. So, combat tends to require a combination of balancing shields and manoeuvring to hit your enemy's weakest shields and also, changing your power management and using your special abilities to gain advantage - and naturally, different ships manoeuvre differently - meaning that the more nimble escort craft can get away with the more powerful weapons, while more ponderous cruisers require the generous arcs of fire to keep the pressure on their enemies... All of which means that you need to be actively guiding your ship to make the best use of your weapons in a fight.
The missions undertaken in your ship are generally along the lines of the following:
Defend a sector - which entails just slogging through a certain number of random instances by killing a certain number of enemies.
Patrol a sector - which is slightly different as you go to a number of different systems and you can just have to scan for anomalies or beam down to planets or see off some pirates.
Specific missions - these are longer and generally involve more than one part and might require travelling to more than one system and several sections of space and ground combat.
Fleet actions - BIG instances where you have to take on several large numbers of enemy ships in what can amount to pretty epic battles. They even show a leader board at the end.
The other side of game are the away missions, these are carried out in a more traditional MMO manner with a third person perspective, equipment, weapons and what pass for STO's version of potions and spells. The notable difference here is that you have your bridge officers with you - so you're controlling a squad. You get to assign points to their skills for both space AND ground combat - in much the same way as you yourself progress through the ranks and skills. As you'd expect of an MMO, twitch reflexes are now required here - point and click. In truth, most of the killing is uninspiring. You get bonuses for flanking enemies but it feels as if this aspect of the game was tacked on. Granted, it's nice to be able to walk around starbases, your own bridge, explore strange new planets - and not ALL away missions require you to shoot a horde of idiotic Klingons or Gorn... Some involve scanning stuff or talking to people!
Perhaps the problem with the game is that Star Trek was always envisioned as a peaceful utopian future where everyone just gets along and humans are all about lofty aspiration such as peaceful exploration and the like. There are some exploring missions - go out and scan some rocks... but the entire setting of the game - 30 years after Nemesis, tying into the new Star Trek film by having Romulus destroyed because Spock forgot to set his alarm clock and the Klingons running amok and at war with the Federation (again) and the Borg showing up (again) pretty much your standard MMO situation. Speaking of Spock, Nimoy offers some insight (as well as titbits on load screens) into the current situation of the galaxy, when you enter a new sector of space for the first time - which is a nice touch...
Beyond the fact it's the ol' galaxy in conflict type scenario, the game does spend quite a lot of time making sure to reference familiar characters or their progeny. You get to choose from the well known species of the Star Trek universe, familiar designs of starships and they've even got systems referenced from the shows. Naturally, that won't do anything for you if you're not a Trek fan but if you've watched the shows, it's good to see that some deference is shown and isn't just tacking a franchise name onto a game for the sake of it. It's a little vexatious that you can't decide at the start of the game whether you want to create a Klingon or Federation character but given the considerably greater emphasis on PvP in the Klingon game - that makes sense from a logistical stand point.
The game itself is somewhat unusual in that you don't choose a specific server to play on, rather everything in the game is instanced. Rather helpfully - especially when you're starting out - when you blunder into enemy contacts (aka the random instances you have to beat for defend sector missions) these instances add other people, so you don't need to take on a dozen ships at a time, so... there's a greatly diminished need to shout "LFG!", for at least some of the more casual mission... and that means in the big ol' fleet action missions, you can get a WHOLE mess of people with a big range of ability, which is in itself entertaining if nothing else...
But of course, this IS an MMO - and the variety of missions isn't huge and many are just variations on a theme but you NEED to do them, if you want to get the equipment, cash (sorry, ENERGY CREDITS) and XP to progress to better ranks and hence better ships and so on and so forth - so, the grind is there but then, that wasn't exactly going to shock anyone that has played an MMO before... it feels like something of a disservice to call this EVE lite, not to mention a gross oversimplification as EVE represents at higher levels of play a lot of stuff that Star Trek: Online isn't eve trying for but in the sense that it's a space based MMO where you cruise around the galaxy, blowing people up... it probably warrants the comparison at least fleetingly for being in the same ballpark... or at least, in its carpark while EVE bites someone's ear off inside it. It's really nothing exceptional - if you love Star Trek and are looking for a game that allows you to experience Trek with other people, this is definitely the game for you... as far as the average MMO player goes... Perhaps if you have tried EVE but found it an entirely too punishing experience that didn't have a learning curve, so much as a learning suicide cliff (they have actually addressed that issue - although, the game remains insanely complicated and punishing and not overly friendly as regards its interface for the uninitiated) but WANT some kind of space game where death just means a 15 second respawn and not potentially hundreds of hours of work down the drain and combat doesn't require you to spend some time understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of your race, class, ship and weapons... then this is probably your best bet for the near future... Something like an MMO Freelancer, perhaps?
The game breaks down into two sections - space and away missions. Most of the game is you flying around in your ship and ships come in three flavours: escort - damage per second, cruiser - tanks and science - doing buffs/debuffs. In much the same way, classes break down into tactical, engineer and science... which equates to much the same.
Your ship itself breaks down into the the equipment you have on the ship and the bridge officers you use - as well as bonuses your character gets for various starship abilities. Bridge officers provide abilities in addition to the ones you have yourself, the number and type being dictated by the class of ship you have. The abilities can do everything from increase weapon damage to improving the shields of fellow fleet members.
The obvious comparison as regards space combat goes is EVE online, things are considerably more dynamic in Star Trek: Online and you don't need to spend hours working out what kind of weapons are best for your class of ship and so on, not to mention that while in EVE online the destruction of your ship results in its permanent loss, in STO you respawn after 15 seconds. While this might kill the tension somewhat it also means that one can focus on playing the game without developing an ulcer, for fear that your new ship that cost hours of play time to buy and outfit will get destroyed because your connection decided to fail at an inopportune moment. Weapons are straightforwardly divided into energy weapons and torpedoes/mines - energy weapons like phasers and disruptors are better at damaging shields, torpedoes and mines damage hulls.
To make combat more interesting than the usual fare, shields are split into 4 sections and weapons are mounted front or aft and different weapons have different arcs of fire - with arcs of fire tending to be traded off against the damage per second. So, combat tends to require a combination of balancing shields and manoeuvring to hit your enemy's weakest shields and also, changing your power management and using your special abilities to gain advantage - and naturally, different ships manoeuvre differently - meaning that the more nimble escort craft can get away with the more powerful weapons, while more ponderous cruisers require the generous arcs of fire to keep the pressure on their enemies... All of which means that you need to be actively guiding your ship to make the best use of your weapons in a fight.
The missions undertaken in your ship are generally along the lines of the following:
Defend a sector - which entails just slogging through a certain number of random instances by killing a certain number of enemies.
Patrol a sector - which is slightly different as you go to a number of different systems and you can just have to scan for anomalies or beam down to planets or see off some pirates.
Specific missions - these are longer and generally involve more than one part and might require travelling to more than one system and several sections of space and ground combat.
Fleet actions - BIG instances where you have to take on several large numbers of enemy ships in what can amount to pretty epic battles. They even show a leader board at the end.
The other side of game are the away missions, these are carried out in a more traditional MMO manner with a third person perspective, equipment, weapons and what pass for STO's version of potions and spells. The notable difference here is that you have your bridge officers with you - so you're controlling a squad. You get to assign points to their skills for both space AND ground combat - in much the same way as you yourself progress through the ranks and skills. As you'd expect of an MMO, twitch reflexes are now required here - point and click. In truth, most of the killing is uninspiring. You get bonuses for flanking enemies but it feels as if this aspect of the game was tacked on. Granted, it's nice to be able to walk around starbases, your own bridge, explore strange new planets - and not ALL away missions require you to shoot a horde of idiotic Klingons or Gorn... Some involve scanning stuff or talking to people!
Perhaps the problem with the game is that Star Trek was always envisioned as a peaceful utopian future where everyone just gets along and humans are all about lofty aspiration such as peaceful exploration and the like. There are some exploring missions - go out and scan some rocks... but the entire setting of the game - 30 years after Nemesis, tying into the new Star Trek film by having Romulus destroyed because Spock forgot to set his alarm clock and the Klingons running amok and at war with the Federation (again) and the Borg showing up (again) pretty much your standard MMO situation. Speaking of Spock, Nimoy offers some insight (as well as titbits on load screens) into the current situation of the galaxy, when you enter a new sector of space for the first time - which is a nice touch...
Beyond the fact it's the ol' galaxy in conflict type scenario, the game does spend quite a lot of time making sure to reference familiar characters or their progeny. You get to choose from the well known species of the Star Trek universe, familiar designs of starships and they've even got systems referenced from the shows. Naturally, that won't do anything for you if you're not a Trek fan but if you've watched the shows, it's good to see that some deference is shown and isn't just tacking a franchise name onto a game for the sake of it. It's a little vexatious that you can't decide at the start of the game whether you want to create a Klingon or Federation character but given the considerably greater emphasis on PvP in the Klingon game - that makes sense from a logistical stand point.
The game itself is somewhat unusual in that you don't choose a specific server to play on, rather everything in the game is instanced. Rather helpfully - especially when you're starting out - when you blunder into enemy contacts (aka the random instances you have to beat for defend sector missions) these instances add other people, so you don't need to take on a dozen ships at a time, so... there's a greatly diminished need to shout "LFG!", for at least some of the more casual mission... and that means in the big ol' fleet action missions, you can get a WHOLE mess of people with a big range of ability, which is in itself entertaining if nothing else...
But of course, this IS an MMO - and the variety of missions isn't huge and many are just variations on a theme but you NEED to do them, if you want to get the equipment, cash (sorry, ENERGY CREDITS) and XP to progress to better ranks and hence better ships and so on and so forth - so, the grind is there but then, that wasn't exactly going to shock anyone that has played an MMO before... it feels like something of a disservice to call this EVE lite, not to mention a gross oversimplification as EVE represents at higher levels of play a lot of stuff that Star Trek: Online isn't eve trying for but in the sense that it's a space based MMO where you cruise around the galaxy, blowing people up... it probably warrants the comparison at least fleetingly for being in the same ballpark... or at least, in its carpark while EVE bites someone's ear off inside it. It's really nothing exceptional - if you love Star Trek and are looking for a game that allows you to experience Trek with other people, this is definitely the game for you... as far as the average MMO player goes... Perhaps if you have tried EVE but found it an entirely too punishing experience that didn't have a learning curve, so much as a learning suicide cliff (they have actually addressed that issue - although, the game remains insanely complicated and punishing and not overly friendly as regards its interface for the uninitiated) but WANT some kind of space game where death just means a 15 second respawn and not potentially hundreds of hours of work down the drain and combat doesn't require you to spend some time understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of your race, class, ship and weapons... then this is probably your best bet for the near future... Something like an MMO Freelancer, perhaps?
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Halo: Legends is to Halo what the Animatrix is to the Matrix and what Gotham Knight was to the Chris Nolan Batman films, a series of animated shorts by different Japanese directors, mostly in a standard sort of anime style.
It's - as with the aforementioned similar ventures - a mixed bag of seven different tales.
Origins is pretty good but really, it's not a story. It's essentially an excuse for Cortana to retell the Halo universe's backstory. Nice art and action but it's really not a story, per se - it just feels as though someone wanted to do a lot of explosions and stuff with The Floor... or that someone felt a person buying Halo: Legends might not have the first clue about the series, so decides to fill them in. Regardless, it's enjoyable but by its nature - is kind of shallow.
The Duel... apparently Elites are Japanese. Down to living in pagodas (seriously) and wearing samurai armour. Maybe that's part of the lesser known canon... regardless, this is something of a disconnect from the rest of the stories as it's about an Elite - apparently the first Arbiter - defying the Prophets. For this heresy, he LITERALLY fights an army. There isn't a lot of sense to this story and it has a weird, kind of blurry almost... sticky animation. Clearly done for stylistic reasons but it doesn't really do much. It's OK for the background and establishing shots but for for action... less so, although the action is kinda cool... but the trite story and the fact you don't really have any time to get to know the character... it's really just action cheesecake with no substance.
Homecoming - pretty standard anime style here. Girl SPARTAN on a planet, has flashbacks to how she escaped from SPARTAN training... again, there is a feeling they're trying to tug on the heart strings when they've just tossed a character at you. The intercutting of the stories - ticking and tocking back and forth between the past and present - is a little jarring too and... doesn't really add much.
Odd One Out - you could be forgiven for thinking that this was someone trying to pitch a Halo Saturday morning cartoon... but basically, SPARTAN 1337 is a gag character and this whole thing is a joke... not a very funny one though. There is the odd titter but really, if they wanted to do a parody of the Halo universe there is so much to do with the existing stuff you don't need to create a deliberately over the top goofy/wacky character who keeps getting punched into the ground etc. So, really - not that interesting.
Prototype - they seem to like their trite messages in this package... I suppose it's hard to get something deep and meaningful into twenty or so minutes... but still.
The Babysitter - this probably comes level with "The Package" as the best of the bunch and really, they're both in a different league to the others. We get some feel for the characters and the animation is good, with some good action and the general awesomeness that goes with having a SPARTAN involved. It even includes one of the characters from ODST... yeah, who cares about that? Still overall, a good effort... again, the Covenant seem to be living in distinctly Far Eastern style housing for no reason but it works.
The Package - naturally, anything involving the ubiquitous Master Chief from the franchise itself is going to get extra points almost as a matter of course... quite WHY the original voice actor wasn't used (it kind of detracts... he did three games just to get shoved aside here?) is a mystery and the guy sounds more like he's trying to do a Batman impression than anything - though, fortunately NOT a Christian Bale Batman. The fact this is a CGI affair may lead some people to think that in some ways, it's more like a cutscene than anything else but that's at least a mite unfair and it's not as if the Halo cutscenes weren't suitably awesome. It's really what a Halo feature should be, people running at Covenant forces and shooting the hell out of them. Also some nice space battles and just general awesomeness. It ties with "The Babysitter"... mostly because it was pretty to look at but invested nothing in the characters.
So, there you have it... really, this is only something a big Halo fan should go out of their way for. Still, at least you get almost two hours of actual material - which is more than you can say for Marvel or DC animated features that struggle to make it past an hour (excluding credits). So, make of that what you will.
It's - as with the aforementioned similar ventures - a mixed bag of seven different tales.
Origins is pretty good but really, it's not a story. It's essentially an excuse for Cortana to retell the Halo universe's backstory. Nice art and action but it's really not a story, per se - it just feels as though someone wanted to do a lot of explosions and stuff with The Floor... or that someone felt a person buying Halo: Legends might not have the first clue about the series, so decides to fill them in. Regardless, it's enjoyable but by its nature - is kind of shallow.
The Duel... apparently Elites are Japanese. Down to living in pagodas (seriously) and wearing samurai armour. Maybe that's part of the lesser known canon... regardless, this is something of a disconnect from the rest of the stories as it's about an Elite - apparently the first Arbiter - defying the Prophets. For this heresy, he LITERALLY fights an army. There isn't a lot of sense to this story and it has a weird, kind of blurry almost... sticky animation. Clearly done for stylistic reasons but it doesn't really do much. It's OK for the background and establishing shots but for for action... less so, although the action is kinda cool... but the trite story and the fact you don't really have any time to get to know the character... it's really just action cheesecake with no substance.
Homecoming - pretty standard anime style here. Girl SPARTAN on a planet, has flashbacks to how she escaped from SPARTAN training... again, there is a feeling they're trying to tug on the heart strings when they've just tossed a character at you. The intercutting of the stories - ticking and tocking back and forth between the past and present - is a little jarring too and... doesn't really add much.
Odd One Out - you could be forgiven for thinking that this was someone trying to pitch a Halo Saturday morning cartoon... but basically, SPARTAN 1337 is a gag character and this whole thing is a joke... not a very funny one though. There is the odd titter but really, if they wanted to do a parody of the Halo universe there is so much to do with the existing stuff you don't need to create a deliberately over the top goofy/wacky character who keeps getting punched into the ground etc. So, really - not that interesting.
Prototype - they seem to like their trite messages in this package... I suppose it's hard to get something deep and meaningful into twenty or so minutes... but still.
The Babysitter - this probably comes level with "The Package" as the best of the bunch and really, they're both in a different league to the others. We get some feel for the characters and the animation is good, with some good action and the general awesomeness that goes with having a SPARTAN involved. It even includes one of the characters from ODST... yeah, who cares about that? Still overall, a good effort... again, the Covenant seem to be living in distinctly Far Eastern style housing for no reason but it works.
The Package - naturally, anything involving the ubiquitous Master Chief from the franchise itself is going to get extra points almost as a matter of course... quite WHY the original voice actor wasn't used (it kind of detracts... he did three games just to get shoved aside here?) is a mystery and the guy sounds more like he's trying to do a Batman impression than anything - though, fortunately NOT a Christian Bale Batman. The fact this is a CGI affair may lead some people to think that in some ways, it's more like a cutscene than anything else but that's at least a mite unfair and it's not as if the Halo cutscenes weren't suitably awesome. It's really what a Halo feature should be, people running at Covenant forces and shooting the hell out of them. Also some nice space battles and just general awesomeness. It ties with "The Babysitter"... mostly because it was pretty to look at but invested nothing in the characters.
So, there you have it... really, this is only something a big Halo fan should go out of their way for. Still, at least you get almost two hours of actual material - which is more than you can say for Marvel or DC animated features that struggle to make it past an hour (excluding credits). So, make of that what you will.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Mass Effect 2 had a lot to live up to.
Being a Bioware game these days leads to high expectations and being a sequel to Mass Effect - universally loved and well received, or near enough - that would go without saying but the build up for Mass Effect 2 started back in mid-2009 and it didn't stop until the game was loading up.
Must like the first game, you're immediately thrust into action - and a rather lengthy and super special awesome cutscene that sets up the game before you reprise the role of galactic bad ass. Things are mixed up slightly this time around as you're working for the shady Cereberus group, who it was possible to encounter in the first game, entirely as the bad guys. They're a human supremacist group and are very much modelled after every shadowy conspiracy type organisation ever. Regardless, you're working for them to try and put a stop to a spate of colonies disappearing - because as it's an RPG, no one else can ever get anything done.
The major difference from the first game is probably the first one that you'll notice - there is ammo. Given that Mass Effect made a point of there being no necessity for reloading - with weapons just overheating - it can be somewhat jarring and does make the game a rather more generic experience... but in practice, the ammo is plentiful and you're only going to be stretched for ammo in seriously protracted firefights. Beyond this, there is a HUGE simplification of the levelling logistics. In fact, most things in the gameplay department have been streamlined. There is no purchasing or finding weaponary, the number of abilities a character has been reduced to four (one of which is unlocked by gaining their loyalty) and weapons/armour upgrading has been all but scrapped.
This might all sound as if some horrific amount of damage has been done to the game but really, it merely allows for more time to be spent playing the game and focusing on the story - rather than spending hours trying to get an optimal load out for your party. It's perhaps somewhat unfortunate that the system introduced essentially means that you get gun A and then later can get gun B - which is in all ways better - but Mass Effect was never particularly heavy on sitting around and fiddling with stats and so on, so it's not really a loss.
The upgrades in question require minerals, which leads to what is the weakest part of the game - the mining mini-game. Much like the original, Mass Effect 2 lets you fly around solar systems (in this case, you literally direct your ship around the solar systems) and scan planets. The difference here being that you're not arbitrarily awarded stuff for a scan or dropped onto the planet in the MAKO, to spend hours roaming bland and generic landscapes, vaguely hoping to find something interesting. No, your scan will - 90% of the time - lead to the mining mini-game. This involves dragging the cursor over the planet to try and find mineral deposits by using the scanner. It's not horrible but it's time consuming and repetitive... and it seems strange for a game that seems designed with the intent of focusing on the narrative and the action above all else to toss in something that utterly removes the player from both... but about 10% of the time (which is probably an overly generous estimate) you'll get an anomaly and this leads to a unique encounter. These are all great fun and are a country mile better than bumping around in the MAKO for hours on end - so, really a huge improvement over that dynamic from the original.
As this is a Bioware game, it almost goes without saying that the voice acting and writing in this game is excellent. As before, one generally has a choice between a good - or paragon - response, a neutral one or the bad - renegade - responses. This has been supplemented by what could ALMOST be considered a quick time event, if that weren't an insult. In addition to dialogue, at times during a conversation, a paragon or renegade action may be available to you and by clicking appropriately, one can do anything from toss someone out of a high rise to stop someone getting shot. It's a very simple but effective way to increase the involvement of the player in the Shepard character.
The story itself is enjoyable although, despite the disappearance of entire human colonies... the threat never feels quite as imminent as it did before, possibly because of the nature of the enemy... there is no equivalent to Saren here, no nemesis for Shepard to talk with... and it hurts the story somewhat. Saren served to tie the overall thread of Mass Effect together, here we've just got an army of mooks who never really say much. Of course, it's still interesting but they don't quite get the epicness of the first game. That said, the more personal elements of the game are good. The first game only had a few personal sidequests, ME2 has a full one for all the members of your crew - they're all unique experiences and depending on how they play out, you can gain the loyalty of the party member, giving them a snazzy Cerberus jumpsuit and unlocking a new ability.
All in all, an enjoyable game that did what most good sequels should - take the framework of the original game and improve upon it. Other than the mineral mini-game and the initial surprise players of the original will have over having to reload their weapons, instead of just waiting for it to cool down, there really isn't much to complain about. The game balances humour - there are some hilarious conversations in the background on the various worlds - action, story, romance (there are EIGHT love interests compared to the original three) and sci-fi goodness into one easily digestible package. Bring on Mass Effect 3.
Being a Bioware game these days leads to high expectations and being a sequel to Mass Effect - universally loved and well received, or near enough - that would go without saying but the build up for Mass Effect 2 started back in mid-2009 and it didn't stop until the game was loading up.
Must like the first game, you're immediately thrust into action - and a rather lengthy and super special awesome cutscene that sets up the game before you reprise the role of galactic bad ass. Things are mixed up slightly this time around as you're working for the shady Cereberus group, who it was possible to encounter in the first game, entirely as the bad guys. They're a human supremacist group and are very much modelled after every shadowy conspiracy type organisation ever. Regardless, you're working for them to try and put a stop to a spate of colonies disappearing - because as it's an RPG, no one else can ever get anything done.
The major difference from the first game is probably the first one that you'll notice - there is ammo. Given that Mass Effect made a point of there being no necessity for reloading - with weapons just overheating - it can be somewhat jarring and does make the game a rather more generic experience... but in practice, the ammo is plentiful and you're only going to be stretched for ammo in seriously protracted firefights. Beyond this, there is a HUGE simplification of the levelling logistics. In fact, most things in the gameplay department have been streamlined. There is no purchasing or finding weaponary, the number of abilities a character has been reduced to four (one of which is unlocked by gaining their loyalty) and weapons/armour upgrading has been all but scrapped.
This might all sound as if some horrific amount of damage has been done to the game but really, it merely allows for more time to be spent playing the game and focusing on the story - rather than spending hours trying to get an optimal load out for your party. It's perhaps somewhat unfortunate that the system introduced essentially means that you get gun A and then later can get gun B - which is in all ways better - but Mass Effect was never particularly heavy on sitting around and fiddling with stats and so on, so it's not really a loss.
The upgrades in question require minerals, which leads to what is the weakest part of the game - the mining mini-game. Much like the original, Mass Effect 2 lets you fly around solar systems (in this case, you literally direct your ship around the solar systems) and scan planets. The difference here being that you're not arbitrarily awarded stuff for a scan or dropped onto the planet in the MAKO, to spend hours roaming bland and generic landscapes, vaguely hoping to find something interesting. No, your scan will - 90% of the time - lead to the mining mini-game. This involves dragging the cursor over the planet to try and find mineral deposits by using the scanner. It's not horrible but it's time consuming and repetitive... and it seems strange for a game that seems designed with the intent of focusing on the narrative and the action above all else to toss in something that utterly removes the player from both... but about 10% of the time (which is probably an overly generous estimate) you'll get an anomaly and this leads to a unique encounter. These are all great fun and are a country mile better than bumping around in the MAKO for hours on end - so, really a huge improvement over that dynamic from the original.
As this is a Bioware game, it almost goes without saying that the voice acting and writing in this game is excellent. As before, one generally has a choice between a good - or paragon - response, a neutral one or the bad - renegade - responses. This has been supplemented by what could ALMOST be considered a quick time event, if that weren't an insult. In addition to dialogue, at times during a conversation, a paragon or renegade action may be available to you and by clicking appropriately, one can do anything from toss someone out of a high rise to stop someone getting shot. It's a very simple but effective way to increase the involvement of the player in the Shepard character.
The story itself is enjoyable although, despite the disappearance of entire human colonies... the threat never feels quite as imminent as it did before, possibly because of the nature of the enemy... there is no equivalent to Saren here, no nemesis for Shepard to talk with... and it hurts the story somewhat. Saren served to tie the overall thread of Mass Effect together, here we've just got an army of mooks who never really say much. Of course, it's still interesting but they don't quite get the epicness of the first game. That said, the more personal elements of the game are good. The first game only had a few personal sidequests, ME2 has a full one for all the members of your crew - they're all unique experiences and depending on how they play out, you can gain the loyalty of the party member, giving them a snazzy Cerberus jumpsuit and unlocking a new ability.
All in all, an enjoyable game that did what most good sequels should - take the framework of the original game and improve upon it. Other than the mineral mini-game and the initial surprise players of the original will have over having to reload their weapons, instead of just waiting for it to cool down, there really isn't much to complain about. The game balances humour - there are some hilarious conversations in the background on the various worlds - action, story, romance (there are EIGHT love interests compared to the original three) and sci-fi goodness into one easily digestible package. Bring on Mass Effect 3.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Avatar has been over ten years and $300m in the making and the hype for it was fairly bold, claiming that it was going to revolutionise cinema FOREVER! In truth, the visuals for this film are often very impressive but while the appearance of the film is often astonishing and does mark a watershed in effects, this is offset by the remarkably clichéd and banal story.
There have been been many rather unkind comparisons to Ferngully and many to Dances With Wolves. In fairness, aspects of both are in the film... but it borrows very heavily from the general area of film that equates the military and big corporations as BAD. The scientists are all very reasonable, seeing the unique ecology of the planet and thinking that IT and not the uber valuable unobtanium is the important thing on Pandora... and yes, they called the material they're there for unobtanium... So, they go for a LITERAL connection to the planet... because the Na'vi can literally plug into trees, animals, the big flying beasties... presumably evolution on Pandora has managed to bypass the biological equivalent of not having a laptop recognise the printer that's plugged in. It's ALL very hippy and it's the kind of tree hugging Gaia type claptrap that would have felt dated... well, back around the time of Ferngully.
It's very much set up to make it obvious that the corporation is BAD AND EVIL and the colonel is clearly spoiling for a fight from the get go, complete with his big scar and bad ass attitude. It's very clear that there's no compromise possible, the imperialist forces of capitalism are bad and evil, the noble savages can do no wrong with their hippy ways.
The events of the film are related by a handy capable ex-marine who apparently fell into it because his twin brother got shot and he's a genetic match, blah blah blah and he's there because it pays well and he needs money to get his legs fixed. So he goes to Pandora, which is apparently 5 years away... eh, whatever - this film has giant flying mountains and biological USBs and a military too stupid to know what orbital bombardment is. Anyway, John Generic is on his whole - gain trust of noble savages schtick. Obviously, initially he is working for the EVIL corporation but one he gets himself some sexy blue space babe, he's all about saving Ferngully - uh, sorry the rainforest... or whatever the hell it is he's saving.
So, we basically go through what amounts to about two hours of Pandora's Walking With Dinosaurs. Really, that's literally about it for the first two hours, John Generic just explores the world, the Na'vi and gets it on with hot Na'vi (your mileage may vary). Then the military/evil corporation get unhappy and go to war! This is an action film with very little action, basically this film pulls all the action punches until the final act. It's visually impressive but there's just no real plot here and the characters are all so forgettable. It just goes to show, you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars and never bother with a script... hmm, that sounds like the Star Wars prequels... this is better than them, certainly visually and at least the plot is coherent.
There have been been many rather unkind comparisons to Ferngully and many to Dances With Wolves. In fairness, aspects of both are in the film... but it borrows very heavily from the general area of film that equates the military and big corporations as BAD. The scientists are all very reasonable, seeing the unique ecology of the planet and thinking that IT and not the uber valuable unobtanium is the important thing on Pandora... and yes, they called the material they're there for unobtanium... So, they go for a LITERAL connection to the planet... because the Na'vi can literally plug into trees, animals, the big flying beasties... presumably evolution on Pandora has managed to bypass the biological equivalent of not having a laptop recognise the printer that's plugged in. It's ALL very hippy and it's the kind of tree hugging Gaia type claptrap that would have felt dated... well, back around the time of Ferngully.
It's very much set up to make it obvious that the corporation is BAD AND EVIL and the colonel is clearly spoiling for a fight from the get go, complete with his big scar and bad ass attitude. It's very clear that there's no compromise possible, the imperialist forces of capitalism are bad and evil, the noble savages can do no wrong with their hippy ways.
The events of the film are related by a handy capable ex-marine who apparently fell into it because his twin brother got shot and he's a genetic match, blah blah blah and he's there because it pays well and he needs money to get his legs fixed. So he goes to Pandora, which is apparently 5 years away... eh, whatever - this film has giant flying mountains and biological USBs and a military too stupid to know what orbital bombardment is. Anyway, John Generic is on his whole - gain trust of noble savages schtick. Obviously, initially he is working for the EVIL corporation but one he gets himself some sexy blue space babe, he's all about saving Ferngully - uh, sorry the rainforest... or whatever the hell it is he's saving.
So, we basically go through what amounts to about two hours of Pandora's Walking With Dinosaurs. Really, that's literally about it for the first two hours, John Generic just explores the world, the Na'vi and gets it on with hot Na'vi (your mileage may vary). Then the military/evil corporation get unhappy and go to war! This is an action film with very little action, basically this film pulls all the action punches until the final act. It's visually impressive but there's just no real plot here and the characters are all so forgettable. It just goes to show, you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars and never bother with a script... hmm, that sounds like the Star Wars prequels... this is better than them, certainly visually and at least the plot is coherent.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
So... the first half of RTD's Doctor Who finale of finales has graced our screens... As one would expect, when a much loved character is about to be offed... it's fairly serious in tone but even that can't stop RTD from pushing in some totally inappropriate, unfunny comic relief - including flaming homosexual... As with a lot of two parters, it seems likely that come part the second, it's going to be obvious that a lot of the first part is filler.
John Simms is again wasted as an actor. He's a GOOD actor, whether it's RTD's script or the direction he received... or he's just hamming it up... it's all a bit much... of course, that said - given the visual effects used - it seems likely that most of it is down to RTD... so, it seems fair to give Simms credit for working with what he had.
If precedent is anything to go by, it seems likely that this will have an unsatisfactory resolution though...
John Simms is again wasted as an actor. He's a GOOD actor, whether it's RTD's script or the direction he received... or he's just hamming it up... it's all a bit much... of course, that said - given the visual effects used - it seems likely that most of it is down to RTD... so, it seems fair to give Simms credit for working with what he had.
If precedent is anything to go by, it seems likely that this will have an unsatisfactory resolution though...
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