"Ready Player One" Book Review

Book Details

            “Ready Player One” is the inexplicable success from Earnest Cline.  Described as “Harry Potter for adults” mixed with “Willy Wonka” to the detriment of each of those stories, RP1 follows Wade, a poor orphan whose obsessive memorization of 1980’s cultural flotsam allows him to win a video game contest making him the richest person in the world.

            Along the way Wade recites things without wit or depth and acts like a creep.  This story makes the “Big Bang Theory” look like a high art love letter to intellectualism.

 

"Novel"

Review in Short

This is the first book I ever got a refund on for being so bad I not only disliked it but frequently said, "fuck off" while reading it.

Compliments?

None.

Honestly, to me, this thing has no redeeming features.

I gave it a long time to get to the good parts I assumed must be in there based on its popularity. They never showed up.

Complaints?

            “Ready Player One” is what people claim to hate about “Family Guy”.  It is hollow references to things you like, and the reference to something you know makes you laugh, not because it is funny, but because the familiarity of it gives your brain a pleasant tickle.  It is the same reason children like “Blue’s Clues” having seen an episode a thousand times, they feel a sense of familiarity with the material and that makes them feel happy and safe.

            There are whole pages just listing movies and authors without insight or commentary.  What do I mean by “insight or commentary”?  What I mean to say is, when the author points to something, it is to say it is there, in the same way a tiny child points at a cow and says, “cow” and then will point to a barn and say, “cow” because he is not entirely clear what the word “cow” refers to but both of those things are in the picture book and one of them has to be it.

            That cow/barn thing was a joke, there aren’t any of those in “Ready Player One”.  Like I said, the book will point out something, but its significance to the character is skin deep.  The main character, Wade is shockingly well read and has seen dozens of movies but has the flattest personality of any protagonist in literary history.  It is hard to describe how boring he is.

            I am, in many ways, a traditional style nerd.  I have read a lot of comics, I play Dungeons and Dragons, and have read a lot of fantasy and science fiction books.  I have been around a lot of traditional style geeks in my life, and let me tell you something, NOTHING IS DULLER than listening to a nerd just tell you “of” his hobby.  Not “about” his hobby, “OF” his hobby.

            I respect that even if I do not understand the appeal of something, I like when my friends who are into it explain to me what it means to them.  WHAT IT IS ABOUT.  When my friend Amber (who designed my blog logo) told me that the anime “Made in Abyss” had left her emotionally wrecked and recommended it, I started watching it.  And when I made recommendations of it to other people I made sure to give them a quick synopsis of what I liked, “beautiful world that seems fun to explore, deep mythology, creative and intriguing concepts” (to keep it short).

 

It does have a bit of Japanese weirdness in it, but just enough to make you ask, "Why did they put that in there?"

            See how I just told you about a thing, what it meant to someone I know, and what I liked about it?  I can do that with other things.  I even make lists of things I like and take time to explain why I like them.  I put my thoughts out there for other people to reflect on and learn from.

            “READY PLAYER ONE” DOESN’T FUCKING DO ANY OF THAT!  It just lists things.  What they mean to people, what learning about them taught people, the emotional impact, the creative drives behind them, NONE OF THAT IS THERE.  It tells you “OF” its hobbies.  And its hobbies seem to consist of “knowing” about things, instead of “caring” about things.  The difference between quoting religious scripture (“of”) and being a good person (“about”).

Last year, when a white nationalist rally broke out into violence in Charlottesville I felt like shit.  I hated that the world was getting visibly worse as I looked on.  And when I wanted to talk about how I felt about the situation I talked about the cartoons and shows I watched as a kid and how they shaped me to care about other people and to value the differences that make us individuals.  I used pop culture as a lens to illuminate to my readers what I was feeling and why.

“Ready Player One” doesn’t do that.  And I am not sure if the author would even know how to do that.

The book is fucking boring.  There is an entire chapter in which the history of the “Sword Quest” video game series is explained.  This is foreshadowing for the rest of the book in which playing the game yields real loot.  It is the driest, most basic presentation of the information possible short of just straight reading the Wikipedia article.  I actually knew everything he talked about because I had watched a FUNNY mini-documentary by the Angry Video Game Nerd years prior… Except his documentary went into more detail and was fun to watch.

Couple More Complaints.

The writing is also bad on a technical level.  Unnecessary bits of explanation for things that do not need to be explained.  Sentences that lift right out for providing no useful information are fucking everywhere.  At one point he explains what a ticket is for.

The book is also creepy, like the character's behavior towards women comes off as the most hover-handing, "But you're a g-g-g-girl" dipshit personality I have seen in ages.  It is gross.

What is more I kind of thought that creepiness was just me reading it into the character, but NOPE, that shit is baked in.  Turns out the author wrote a poem… called “Nerd Porn Auteur” about how pornography with the kinds of women he likes aren’t popular.  It is the most MRA garbage thing I have read.  I would write something like this to MOCK twerps like this.

 

Hey look.  A pop culture reference that ties into what I am talking about.

One Last Thing

All this being said, I have a hard time believing the movie (which is what prompted me to try and fail to get thru this thing) could be anything other than an improvement on “Ready Player One”.  The film will be able to show everything the book listed, and a .1 second glance of something while the narrative keeps moving is better than stopping the narrative dead for pages at a time to read a list or Wikipedia entry at the audience.

Beyond that, Steven Spielberg is probably the best director ever.  He has worked on projects of every stripe and has managed to make the material resonate.  I mean, if I hadn’t tried the book the trailer would have sold me in an instant, not because of all the references, but because EDITING IS MAGICAL.  The pace that they keep up, the tone they are putting out there, the punch of it, feels like something.  I think Steven could wring something out of this.

"It's bad to kill. Guns kill. And you don't have to be a gun. You are what you choose to be. You choose. Choose."
-Hogarth Hughes, "The Iron Giant"

Or Steven could totally miss the point.  That is possible.  The idea that the material is presented skin deep, an image without thought or depth is rather consistent with internet culture.  Millions of vain entitled assholes who coopt an image from pop culture that they like but seem to have no understanding of.

Monstrous little cretins that wear the skin of cartoon heroes because “they’re totally badass” without giving a thought to what the stories that made those characters great were about.

Last Words

I felt insulted reading this.

Maybe the movie won’t suck.

For Some More Discussion

______________________________

            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Most Over Rated Disney Movie

            I have not been posting nearly enough this year and I want to steer back from that.  To that end I have found a 30-day blog challenge and fluffed it out to 31 entries (since December has 31 days).  I have done a 30-day challenge before for movies, though that one was poorly executed (I started it in the middle of a month, at one point I posted 2 entries on one day, it is a mess).  I did another one just this year in August on Video Games, that one was better, go read it after this one, all of it.  Or don’t, no pressure.

            Today is day 24 and the topic is “Most Overrated Movie”.

I almost gave this to “James and the Giant Peach” but then I recalled that a good 20% of that movie is in live action and decided that DQ’d the mean spirited thing.  I only went for it initially so I wouldn’t keep talking about the same damn thing again.  The ultra-mega hit that so dominated the world that they are redoing the theme parks to better incorporate the IP into them.  Who has a song that everyone has heard a million times—because the song is the best thing in the movie.  Of course I am talking about “Frozen”.

BUT I’M TIRED OF TALKING ABOUT “Frozen”.  I can’t even turn this into a top 5 in an interesting way, or find some new angle to come at the topic.  Disney is a pretty up-front about itself company and I can’t really scratch any deeper on this.  “Frozen” has awful bad guys, mediocre protagonists, stupid decisions driving the plot, and while the animation at first struck me as awesome—the snow looks great—it did not hold up to scrutiny as the character models (especially the women) are interchangeable and the houses look almost like doll houses (They look fake in the sense that they were poorly animated).

She cries funny.

This thing made a billion dollars.  It is in the top 50 for animated movies on Rotten Tomatoes.  IT IS A MERCHANDISING EMPIRE ALL ITS OWN.  I can’t see a movie with a greater disparity between its quality and the amount of praise it received.  IT WON BEST ANIMATED FEATURE.

            Blergh…

            What about high hopes?  While “Frozen” was reworked around some ideas (it has actually been workshopped since Walt was alive) I don’t think that Disney thought it would be the titan that it is.  What did they imagine to be their crowning achievement that amounted to little?  What was the most overrated by the company that ultimately underperformed because of inflated expectations?  Well, the answer is just around the riverbend.

            At the time of its creation “Pocahontas” was being seen as the sort of classic, “we’ve done this right before, we’ll do it right again” romance that would certainly be the hit of its era.  Animators jumped ship from working on “The Lion King” to work on what was sure to be the more successful project.  Jeffery Katzenberg, one of the most important and powerful entities in all of animation held this belief.  IT WAS A RARE MISSED MARK FOR HIM.

            I am a child that grew up in the 90’s, and if there is one thing I remember about going to school in the 90’s it was the ever present specter of white guilt that hovered over all of the curriculum of the era.  I remember learning all of the different tribes of North America in elementary school, how there were longhouses, teepees, and the sandstone Pueblo housing in the south west.  I recall learning about gender roles, property rights, some of the managerial styles of tribal life.  I went to field trips that emphasized Indian mounds.

This was no fun.

In Middle School we spent so much time dwelling on the Trail of Tears, by which I mean I learned that it was a sad and morally repugnant event in history, but I couldn’t tell you the year it happened, the events that led up to it, the events that followed, or who was president at the time, but I knew white people should feel bad about it.  It was a shallow view of history to say the least and I would even say it made me more of a bigot growing up.  You know what fought back against that idea?  The positive and inclusive steps pop-culture was taking to make minorities more prevalent and respected, which is why I don’t bitch about it now when they cast minority actors in more and more blockbuster movies.

            Keep in mind I know that my white forefathers were absolute bastards toward the Native Americans, and that there were many tribes and cultures that populated the Americas before they got there, but the strange BS mysticism and reverence of a vague Native American spiritualism that sprung up and the odd revulsion toward the explorers and pioneers of white America, that was doing no one any favors.  “Pocahontas” has that shit in spades.

"What the hell tree has purple leaves?" -Pocahontas

            There are a few good—albeit preachy—songs to complement the flowing animation, but overall you should NOT make a movie about the longest term genocide in history and frame it as a bullshit simplistic miscommunication between two people because of WANTING GOLD.  Ultimately the tension is resolved by… I honestly have no idea.  No substantial resolution to the underlying tensions are reached.  You can point to Pocahontas stopping the execution, but that didn’t answer any of the issues that still existed… Which I guess is a good explanation for why the Indians would ultimately be wiped out.

            “Pocahontas” is not the cultural touchstone that “The Lion King” became, and compared to “Beauty and the Beast”, who it was emulating—with an epic romance and tons of sidekicks— “Pocahontas” is a joke.  I am sorry, but the best romances are about strong FLAWED characters going thru arcs via contact with one another and becoming better people.  Having two perfect characters—John Smith and Pocahontas are annoyingly flawless—politely talk out the issues existing between two sides in a war because they want to bone each other IS NOT GOOD DRAMA.

"Want to see if my carpet matches my drapes?" asked Jon.
"What's carpet?  What're drapes?" asked the mysterious native woman.
"Oh yeah, gonna have to use different pick up lines in this country," realized John.

            There are about a trillion tumblr nerds wanting to talk about how this movie is sexist or racist but you can ignore all of that because the real problem as far as I am concerned is how flat everything is.  Pocahontas is a pretty princess whose biggest concern when not frolicking in the forest is that she is being pressured to marry a guy who is noble, good looking, and liked by her entire community.  Boo-fuckity-hoo.  John Smith is the swarthy adventurer who has seen the world and conquered it all with his good looks, skill, and bravery, the guy probably has a trail of bastards and broken hearts from Cairo to Santiago.  I’m having déjà vu as it is another case of Boo-fuckity-hoo.  NEITHER OF THESE PEOPLE HAVE ANYTHING TO OVERCOME!

            I don’t even know these characters’ motivations.  Let’s compare a few protagonists from other movies.

Belle, “I want to see the world, the one beyond the little village I live in”.  How does she do this?  “All I can afford is to read books about that world”.

Hercules, “I want to prove myself worthy of my birthright as a god”.  How does he do this?  “I will fight evil, protect the innocent, and bring glory to my name.”

Rapunzel, “I want to go outside.”  How does she go about this?  “I go outside as soon as I have a—let’s call him ‘willing’—guide so that I will be relatively safe.”

"Tangled" sure as hell has a greater grasp on the idea of romance than "Pocahontas".

These Characters have goals and do things to accomplish those goals.  What is the goal of each of the leads in “Pocahontas”?  I don’t know.  What do their actions indicate might be their goal?  Getting some strange from an ethnicity they haven’t been with before.  Capital.  Wonderful protagonists.

Whatever.

            Share your own thoughts on this in the comments.  I know I am not the only person out there who is nostalgic for Disney products, and I am sure many people disagree with my selection for today’s entry. 

I picked Disney stuff just because I knew there was so much of it to talk about and it lends itself to discussion in the comments.  So please, tell me how my opinion about cartoon movies is biased and how your opinion on cartoon movies is objectively right.

______________________________

If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Movies of 2014, THE WORST MOVIE

            Let me start off by saying: I do not go into movies wanting to hate them.  I wish that all things produced and sold could have something in them for me to take and enjoy, learn from, or be enlightened by.  I like to like things.  I like fun.  And while writing scathing reviews can be fun to write and read, I would much rather be the person who draws attention to something I feel is being overlooked by the general public (like "The Boxtrolls") than to try and tear down something people seem to be heralding as some masterpiece.  That being said... This movie has already won a Golden Globe for "Best Picture".

Worst Movie of the Year 

Yes.  I am being serious.  This thing has a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score.  I hate it. (Poster)

Boyhood                    

            For the life of me I cannot understand the appeal of this thing.  I hesitate to refer to it as a movie.  In an era in which dozens of television shows have run for a decade with casts evolving and each episode presenting a plot with developments and interesting dialogue... What is special about this?

            Hell, forget TV shows, you want to look back at the last decade?  Look at the internet.  You can at any time call up any number of videos of history, news, or even someone's home movies which they freely share.  The world has become a big community posting their family photo albums online for each other to see and empathize with.  So the whole conceit of the movie, that it was filmed in sections over 12 years is meaningless.

            The acting in this is bad.  Just bad.  Ethan Hawke (whom I like as an actor) and Patricia Arquette, are the only people who seem to be trying, and they suck.  Hawke seems to be playing to the back rows which is distracting when he is paired with the kid actors who have no ability at all and are visibly uncomfortable in many scenes.  Patricia by contrast is sleep walking as a sheepish to the point of cowering woman who... gets abused.  The titular boy is so irredeemably dull and mumbling that I actually hated him as a character, though being silent means he can dodge saying the dialogue, which is bizarrely out of touch, as no one seems to talk like a human.  Voids of wit or insight.

            I wonder how much "movie" was left on the cutting room floor.  Because there are scenes in which Hawke spouts the typical know-it-all bullshit that free spirit fuck-wits like his character often spout... But since his character is supposed to be seen as wise by the audience does that mean that they shot scenes with multiple possible insights?

            I imagine you are saying, "Wha?..."  What I mean to say is that Hawke bitches about President Bush.  Now in the present, to the general public, President Bush is seen as a fool who was tricked into invading a country by the military industrial complex, we "know" that.  But they could not have known that at the time they were filming the movie.  So did they film scenes with Hawke's character cheering the invasion?  With Hawke saying that he is worried but hopes that things will be alright?  So that no matter what the ultimate outcome of the Iraq invasion they could have cut the movie together to make him look like the wise father?  The reason I ask is because the movie feels about as artificial and sentiment baiting as it gets and I wonder how much of this was written before hand and how much was weaseled together to give comforting sentiment from the 20/20 hindsight of the audience.

Somewhere in one of these parallel universes, Richard Linklater made a movie about the son of a TEA party activist.  And the effort he went to to make them sympathetic stretched him creatively, and won him no awards.

            Beyond all of that I fell like this could have worked... as a series.  Take each segment that is a year in the life and make it an episode, 12 episodes, each with a story that builds toward the character growing and serving as a snap shot of the time.  Sure you wouldn't get Oscars, you would have to settle for Emmys but the story would have been complete... and an actual story with an arc... rather than: NOTHING.

            I just kept thinking thru the whole thing back to a particular scene in the movie "Adaptation" which gives a brutal criticism of script writing and the necessity of structure and conflict (Watch the video), things "Boyhood" lacks because of its meandering bullshit style over substance Gimmick (there is that word again) of banking on filming a time rather than filming a story.

Overall: 0/10

Worst Movie I have ever seen

            If you felt this movie touched you somehow, please comment.  Please share this with those who are able to explain their opinions.  Because every review I have read emphasizes "the ambition" or "the time capsule nature" of this rather than themes, story, or production which I think of as the key components of a movie rather than what we got.  I welcome someone to tell me I am wrong, but try to avoid the "it was filmed over 12 years" because I know that, and I do not care about that.

            It is strange that 2014 had me find three films that I liked so much that one of them is my favorite film ever now, and another is my favorite super hero movie (of which there are many to choose in a genre I am very found of).  But I also feel that "Boyhood" is the movie I hate the most of any movie I have ever seen (and this is in a year in which I watched 3 movies that I gave 1/10).  I wrote a blog back in May 2011, about the movie I thought was the worst, "Phantasm".  And again that shows how much I have changed as a person.  While I still regard it as crap because by today's standards it looks like it was made in two weeks for 40 dollars with the staff of a failed sitcom and a local Golden Apple diner theater, I "get it" now.  "Phantasm" was about nightmares and dream logic and the loss of control of one's life in the wake of tragedy.  It has themes and weirdness that takes you out of reality and into a story full of... maybe 'imagination' is the best word for it.  It tries.

I am citing this as a positive example of effort.  What?  (Poster)

            "Boyhood" is not really a movie to me.  I used to think one of the worst things a movie could be is stupid, but now... Boring is the worst thing by wide strides.  And "Boyhood" is boring.  It's boring faux profundity is so dense that it bends light and time. When my friends and I watched it I thought we had been watching the god damn thing for 6 days. We wandered thru a desert and nearly died of thirst.

 ______________________________

If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Why I dislike "The Big Bang Theory" (The TV Show)

            I don't really like the show, "The Big Bang Theory".  While I will admit that the show does on occasion have some heart or development for the most part it is just a dumb farce that seems to have limitless contempt for the characters and the audience.  To illustrate this point I would like to point to an episode that for whatever reason really sticks out in my memory, "The Cornhusker Vortex" (Season 3, Episode 6; Nov 2, 2009).

            In this episode two of the characters, Howard and Raj play a game of kite battling (none of this is shown, that would be interesting and showcase something exotic and neat that their worldly jobs and education have yielded... can't have that, they are to only be the butt of jokes) somehow Howard fucks up because he gets distracted by a pretty woman and so Raj is mad at him.  Since none of the kite flying is shown I have no idea how he ruins things, but that is the "B" plot.

What do you mean we don't get to be characters rather than one-note jokes?  Not for another 3 seasons?  That's lame.

            The "A" plot though has to deal with Leonard (why doesn't he go by Leo?).  Leonard finds out that his girlfriend Penny is having a football party with her friends (friends that are never previously seen, and are never heard from again) and Leonard wants to participate, she just thinks he'll be bored because he doesn't like football (she is completely right and the mature thing to do is for Leonard to just admit that and they should just agree to have fun on their own with other friends from time to time, but he is emotionally retarded).

            For some fucking reason Leonard decides to learn football from textbooks and recites the rules of the game in exacting detail as he watches, and remains completely baffled by the game.  The clever twist of the episode is that the asperger's syndrome test subject, Sheldon knows all about Football having grown up in Texas, and teaches it to Leonard.  Ultimately Penny sees how Leonard is frustrated and does what she did originally and lets him go to spend his Sunday hanging out with Howard and Raj whose friendship is mended.

So the plot of this show is that a man who understands particle physics...
Can't understand the rules of a sport?
You know, lots of people don't care about lots of sports, its not that they can't understand the rules...
It's that they have no interest.  Like people who dislike jogging or broccoli.

            Why in god's name did they have to teach Leonard football at all?  Forget watching it, reading it, cultural osmosis, and Sheldon teaching him... All of that aside, "Madden NFL 2010" was released 6 weeks before this episode premiered.  It is a football video game.  Just buy a used copy of Madden 09' from Gamestop (there will be 10,000 copies there for $5) and have him play that for a few hours, Leo would have mastered the rules in a day.  The guy plays video games all the time there is no reason he couldn't learn to play a game for children... VIA PLAYING THE VIDEO VERSION OF THAT GAME FOR CHILDREN.

Use a video game to teach someone about a sport?  But how can football if not jock!?

            Even from a story perspective there should be some kind of contrast between the exotic sport of kite battle and football and how Howard and Raj get into a fight during it, and how Leonard forcing his way into the football party should cause a fight with Penny, but there is no real parity, no message beyond, don't watch shows you dislike... a message I had no trouble following as I have watched maybe an episode's worth of clips since then.

            I will admit that once there were more women on the show and they were treated like characters instead of objects the show improved.  And once they had Howard stop acting like a would be sex offender it improved.  And once they stopped with all the hack nerd jokes (there are only so many) the show improved.  But it is still crap.

Movies of 2013, Apocalypse, pt3, World War Z

Apocalypse Films (or "What is the Dumbest Thing I have seen all Year?")

World War Z, or "What?  Seriously, what?"

Overall: 3/10 (To answer my starting question, this is the Dumbest movie I have seen all year)

It is clear this script was not written for the book it was supposedly based on.
It is a series of set pieces strung together rather than a carefully plotted tale building to a climax.

            Another god damn zombie movie.  Look, this is just a really, really stupid movie, if nothing else it is that, and I would not recommend seeing it. I am now going to look at some spoiler info to show how dumb it is.

            Spoiler time discussion: The zombie outbreak starts... somewhere and spreads through airports, the zombies can only be incapacitated by bullets though unless they are completely destroyed they seem to keep coming after a short respite, they are fast, the infection spreads quickly, and all the actors in zombie make up over play the role to the point that it is silly rather than scary or engaging.  Brad Pitt is a UN investigator that is sent into... I don't know what he does, I think his job involves figuring out what happens in warzones.

            The movie is a road trip, going from scene to scene all over the world, initially it is pretty good with the outbreak in the city, followed by raiding supplies and escaping via helicopter on a roof.  These are simple down to earth adventures that could be experienced by anyone in a crisis situation.
            Then Pitt travels to Korea, and while refueling in the rain the zombies attack, how the zombies saw, heard, or smelled them in the rain (at night) is not explained and the rules for how these things behave is a little unclear.  One character, thought to be plot indispensable falls down and shoots himself in the face... It is hilarious.

            After Korea they go to Israel in the most laughable point in the film.  Israel has apparently been spending all the foreign aid the US has been giving them on walls to keep the zombies out (METAPHOR) and then decides to let everybody into the walls having never heard of quarantine procedures before.  Then when the groups of Jews and Palestinians start singing about love, togetherness and acceptance the noise attracts zombies to break in and annihilates the whole thing (METAPHOR?)

The Israeli wall is where this happens.

            Brad Pitt escapes in a plane, which gets infected (I have no idea where this comes from it is established that infection takes 12 seconds, they have been in the air for an hour... Again the rules are made up and the plot points don't matter).  The plane crashes near enough to walk to a WHO (World Health Organization) facility... Near enough to walk with a piece of plane debris going through Pitt's torso.  The WHO faculty then threaten Pitt with violence and interrogate him... Why?  They are doctors and viral pathologists not fascists, there is no reason for them to act this way.

            They then explain that sick people are effectively invisible to zombies... The zombies only wanting to infect healthy people... because only a healthy person can spread the infection properly... a magical disease that turns off the circulatory system... No kidding they establish that biological attacks on the zombies won't work because without a working circulatory system there is no way for the disease to harm them...  So what difference would being sick make?

            Regardless Pitt gets to the zombie infested lab with all of the virus samples, infects himself (it is important to note that he is in a refrigerator and finds syringes to inject himself, because of course they keep syringes in the refrigerated room with all the Ebola).  And it is true that undead can't see sick people... They then infect the world with  some kind of flu and people commence to exterminate the zombies in epic battles which look all the more preposterous because all of the human attacks are effectively invisible and completely immune to attack from the zombies now who ignore them even while getting bashed apart.

            Pitt then gets to reunite with his family in the Canadian wilderness.

            Additional problems: There are not this many people in the world to make the things that happen in this movie happen.  You have millions of zombies in every location pouring like a tidal wave over crowds of humans... Horseshit.  It would not take that long to figure out sick people are invisible, it would be immediately apparent.  The WHO are a useless international disaster response force, if you want someone to hand out condom information packets and hold an AIDS seminar for people who don't listen, call the WHO, massive viral breakout would require the CDC which is in Atlanta and would have been destroyed instantly in this movie.

            There are so many things wrong with this movie that any active viewer will become bored and frustrated with it after the first 30 minutes.

My Thoughts on "Red Dead Redemption", End

(Continued from Part 3...)

Cause Avenging an Asshole is Cathartic

            You are now playing as John's son, who much like the dead uncle is a boring and annoying character who is defined mostly as being a wimp and a fool.  The game fast forwards to him being a weary and angry adult.  John's wife then dies off camera years after John's death, and the Son now goes out for vengeance.

            The Son finds and murders the Government Agent which tasked John with finding the gang.  The government agent who ultimately betrayed and killed John.  Here is the problem: that agent was totally right in what he did and was acting with legal authority.

            The Son is just a murderer, plain and simple.  This is not a good message to go out on.  It is basically saying that Justice is a lie and that violence is the ultimate authority.  If the Son had instead talked with and ultimately forgiven the Agent for doing what he did, in so doing bringing an end to the cycle of violence then the ending would have been more hopeful though sad and hard.  Instead the game wraps on the weakest and darkest of all three possible endings.

 

Also, the Son is just not as interesting.

Final Thoughts

            I don't really like this game, and by the end felt like I was doing a chore.  It doesn't help that Redemption is incredibly long and linear.  Its length is not in gameplay either but in padded world crossing.  You will ride a horse for hours and hours from one map marker to the next and deciding which to do first or last will have little if any impact on how the story unfolds.  It is spread so wide and thin.

            You have a series of missions which run you across vast empty expanses on a slow moving horse, back and forth.  Once you finish the missions in an area you are shuffled to a new area, in which you go back and forth completing missions, going from place to place on a slow moving horse.  At a point I just wanted to go from mission to mission and finish the game, I dreaded having to cross the Mexican desert AGAIN, for the sake of doing a mission that I thought was stupid to help a group of people I disliked on what seemed like an entirely unnecessary side quest.

            Here is a crazy thought, why didn't they just have three protagonists.  John hunts Bill.  Another guy (there is a perfect candidate for this in the game too, a retired gunfighter who teaches John how to perfect his quick draw technique, an event which happens so far into the game it is insulting) fights the Mexican Revolution.  And a third guy is a government agent (again, there are candidates in the game) fights Dutch and the Indians.  You wouldn't have to shoehorn in John into a bunch of places he has no business being, and he doesn't have to interact with people he has no business suffering.

            I imagine this thought occurred to Rockstar studios, the makers of the game.  Their latest soon to be out game, "Grand Theft Auto V" has three different protagonists in it, with stories that weave in and out of each other.  That sounds like a good fix.

 

Also driving through a city is just more interesting than riding a horse through a desert.

My Thoughts on "Red Dead Redemption", pt3

(Continued from Part 2...)

Viva!

            Anyway, at the end of the Mexican Revolution you capture Javier, kill Bill, and help the revolution win at the expense of itself.  Hooray for John.  You are then told the leader of your gang has shown up and you need to get him if you want to go back to your family.  And this is the part when I started hating John.  The Government officials who are forcing him to do this are completely in the right, and John is a monster.

            John is a mass murderer and criminal.  Regardless of his current motivation and whatever else he has done since his days of younger-man-violence doesn't make up for what he has done.  What is more it isn't just me saying that.  Satan (the literal Satan) tells John as much.  But the government agents are sticks in the mud and douches so you as the player are not supposed to like them.  I guess?

            So you head out to catch the leader of your old gang, Dutch.  You have numerous opportunities to do so, are given hosts of reasons to do so, but for some goddamn reason John doesn't.  John has been shown as able to shoot the wings off a fly but can't bring himself to shoot a mass murderer like Dutch even when Dutch blows an innocent woman's head off in front of John.

            Turns out Dutch is some sort of anarchic primitivist marauder, justifying his violence by allying himself with Indians who had their land taken away.  You are shown to be on the side of assholes when they have John escort and assist a racist, drug abusing, Yale phrenology professor around.  Because civilization is clearly the breeder of limp wristed assholes, not like the frontier, which breed real (murderous) men like John.  This message is stupid, and turns a middle finger up at the player who has grown up in the relative comfort and luxury of civilization.  I resent this.

Mostly because both I, and the game itself are products of this civilization.

Return of the King

            Ultimately the end(s) of the game is unquestionably what I have the most problems with.  After Dutch is dead John is allowed to return to his family.  In an ideal happy ending John would ride up to his house, the camera would pan far back and you would watch him walk into his home and the credits would roll.  The journey would be at an end.  The message being that monsters like John get to live and be happy so long as they are monsters for the civilization they would otherwise be a terror to.  It is a complex and damning message to society that glorifies violence with happy endings.  It keeps going.

            Much like the assault on the Fort in Act I, this ending does not happen.  Instead you meet John's wife, uncle, son, and dog.  You do boring missions like killing birds before they eat your corn, herding cattle, and hunting caribou.  Wonderful.  I will admit that I like the character of the wife.  She is flawed and sassy.  There was some legitimate heart put into the writing and performance of the character.

            Then the next ending happens.  Turns out the government are not going to let John go.  He has killed too many people to not face justice.  An army attacks your farm.  This only adds to the game vs story issues because I have a pardon letter in my inventory which would absolve me of any unlawful murder or massacre I might have committed during the game.  This game mechanic can get me out of a $10,000 bounty for the burning of a nunnery, orphanage, and village of retired veterinarians, but it does not function in this scripted event.

            Anyway... there is a shoot out.  John's uncle dies, I think this is supposed to make you sad, I did not like the character so it got a "meh" from me.  John's wife and son escape on horseback.  And ultimately John is gunned down by about half a million rounds of ammunition.  This is again a section which demands the credits should roll.

            Your character has died.  The message of the game is one of justice unyielding.  You cannot escape the wages of sin.  Second chances won't be earned in a civilized society.  Bit of a downer message but I would have been okay with that.  THEN THE GAME KEEPS GOING.

Also, he's been in worse situations in the game, another scenario in which the story and the gameplay are at odds.

(Continued in the End...)

My Thoughts on "Red Dead Redemption", pt2

(Continued from Part 1...)

The Dubious Honor of Good Samaritan

            This is also a part of the game that I notice a real flaw in the "player is part of the story".  The game has a moral choice element, when you kill people without reason you earn a reputation of being an asshole, when you help those in need you are seen as the Lone Ranger.  To keep with this there are little adventures you can have, occasionally you will see a guy trying to kidnap/rape/murder a woman, and you can chose to stop them, I frequently do.  There are also things called "Strangers", tiny stories that take you on a short story in the wild west.  I saw the start of a Stranger mission, a guy beating up a woman behind a brothel, so I shot him and instantly failed the mission.  At this point I have shot dozens of men beating up women and have gotten nothing but honor so this was surprising, so I reloaded the mission.

            When I reloaded I walked up and found out she was a prostitute/slave of the guy beating her up.  The pimp/slave-owner offered to sell me her.  I shot him... Cause seriously: fuck that guy.  Instant fail for the mission.  So I reloaded the mission again.

            This time I bought the girl and freed her from slavery so that she could go to a convent and take better care of herself.  I went to check up on her and it turns out she had been kidnapped and then murdered by her former pimp/owner.  I then shot him in a duel, winning the mission.  WHAT?  So, the point of the mission was to fail at saving a girl because you chose to negotiate with a slaver?  That is stupid, I shot him even before I knew what was going on because I judged the situation totally right... but instead of instantly winning the mission I was told, "WRONG" .  I shot him when I knew what was going on, and was reprimanded again.  I shoot him after the girl is dead and somehow VICTORY.  No.  Fail.

You're no player, you're an audience.

Endangered Species

            That was one of the stories in Mexico, but there are other issues, like the hunting mini-games.  You can kill mountain lions or deer in certain parts of the map, or gather plant life, and then sell all that junk to buy bullets (there is a certain area that if you stand around every mountain lion in North America will find you over the course of an hour and each one will nearly kill you).

            At one point I find a Stranger who needs some plants to make a glue and some skins to make a glider wing, I have collected and sold somewhere around 10,000 pelts while playing the game so I go to the general store to buy some pelts to help the glider Stranger out.  NO PELTS FOR SALE.  Why?  I want to buy some pelts, I can't be the only guy selling, so why can't I buy some?  No reason.  The game seems to have wanted a survival mechanism to it, the ability to buy cheap and sell for a profit, the ability to find rare things and make use of them in creative ways, instead it is just a straight up "junk for cash" system.  That isn't all that fun.

10,000 ninjas living in about 4 square miles.

Continued in part 3...

My Thoughts on "Red Dead Redemption", pt1

            "Red Dead Redemption" is an odd game.  It has glitches which detract, its controls are ass for many situations but can be mastered if you are of the temperament to master video game controls.  Simply put: it is playable.

            BUT, I have some issues with the story.

Once Upon a Time in the West

            You are John Marsden, an ex-criminal who has been found by government men.  You have been taken into custody and your wife and son have been shipped off to somewhere safe.  The government men make you a deal, "Help us catch/kill your old gang and you get to go back to your family.  Refuse to help and we will just hang you for the murders you committed."  Honestly, it is a pretty good deal when you think about it, especially when you consider what would have happened if Django and Schultz had found him first.

            John then gets shot immediately.  Mostly this wound is born of stupidity having approached the situation with all the tactical wit of a drunken Santa Anna.  He is then helped by the kindness of strangers and has to set into motion a posse to take out the psycho who shot him.  And the psycho has a fort and an army.

            The first third of the game is excellent.  Everything builds toward one goal: attacking the fort, and killing Bill, the goon whose reign of terror you have been sent to end.  You meet a series of strong and interesting characters, you talk straight with people, and in the end gather up a collection of lawmen, rogues, and criminals to raid the fort that Bill is hold up in.  If the game had ended with the raid on the fort I would have thought, "That was a very well paced game.  Bit short I guess."  But I would have been happy with the ultimate conclusion.

            It doesn't end there.

Not exactly the Justice League.  But each is good in their own way and they make the Fort siege interesting .

I Have Sand in my Everywhere

            No, instead Bill escapes to Mexico and hook ups with a previously unnamed fellow member of the gang, Javier.  This is clunky.  I had up to this point thought Bill was the only guy I was after, now there is another, and they allude to a third.  I  mostly just roll with it.  They did a good job of building the first act, so I anticipated the second act moving at the same strong clip.

            Then a Mexican Revolution happens, and the pacing turns to molasses.

            I'm not kidding.  John gets dragged into political horse shit in Mexico, a war between a hedonistic governor and a hedonistic revolutionary.  I imagine this was to illustrate the old phrase, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," but in the end it mostly just had me feeling tired and frustrated.  I just could not understand why John would have gotten involved at all, but he ends up working for both sides and kills more people than the rest of the revolution combined.  John's in game body count must be in triple digits at this point.  And the fact that John has no substantive remorse about this, seeing the end goal of getting his family back as a clear and justifiable goal makes him into an absolute monster when you get down to it.

"But, it's so pretty.  Just look at those graphics."  I am not wowed by graphics.  it I wanted to look at something pretty there are better uses for my eyes.

Continued in Part 2...

I Review "Prometheus"

            "Prometheus", or as it could be subtitled, "Why are they doing that, it seems really dangerous and stupid?"

            I saw this the weekend it came out, which is very uncharacteristic of me, as I am incredibly cheap, but it looked like a really genre defining movie.  To be honest I have never been a fan of the "Alien" franchise, it is only okay in my opinion, as the first movie is rather boring, and I actually have had no drive to see the others.

            There is nothing in this movie I did not understand.  It did not go over my head, I've read about this soon to be tired concept many times.  The only thing that escapes me is what was going on in the minds of the shitty characters.  People react to things so inconsistently with how a normal person would react (with notable exceptions) that it detaches you from the movie, and grows frustrating.  "Looks poisonous, let me have a lick." "Is that barbed?  Let me check by shoving it up my own ass."

"Jesus, I know we transported down to dangerous locations all the time, but we never had a budget for cool space suits, its not like we had them and didn't use them correctly."

            Let me go over the things I liked.  I liked the main character in spite of her "faith", which is a major point of stupidity in the movie, she openly states that she believes and acts on assumptions she makes without evidence (I can't remember the character's name).  I liked the Captain in spite of him leaving more than one crew member to die in an alien fortress so he could dip his dick in Charlize Theron, honestly she is so pretty and the characters he left to die were so annoying I can't really hold it against him (can't remember his name either). I liked Michael Fassbender's performance so much that I think he should get a best supporting actor nod (though the character does numerous things that make no sense, even in context, even after you have seen the whole movie).  And I really like Charlize Theron, she was a really cool character who was frequently the most level headed and sensible (so of course the movie tries to make her look like the bad guy through a good chunk) (SPOILER: she dies in a really stupid way).

            I very much enjoyed the look of the movie, the Alien colony/base is really creepy and alien in its appearance, because Giger knows how to make alien things look actually alien.  There are several good scenes.  And the ending I feel works, for the most part (though there is a certain cheapness to it).

I typed "Cheap Sci-fi Ending" into google, and this image from "Prometheus" was in the top 15 results.

            What I dislike is so numerous I think I will have a hard time listing it all to completion.  Chief is this: Characters don't act intelligently or with any sense of self preservation aside from those few I liked (and I primarily only liked them because of that trait).  The dialogue does not make sense with what is on the screen many times, with people wondering if the massive obvious structures, runways, and faces carved into mountains are artificial constructs.  The idea that these scientists just confirmed extraterrestrial life and they are not all ecstatic for such a discovery.  And good god: the tired stereotypes that appear that have no place in this type of film, those tropes were made fun of in "Cabin in the Woods" earlier this year.

            I dislike the way people rudely treat the Android character, David (Michael Fassbender), who is for all intents and purposes a human being with intelligence and a will of his own.  I can understand talking to him like a subordinate, he is there to assist, but it comes off so dickish.  I sympathize with the character and I just see him as a character in a movie.  The characters in the movie actually interact with him, shouldn't somebody talk to him as if he were a person using "please" and "Thank you" and asking him his opinion?  I mean, the idea of a sentient machine has existed for so long in science fiction I would like to think that if a group of forward thinking, planet hoping, diverse and adventurous super scientists met a thinking Machine they would be less obnoxious and more curious and open.  These scientists probably grew up in a world were movie making technology was hyper immersive (as evidenced by the hologram technology they used) and since these are scientists they probably are not unfamiliar with Science Fiction presented very convincingly.  These scientists would not be this thick headed... they're fucking scientists.

There is also a lot of goo in this movie.  So much so that at one point all I could  think of was that scene from "Ghostbusters 2" when Ray yells, "SLIME!  ITS A RIVER OF SLIME!"

            There are also little things that just don't make sense from a practical standpoint.  They don't take weapons with them on their initial exploration of the alien structure, and take off protective gear in situations that no sane person would do so (I said, "put your fucking helmet on" out loud in the theater, and had to stifle myself half way through the sentence).  Characters act maddeningly inconsistent (at one point the map maker, who has his own scouting robots, gets lost in the facility).  There are twists so lame, that when they were "revealed" to the audience people saw it telegraphed from a mile away (one reveal actually had a guy in the back of the theater say the word, "GASP" in the flattest tone I have heard this side of Ben Stein).

            And I would say that is my biggest complaint: this movie is dumb.  It has a consistent tone, cool realistic appearance (to a point, the last monster and space gods looked very CGI).  It is just that people make way too many objectively bad decisions for people who are trusted with representing mankind on a 100 billion dollar space exploration mission to find intelligent life.  And being a person who doesn't usually get mad at movies, this one pissed me off.  Which is a shame, the questions they meant to leave unanswered were thought provoking.  It's like a really beautiful a delicious looking cake, that someone walked in and shit on.  You shit on my Ace of Cakes.  It was something great marred by stupid and that makes it all the worse.

            I am actually thinking of more stuff to complain about, as I am sitting down to publish it, I could go on for pages.  And others have.  SHIT ON MY CAKE!

Ace of Cakes.  Like that, but with Shit on it.