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Reviews
Prometheus (2012)
By the numbers
I was very impressed by the trailer and the thought of Ridley Scott taking back his movie was very exciting but the movie itself was surprising for following so much cliché whilst having no overarching plot, focus or strong character development. Michael Fassbender was the best character by far with mannerisms that seemed more alien than the aliens though much more subtle. His motivations though remained unclear throughout the film and this was the main criticism. What is is film about? The alien at the beginning drinking the black goo with a terrific spaceship taking off all three of which are then promptly forgotten after the intro credits. Peter Weyland - the uber-genius and arguably the creator of the Alien universe and the feel of the evil corporation reduced to nothing more than the old sci-fi staple of the evil old man looking for extended life an on screen for maybe 5 minutes. The space-jockey which was so mysterious in the first movie - maybe thousands of years old and from an exotic race nothing more than a large human being who may have died a few decades ago. And it turns out every major race from the movies are basically human beings that have had their DNA messed around with, including the iconic aliens themselves. No questions answered - only huge obvious setups for a sequel. Really it would have been fine for some low-budget Aien ripoff a la Aliens vs Predator filmed by a 'rent a director'. But for a return to the original Alien universe vy the man who invented it it was, well, meh...
The Infidel (2010)
Excellent story, intelligent and sensitive acting, and absolutely hilarious
I rented The Infidel about 3 hours ago on pay-per-view being expecting a good but misfiring comedy about Jews and Muslims with some fairly obvious humour. However the as ever excellent Omid Jahlili (apologies for any misspellings), and Richard Schiff were the 'odd couple' of this really charming and heart-felt tale which was at times heart-stoppingly funny largely because of the deadpan delivery and wry observational comedy of the two principles. Richard Schiff teachng Omid to say 'oy' before moving on to 'vey' was so funny, but the real heart of the film was the telling of how fragile the racism of religion is and how based it is on misunderstanding, grandstanding, ego and attempting to 'secure the place in one's own community'. If it has a message it's that everyone is prey to their own culture's prejudices even when those prejudices are based on sometimes almost commicaly absurd rubbish,. A true classic. And a perfect selection of leading men.
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight (2010)
A dire game with little thought put into it
I had very high hopes for C&C4 as many a long-term C&C fan did. It was after all the game that was supposed to tie up a 15-year long story arc that had engrossed many millions of players. The game itself is actually of very poor quality - you only need to read the reviews on Amazon. Suffice to say the entire prior fan base has been ignored with changes to the game mechanics that change the very nature of the game to the degree where it ceases to be a C&C game. However the biggest surprise is just how poor it is and how badly designed from the offset.
The game forces you to use a tiny unit-capped army of fewer units even than that you would use in say Company of Heroes (about ten or so), and then designs the game around a number of controllable checkpoints that cannot be held as the player has to go to find more control points to raise their technology level. This creates seemingly endless, monotonous games that are nothing more than constant back-and-forthing between the same points on the map. This is made worse by the fact that there is a requirement to be online and connected to EA's servers the entire duration of your game which includes to save games. As server connections are intermittent this makes for a hugely frustrating series of games where you do the same thing repetitively and then suffer a catastrophic loss of your position because EA's servers have gone down or are suffering from a bad connection. Furthermore EA have discontinued support for a number of games that have only been out for a year or 18 months or so and so there is every reason to believe that once many people have bought this game EA will simply pull the plug on their servers once they become uneconomical at which point we have to assume you will no longer be able to play the game that you purchased.
Little effort has been expended on a single player story - no plot lines have been taken from prior games so there is little continuity and there is an air of 'that'll do' about the sets and acting (apart from Joe Kucan - sublime as always as Kane - his last lines are delivered with pathos and quiet empathy that actually add to the depth of the megolomaniac character). The stories are both not only well below the quality of the admittedly camp but thoroughly enjoyable stories of previous games but both campaigns can be played through in a few hours. The overall impression the player gets is that the single player experience was simply of no interest to the designers.This grates because for 6 months the hype machine has emphasised time and again that this is the 'grand conclusion' to a story arc.
This mindset applies to the game-play and graphics - the machines seem far too large and cartoon-like - far from the hi-res models of earlier games to the degree where you feel that you are playing a beta of a game and that perhaps real unit models will be released later. Combined with the game-play which seems to have been designed to draw out maximum effort and time spent playing from the player for minimal design effort on the part of the design team this reduces the quality of game-play almost to nothing. This is actually a very common multi player design aspect called a time-sink where the player is forced to do repetitive tasks in order to artificially lengthen the playing duration. As annoying as this is in multi player it is dull as dishwater in single player. There simply isn't any fun to be had here.
Some comments suggest that the main target audience of this game is multi-player but this simply isn't the case - this isn't what the publishers have been hyping for months and it is only now that the game has received a drumming that there seems to be a 're-trenchment' to try and re-define the game as being aimed at multi-player. The multi-player experience will be identical to single-player only with even less reason to play. Certainly there are games that do the squad thing 1000% better than C&C4 and the gamer is unlikely to think that sharing a evening going back and forth between the same three checkpoints for an hour constitutes 'fun'.
Finally the gaming community has noticed that there has been from launch a sudden arrival of a number of unusually positive reviews from individuals, often with no history on the site, that radically contrast the vast, vast, vast majority of independent reviews and marks/grades. On each major review website there seems to be one standout extremely positive review usually marking the game at some outrageously high mark such as 10/10 or 100% with glowing recommendations but from only this single reviewer. This seems to suggest a coherent attempt by party or parties unknown globally to 'stem the tide' of the negative response to the game in a very sinister and underhand fashion. This extends as far as Amazon in the UK which censored negative reviews in the first week of the game's launch. Take a look at each major review site and there will be perhaps 100 negative 1/10 reviews yet with one standalone review marking 10/10 and saying it's the greatest game ever. This extremely obvious form of manipulation is extremely underhand and just serves to bring down the reputation of the publisher/developer further.
All in all a tragic end to a classic series that many people have waited literally more than a decade to see the completion of. To be dismissed as merely 'the old guys' and to have this dire quality sub-standard game passed off as a true successor to the C&C franchise is insulting to the loyalty of the previous gamers and the intelligence of the new.
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Bland and a wasted opportunity
I went to see Alice expecting the perfect mix of one of the most original and surreal directors ever being given the perfect material from arguably the most surreal book in history - a wealth of ideas to interpret and create. Instead this was a hugely disappointing and bland experience that made me feel I wasn't watching work from the same director as Nightmare Before Christmas and Sleepy Hollow. The Alice books are dark and the imagery nightmarish. Even an interpretation made for children had the potential for many moments of dark or surreal, outlandish and off-the-wall plots and imagery but the film simply has no heart. There is little plot - characters are left hanging in the air with no development and it just seems to be an Alice 'checklist' - Drink Me, Eat Me, Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter, March Hare, Queens etc. - all present and correct and all on screen for about 30 seconds with no reason why they are there. And the Mat Hatter is perfectly sane! Just with occasional bouts with confusion or self doubt but he soon pulls himself together. But overall the feeling is that there just isn't any direction or reason to have made this - it isn't the original book - that's fine but if you're going to take something that original and make a new vision then that vision had better be something special - and it just seems to be following the same generic formula of any other action Hollywood pic. The 3D as a mechanisms is not so bad but I do wonder when directors are going to realise that rushing 50 things past the screen at once doesn't allow the mind to focus on anything - I had to close my eyes for a few seconds a few times in the film (most notably when falling down the hole) because everything was just a blur - I had no time to follow anything so I waited until the whirlwind of CGI stopped - I had to do something similar with the first Transformers when you couldn't make out any single activity. Overall though really disappointing. My wife and I have long held that the perfect creative team would be Tim Burton directing, Johnny Depp as lead, a plot by Neil Gaman and music by The Cure - the four most original artists in their fields. Pleeeeaaasee Tim don't spend the last third of your career making rehashes.