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Movie Review: Three Inches

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 22, 2013Posted in: Movie Reviews, Reviews

Yeah, I know, I’m not exactly stretching my critical talents in taking on the likes of Three Inches. I’ll make it up to you later.

Originally intended as a pilot for a SyFy series that never was, the movie lands in a dead zone of mediocrity located somewhere between X-Men and Mystery Men. Granted, the movie has potential, especially given some of the established talent attached to the production. Yet the combination of a bloated cast and a poorly plotted script kill any chance for this movie to gel into something better than the sum of its parts

The story focuses on Walter (Noah Reid), a twenty-six year old dog washer who lives at home with his mother, played to the hilt by Andrea Martin. Right out of the gate I’m not sure what to make of Walter, whose primary goal in life seems to be finding the nerve to tell the literal girl-next-door that he’s loved her forever whist adorning the walls of his bedroom with classic Starcraft posters – methinks Blizzard kicked in a quatloo or two toward the production budget. It’s the sort of initial conflict I would expect in a movie with a teenage protagonist played by a twenty-six year old actor. The only benefit I could see in aging up the juvenile trope is it allows Walter’s inevitable superhero angst to be tied to a paper thin subtext on post-university career disillusionment.

Shortly after Walter, who also narrates the movie to little affect, gets rejected by the girl-next-door he is struck by lightning. This in turn awakens his telekinetic ability to move any object three inches – a seemingly useless power for which the writing is clever enough to find some decent applications. This extended first act, which goes on for nearly forty-five minutes, also sees some of the movie’s best comedy. It’s mostly one liners and unexpected reactions to clichéd situations which get the job done. The act also introduces James Marsters as Troy Hamilton, who fulfills the Nick Fury/Professor X archetype; it’s just a shame his part is so flimsy that a stiff gust of wind could knock it down like poorly assembled lawn furniture.

Three Inches’ sins extend beyond making a strong character actor play a boring as toast bureaucrat. The movie is hopelessly bloated with secondary and tertiary characters. I’d be happy if these players were dispensable redshirts, but the story actually tries to give them all screen time. This slows the pace so much that it takes a full hour before the story’s central conflict finally lurches into action. The writers, whoever they are as there’s no writing credits listed on IMDB, spend far too much time in the “getting to know you” and “why we fight” phase of the super hero character arc, only to skim through the actual conflict.

Then, as if somebody recognized that the script pissed away runtime that would have been better spent on framing a tangible foe or at least a clear objective for the superheroes, the third act triples down on the pathos. The “acquire the package” trope resolves into the package being a little girl and suddenly the audience is supposed to give a damn. If only we knew why she was special, beyond the lazy exposition that identifies her as a person with uber-powers. Perhaps if we learned something about those holding her captive, then we might care about this plot twist.

Cut to a cornball “I’m Spartacus” ending, sans crucifixion, followed by Walter backsliding into his crush on the girl-next-door, even though the sexy female superhero on his team all but made her intentions clear to him, and the movie leaves its audience wondering just how many executives actually thought this would be worth an hour and a half of my life.

On a technical level, Three Inches boasts some of the sloppiest editing that I have ever seen. There are scene and act breaks which cut to black for three or four seconds before moving on to the next sequence. Again, I want to know how something like that gets past the final screening. Surely somebody must have wondered why the editor was intentionally killing the pace of the story every eight minutes.

In the final assessment, Three Inches certainly showcased some potential, if only it knew what it wanted to be. It’s not funny enough to be a full-on comedy, but it’s too poorly paced for me to take it seriously as an action movie. It smacks of committee style writing and revision throughout the production. Unless you are slavishly devoted to James Marsters, Naoko Mori, Craig Eldridge, or Andrea Martin, you would be wise to give this one a miss.

Three Inches

Directed by: Jace Alexander

Written by: Nobody, apparently.

Starring: Noah Reid, Stephanie Jacobsen, and James Marsters


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Afternoon Anime – Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Episode 8

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 15, 2013Posted in: Reviews, TV Reviews

The eighth episode of Space Battleship Yamato 2199 plays out as something of a throw away story. Though Wish Upon A Star confirms a few things any intelligent viewer would have speculated about on their own, this window into the culture and hierarchy of Planet Gamillon really doesn’t break any new ground. In short: if you haven’t quite figured out the series’ extended metaphor, then you will certainly get the message by the end of this episode.

Much of the story happens on Gamillon, where its citizens are feting Lord Albet Desler on the occasion of the 103rd year of his reign and the 1000th anniversary of the Great Gamilas Reich Empire. The VIP after party to the public spectacle facilitates introductions to the Gamilas high command, whose names all range on the Germanic spectrum. Once we move past the toadying and scraping before Desler, the throne room’s assembled guests are treated to the “theatre” of a new weapon being used against the Yamato.

Meanwhile our eponymous battleship has warped into a solar storm, engineered by Desler of course. A lone Gamilas ship, which turns out to be the sole survivor of the Yamato’s assault on the Pluto base, is charged with deploying the “Desler Torpedo,” thus redeeming themselves for defeat at the hands of “the barbarian ship.”

Note here that the Pluto base survivors are white-skinned as opposed to blue-skinned Gamilans. Idle racism from Desler’s inner circle confirms that these Gamilans are non-terrestrial humans who have been assimilated into the Gamilas Empire. Their worlds acceded to Gamilas’ Anschluss unification of the Large and Small Magellinic Cloud, and in return were allowed to serve as second class citizens within the greater Gamilas Empire.

Say what you will about the original series’ attempts to re-write Japanese identity, but at least it was more subtle than this. I would wager real money that Iscandar is now some sort of Space Warsaw Ghetto.

The episode’s big reveal comes in the form of the Desler Torpedo releasing a gaseous biological weapon akin to the blob. For those keeping score at home, Gamilas’ WMD count now includes radioactive meteor bombs and biological gas weapons. Is anybody unclear on how they are supposed to read the Gamilans at this point?

With the solar storm precluding another warp or effective sub-light manoeuvring, Captain Okita’s only option to escape the blob is to sail dangerously close to a star. Doing so facilitates yet another opportunity to foreshadow that Captain Okita’s days are numbered. The Captain’s plan, which apparently none of the Gamilans, save for Desler, could imagine, allows the star’s gravity to trap and consume the gas monster. The Yamato then uses the wave motion gun to blast a gap through an unavoidable solar flare (physics FTW) and thus navigate the ship to safety.

Meanwhile the Gamilas ship that fired the torpedo has advanced on the Yamato in a suicidal attempt to salvage their honour. Unfortunately, the gap in the solar flare closes around the second ship, killing the alien crew in the process.

Could the Yamato have come out of that battle any more righteous? Not only did they let the star destroy the biological weapon, but they passively allowed a force of nature, rather than their shock cannons, to melt the lone Gamilas destroyer. A single blast from the Yamato’s conventional weapons can sink a Gamilas ship. But instead of having the rear firing guns to do just that, the writers kept the Yamato’s figurative hands as pure as an Admiral’s inspection gloves.

For all this constant reinforcing of Gamilas as an evil empire, the only exception being one of the second glass Gamilans reading a letter from his daughter, and Earth as a righteous victim of an imperialist agenda, I really hope that the series is setting me up for a bait-and-switch. Otherwise it is going to be a long season of nothing but binaries of black and white. Where’s the grime and grey area of war? It doesn’t need to turn into a “Space Terrorist” story, per my last afternoon anime post. However, continuing as is seems childish in its simplicity.

Stray Thoughts

-   Lt. Niimi approaches Captain Okita with a request to explore a habitable planet discovered between warps. Okita shuts her down, citing the shelving of the “Izumo Plan.” Interesting to know that the Yamato was designed as an ark, but it’s a stretch to imagine this as becoming relevant to the main plot.

-   Okita shows the bridge personnel a telescope image of Earth when they are 8 light years from Sol. The distance allows the crew to see the Earth as a blue planet for the first time since the war began - physics FTW for real this time.

-   True to the original series, Desler is written as charismatic and somewhat aloof when compared to his zealous staff. He is a paradox as the embodiment of civilized behavior while simultaneously abiding genocide and subjugation. Perhaps the writers can find a way to explain why he is this way, rather than chalking it up to a goofy Hitler allegory.


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Game Review: StarDrive

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 10, 2013Posted in: Reviews, Video Reviews

Where to begin with StarDrive? Perhaps, in the past. One of my fondest memories as a gamer is the Christmas break of my eighth grade. Therein I devoted a solid two weeks to my first ever game of Master of Orion. It was a sublime experience for me as a budding galactic tyrant. In the years that followed, I discovered other 4X entires: Endless Space, Sword of the Stars, and Galactic Civilizations to name a few. I also dabbled in tabletop games like Battletech and Renegade Legion: Leviathan. Bearing this in mind, it’s fair to say that my tastes lean toward the complex. But of all those games, StarDrive is easily the best I have played in terms of balancing accessibility with difficulty, offering a level of creative freedom usually reserved for tabletop games, and most importantly, evoking that same eighth grade Master of Orion sense of wonder.

Like most games of this genre StarDrive starts players with a home solar system and a handful of ships. From there, stellar hegemons must research new technologies, expand their empire, negotiate with alien races, and lead an armada across the stars – all in real time. Five seconds in real life equals one turn in the game. To the designers’ credit, I’ve never once felt bored or rushed within this real time system. Granted there are times when I pause the game to take stock of a planet’s economy or an incoming fleet of xeno scum. But no matter if I am managing a single star system or a late game empire, the pace always feels appropriate.

Though much and more of the game can be turned over to AI management, which is generally pretty sharp, micromanagers are going to find themselves utterly enraptured by StarDrive’s economic system. Each planet in the game produces two main resources, food and production. A given world can then be set to export, import, or store each resource. This allows lush Terran planets to develop as breadbaskets or hubs of research, while harsher, but mineral rich, worlds are cultivated into production centers. Facilitating this trade is an intuitive system of player, or AI, designed trade routes. 90% of the time this is a brilliant mechanic to ensure nobody in your empire starves to death. The rest of the time I’ve watched one of my expensive transport ships claiming it is “looking for a trade route” even though I’ve assigned a clear one to it. It’s a minor annoyance which would probably be eradicated if I turned shipping over to the AI, but where’s the fun in that?

Setting up trade routes also allowed me to discover some of the finer points of detail that have gone into the game. One such flourish is planets orbiting their star in real time. I discovered this quite by accident when I noticed a trade fleet sitting idle in a system. I zoomed in only to discover that planets Castor and Pollux had moved out of the trade routes I designated. This may seem like much ado about nothing, but small points like this really help sell the idea that I, personally, am managing a space empire.

Brilliant as it is to command my own version of the Colonial Union, ruthlessly exploiting the Earth as a breeding tank for colonists, manoeuvring from a galactic scope down to a single planet can be a bit clumsy. Eventually I memorized the important keyboard shortcuts, but when ship models on the galactic map are designed (somewhat) in scale to stellar bodies, there can be a lot of zooming in and tracking on the mini-map. It’s very honest to the grand emptiness of space, mind you. But players should be prepared for a bit of extra mouse work.

Perhaps if StarDrive came with an interactive tutorial I might have been able to sidestep some of this early confusion. Then again, I could have paid a bit more attention to the built-in slide show explaining the game’s core game mechanics. Beyond this initial overview, an in-game help system offers a triad of videos and expanded entries on the tutorial’s material. So if you start to feel a bit overwhelmed, the guidance is there. Just don’t expect StarDrive to teach you once the game begins. The onus is on you, the player, to learn what you are doing.

Where StarDrive really shines is in terms of ship building and ship combat. Where Galactic Civilizations had players making lego ships as a lead in to glorified paper-rock-scissors battles, StarDrive creates an experience similar to what I used to get when designing a pen and paper starship for a game of Leviathan. Each ship class has a fixed amount of space for internal and external modules. From there the player uses their tech at hand to design a ship which will suit a particular role. Let me give you an example. When the game begins you can only build fighter-class ships and freighters. Alone in the galaxy I didn’t bother researching corvette-class hulls. This proved a mistake when I ran afoul of some corsairs with ships much bigger than mine. I sent out two squadrons of my finest fighters to meet the brigands. None returned.

At that point I seemed well and truly fucked. Then, inspiration struck. I could take a freighter hull and load it up with guns. Sure it would maneuver like a pig in a bog, but it would protect the Earth. Lo and behold my mighty freighter fleet won the day. Of course they ran out of ammo during the next battle, once again proving that logistics is at the core of StarDrive.

From there I began further experimenting with ship design. Once I unlocked laser tech, I built a line of fast interceptors designed to shoot down missiles while heavier corvettes pounded the enemy with forward guns. Learning from past mistakes, I loaded out a middle weight freighter with a munitions factory so I could rain a constant stream of nukes on a “Kulrathi” planet without sending in the marines. I have dreams of building my own personal Space Battleship Yamato and blasting my foes with mighty broadsides, but I haven’t quite unlocked the titan ship class.

If that were not enough, StarDrive also offers a truly inspired fleet construction window. Rather than having industrial planets spam out ships, a la Master of Orion, players can build fleets of almost limitless scope. This involves designing a proper combat formation: fighter screens, fast attack destroyers, bomber wings, if you can imagine it, you can build it. The fleet manager then asks if you want to requisition the fleet from existing ships or build them from scratch, automatically dividing production between the core worlds of an empire. I may have got a little carried away with this during my first play through. In economic terms, I think the expression is shameless defect spending. Still, it was worth it to watch the fleet assemble in real time before FTLing into battle. Military history nerds, delight; this game is for you. It may not have the flash of Sword of the Stars or Homeworld, but the persistent top down view accentuates the player’s position as commander-in-chief instead of a mere Admiral.

At present StarDrive only offers a single “sandbox” mode. In terms of end-game, this requires either wiping out all other life in the galaxy or bringing the races together into a federation. It does, however, seem a bit odd to build in a menu option with only a single game mode in mind. I’ll assume that Zero Sum Games has plans for more content, or they’ve built in the game modes option as a means of supporting an already very active modding community.

StarDrive does fall short in a few areas, nothing critical mind you but certainly noticeable. Despite a commitment to modding, there’s no way to change the game’s default key bindings. Event notifications are just a little too spare for my taste. I don’t need a ping each time a ship gets built, but a fleet’s construction should merit some alert. Where every other screen in the game has an obvious “click this to exit” button, the fleet construction screen does not. And occasionally ships will rally to a location seemingly of their own volition. Again, these are small issues and nothing which should preclude a person buying the game. I would submit that addressing these points in a patch would make an already excellent game that much better.

In the final assessment, I’m reminded of something Jake Soloman said during one of his XCOM Enemy Unknown interviews. Soloman suggested that strategy games come in two varieties: complex and complicated. Complex games are deeply layered, but still approachable and thus still fun. Complicated games are just that, complicated. StarDrive is firmly rooted in the complex category. It’s not an easy game by any measure. Truth be told, it probably has a steeper learning curve than most games out there. But it stops well short of being burdensome upon a willing player’s patience. The current build has a few cosmetic bugs, but nothing that broke my gameplay experience. Overall, StarDrive reflects the developers’ clear passion for 4X games, as well as a long standing relationship to science fiction as a genre – see some of the alien races for various ‘in’ jokes. This is a must have for both fans of 4X games and those looking to cut their teeth on this style of game.

StarDrive

Developed by Zero Sum Games

Published by Iceberg Interactive


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Movie Review: Transfer

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 8, 2013Posted in: Movie Reviews, Reviews

Directed by Damir Lukacevic, 2010’s Transfer explores wealth and privilege within the not-too-distant-future European Union. Therein, affluent Europeans with a million Euro to spare can have their consciousness downloaded into a younger body. These new bodies, however, are no mere clones. They are living people from the developing world who, in exchange for a 10% commission on the consciousness transfer, agree to have their personalities suppressed for twenty hours a day for the rest of their lives.

This core concept is well known within science fiction story telling. Lukacevic, who co-wrote the screenplay with Gabi Blauert, builds on the trope by making the very process of aging something that can be outsourced to the poorer quarters of the world. And for that effort, the story works more often than it does not. Yet, I can’t help but notice a few glaring plot holes and a general sense of creative caution in the narrative’s execution – more on that later.

NB: Transfer is a German language film. I watched it with English subtitles. I am well aware that the nuance I found wanting within the story may have been lost in translation.

Even as a low-budget affair, Transfer offers a cinematic approach that should be the envy of most North American filmmakers. Key scenes use long slow pans rather than cuts to emphasize the importance of an event and the players within it. Where many directors cut between over the shoulder shots to facilitate a conversation, Transfer makes extensive use of reflections in surfaces and camera-in-camera shots, the latter accentuating the film’s surveillance motifs, to capture a room full of people while maintaining a medium-to-tight shot. I know I shouldn’t play into the clichés of German filmmakers, but damn if this movie doesn’t excel on a technical level.

Transfer’s principal cast positively exude pathos from start to finish. Hermann (Hans-Michael Rehberg) and Anna (Ingrid Andree) undertake the transfer process because after fifty years of marriage, and Anna’s diagnosis of stage four cancer, neither can imagine living without the other. Apolian (B.J. Britt) volunteers as a host because it is the only way to support his orphaned brothers and sisters in Mali. Sarah (Regine Nehy), a native of Ethiopia, does much the same. One would think that contrasting characters with such diametrically opposed upbringings would lend itself to preaching if not a very heavy-handed application of liberal guilt. Instead, Transfer is content to let both the Western European and African perspectives play out equally. This in turn creates the potential for a courageous piece of storytelling, while simultaneously becoming an Achilles’ heel.

The idea of letting people from the poorest parts of the world sample life in the richest, even if only for four hours a day, opens a lot of doors. Hermann embodies old Europe’s xenophobia. Anna personifies newer ideals of tolerance and integration. Sarah reflects upon the individual as part of a community, further championing the four consciousnesses in two bodies as a family unit. Apolian is the voice of post-decolonization anger, seeing all Europeans as selfish and indulgent. The words “white devil” got thrown around a few times. Do people still say white devil? Or did the person writing the subtitles take liberties?

In addition to those four themes, Transfer further dips its toes into the much deeper waters of corporate control over individual people, the existential nightmare of two consciousnesses sharing one body, and even a little bit of Cartesian mind-body-soul subtext. But at no point does it ever feel like the movie is genuinely committing to one of these potential conflicts. On their own, they all work, though some with more gusto than others. The plot, however, moves from one to the next without finding something to bring them all together.

All the while, the viewer must apply some heavy suspension of disbelief to sustain the core conceit that the technology to facilitate a consciousness transfer is incapable of wholly eradicating a host personality. Why design such a revolutionary plot device only to have it work 5/6th of the time? Surely the quality control team behind the transfer system would have recognized a host’s inevitable desire to reclaim agency over their body. And since this company proves to be of the scumbag variety, why not just erase the host all together and sell a false bill to the clients?

In the end, Transfer’s take away message is rather rudimentary:  big corporations are evil, and people, no matter how rich or poor they are, will always be subject to the interests of their corporate overlords. It’s an okay place to land, maybe even a good place considering the visual quality of the film, but when Vegas is in sight why go to Reno?

Transfer

Directed by: Damir Lukacevic

Starring: B.J. Britt, Regine Nehy, Ingrid Andree, and Hans-Michael Rehberg


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The Odd Legacy of Star Trek TNG’s The High Ground

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 6, 2013Posted in: Television, The Daily Shaft, TV Reviews

If Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages is to believed then The High Ground is one of TNG’s most internally lamented episodes. For those who don’t recall this third season story, it’s the one where Doctor Crusher gets kidnapped by space terrorists, who then hold her captive in exchange for aid from the Federation in securing their country’s sovereignty from planet Rutia’s world government.

Ron Moore called the episode “an abomination.” Moore goes on to say,

“We didn’t have anything interesting to say about terrorism except that it’s bad and Beverly gets kidnapped – ho hum. They take her down to the caves and we get to have nice, big preachy speeches about terrorism and freedom, fighting and security forces versus society. It’s a very unsatisfying episode and the staff wasn’t really happy with it.”

Michael Piller, credited as The High Ground’s co-executive producer, questioned the overall statement the story made about terrorism.

“Was it the point where the boy puts down the gun and says, ‘Maybe the end of terrorism is when the first child puts down his gun?’ It was effective in the context of that show, but is certainly not a statement that provides any great revelation.”

Given that the IRA crisis was far from resolved when the episode went to air in 1990, it is understandable why The High Ground was seen as a milquetoast affair in the face of a real social issue. The closest the episode comes to making an actual statement on terrorism is during a conversation between Data and Picard. Data cites Mexican independence from Spain as a precedent in support of violent insurgency as a last resort when attempting to bring about political change. Picard’s reaction to Data’s android innocence is to fall back on the series’ stock answer: “Well that’s just human nature and these are big questions for which there is no easy answer.” No wonder the writers were unhappy with the episode. At least when TNG married the prime directive with the war on drugs it came with the benefit of Lt. Yar admitting to the allure of chemical intoxication; albeit Wesley’s subsequent “I’ll never do drugs” comment was positively stomach churning.

 

Nearly a quarter of a century after The High Ground went to air, it’s interesting to note how closely the episode’s themes mirror our own contemporary dialogues on terror. Twenty-three years might have given us real world analogues to Star Trek’s PADDs, tricorders, phasers, and even a theoretical model for a warp drive, but clearly our sociology has lagged behind the science.

In the episode’s first act, Alexana Devos (Kerrie Keane), the head of Rutia’s security condemns the Ansata terrorist organization as a group of animals. She further paints the Ansata as “…fanatics who kill without remorse or conscience.” Please to note the othering of terrorists as sub-humans.

Devos’ attempts to ferret out the Ansata portray Rutia as a near police-state. Suspects with even the slightest ties to the Ansata are rounded up in mass arrests and questioned without formal charge or the benefit of legal counsel. Rutian methods extend so far as to arrest children and teenagers as potential Ansata sympathizers. Though nobody comes out and says it, the episode clearly implies that Rutia is a place where the average citizen is either with the government or the Ansata.

Meanwhile the Ansata view themselves as freedom fighters struggling against an oppressive regime. Kyril Finn (Richard Cox), leader of the Ansata, rationalizes himself to Dr. Crusher as a 24th century George Washington. When Crusher reminds Finn that Washington was a general and not a terrorist, Finn retorts that the difference between terrorists and generals is the difference between history’s winners and losers. This leads to an interesting point wherein Finn asks Doctor Crusher how much violence is buried in the Federation’s past? In terms of canon, quite a lot: The Eugenics Wars, World War 3, the Earth-Romulus war, and a century of cold war with the Klingon Empire. Finn throws the idealized world of the Federation in Doctor Crusher’s face to demonstrate the selective memory governments often utilize in the prosecution of terror while simultaneously ignoring their own “legitimate” uses of force.

When Finn takes Captain Picard hostage after a failed attempt to destroy the Enterprise, Doctor Crusher questions the difference between a mad man and a committed man willing to die for his principles. Picard, however, is utterly dismissive of the Doctor’s question. Having witnessed the Ansata murdering members of his crew, he is not inclined to entertain the broader issues of the Ansata conflict. Picard further marginalizes the Ansata position in his suggestion that Doctor Crusher’s entirely conceptual recognition of the Ansata cause is the product of Stockholm Syndrome.

Later in the episode a joint Starfleet-Rutian strike force assaults the Ansata compound. Picard and Crusher are liberated but Finn is assassinated in the process. Picard’s reaction to the kill is somewhere between indifference and tacit approval. Then, as if to wash the Federation’s hands of the entire situation, the Enterprise leaves Rutian security to deal with the aftermath of Finn’s martyrdom. At no point does anybody in a Starfleet uniform acknowledge the fact that the Federation has played an active part in making an unstable situation worse.

Given the way the word has changed over the last twelve years, it’s hard not to look at Rutia and see a blueprint for our world. Combatants turn each other into monsters to legitimize their respective actions. Disagreement is confused with dissent. Empathy is mistaken for sympathy. The High Ground may not have told the story that Melinda Snodgrass intended in 1990, a story which would have seen the Federation on the wrong side of history, but it does offer a clearly unexpected window into our own world.


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Game Review: Monaco – What’s Yours is Mine

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 1, 2013Posted in: Game Reviews, Reviews, Video Reviews

So I thought to myself, what’s more fun than doing a video/screencast review? The answer: waiting for about three hours while the video encodes in Windows movie maker and still doesn’t have the decency to register on youtube as HD compatible. Seriously, before I do one of these again, I am going to have to invest in some better software for video editing. At any rate, I present you with my first ever video review. Up on the block is Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine.

I don’t want to pre-empt myself too much; however I will say here that this is a top-down stealth/heist game from indie publisher Pocket Watch Games.

And do feel free to leave me some comments on what I could have done to improve on this review. I already have some thoughts in mind on what I might do differently for my next video review.


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TV Review: Doctor Who – Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

By
Adam Shaftoe
– April 29, 2013Posted in: Reviews, TV Reviews

On a very fundamental level, I am not predisposed to enjoy an episode like Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. Try as I might, I don’t see the narrative value in story telling that pushes a reset button at the start of the fifth act only to spend its remaining few minutes doing jazz hands in anticipation of laurels. Even if the reset is planned from the first act, as it likely was in this episode, the need to invoke a modified “it was all a dream” trope shows me that the conflict at the core of the story was simply too impossible to manage. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First we have to identify the actual conflict in this episode.

Part of the reason why I think this episode felt so haphazard has to do with the multiple conflicts in play, none of which managed to stand out as the thing which binds the rest together. The episode just moves from one thing to the next, seemingly absent a meaningful endgame.

Journey could have very easily been a “Humans are their own worst enemies” episode. The Venture Van Halen Van Baalen Brothers posses the greed, avarice, and short-sightedness which Doctor Who so often uses to juxtapose the inherent weakness of humanity against the seeming infallibility of the Doctor. The fact that the VB Bros. end up in the TARDIS opens the door to another potential conflict: The Doctor is destructively obsessive.

Consider for a moment that the toxic fumes and insta-death fuel leak within the TARDIS get cleaned up in a matter of seconds. The Doctor didn’t really need the Van Baalen brothers to find Clara. Yet, Eleven threatens to blow them up if they don’t help him. Why does he do this? Does he want to protect Clara, or is he just interested in solving the puzzle of her true nature? Interesting as this question is, it becomes a moot point with the reset button business. The dickish Doctor who all but killed killed two of the Van Baalen brothers becomes a hiccup of timey-wimey story telling.

What about the TARDIS then? We’re meant to believe that the TARDIS doesn’t “like” Clara, albeit through some very clumsy exposition.

 

When the TARDIS failed to let Clara in during the Rings of Akhaten, I didn’t see malevolence; I saw the Doctor not giving Clara a TARDIS key. But suppose we work with the malevolent TARDIS theory for now, except then we’d have to ignore the fact that the artificial labyrinth the TARDIS created within the episode was meant to protect Clara. Even the Doctor says that the out of sync console room is the safest place on the ship, and that’s exactly where the TARDIS led a woman she purportedly dislikes. So much for that conflict. Meanwhile, the TARDIS is snarling at the Van Baalen brothers, crying out to the fake-android-cyborg brother, and Matt Smith is walking around with his, “Oh shit” face on the whole time. So perhaps the conflict is going to be about the TARDIS turned Mr. House on the invading salvage team? Well only for about five minutes because then the XCOM Alien Abduction sound effect (if you’re going to borrow sound effects, don’t borrow from 2012′s Game of the Year) is going to play in place of the standard cloister bell to signal that the TARDIS is going to die.

Great! The now there is a conflict we can all get behind. The last vestige of Gallifrey, a machine that was old when the Doctor stole it 900 years ago, is coming apart at the seams. For an instant I dared to hope that the death of the TARDIS might extend to the 50th anniversary story. If we take Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife as canon, then the TARDIS is more than just a time machine; it is the infinite union of time and space. Something going wrong there could certainly hand wave Tennant and Smith together. Moreover, the audience has a huge emotional attachment to the TARDIS and its death could raise the stakes without putting a gun to the head of the universe. But instead of killing the TARDIS, Stephen Thompson – who is also credited with writing the atrocious Curse of the Black Spot – kills the TARDIS to let Smith and Coleman walk through the time frozen shrapnel of its exploded core.

Is it a cool visual effect? Absolutely? But is it great story telling? Not if the only way out is to call a mulligan on everything that happened in the story and cancel out any potential growth in the main characters or meta-story.

While I’ll offer no quarter to this story as a narrative nightmare, it does shine as an interesting archeological dig into Doctor Who’s internal mythos. The episode very much delivers on its promise to be a journey to the centre of the TARDIS. Along the way we see the much talked about swimming pool and a library which oozes, literally, Time Lord history. There are vanishing walls and West Wing style camera shots of people walking around infinite hallways.

The problem with archeology is that it can often be difficult to craft a narrative around a collection of artefacts. Doing so requires external sources, background research, and inferences which allow for some benefit of doubt. It is on that last point, Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS falls to pieces. I’m not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to an episode which invokes a reset button to solve the story’s problems. Either by accident or design, such a resolution is lazy. Fun as the tidbits of Doctor who history are, up to and including the ghost voice of Chris Eccleston, they don’t end up contributing to the story as anything other than fan service. As a critic I don’t see why I should forge what remains into something cohesive; such is the task of the writer, not the audience.

Bottom line: It’s a pretty episode, it’s a fun episode, it’s even a nice nod to the series’ long running history, but at best it’s a narrative hot mess and at worst it’s self-congratulatory navel gazing.


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Game Review: Iron Man 3 – The Official Game

By
Adam Shaftoe
– April 26, 2013Posted in: Game Reviews, Reviews

In approaching Gameloft’s Iron Man 3 I knew enough to keep my expectations reasonably low. Still, the part of me which reveled in the impossible arcade games of my youth really wanted to get on board with an Iron Man infinite flyer. Unfortunately Iron Man 3 seems to eschew everything Imangi Studios did with Temple Run 2 to make this variety of “free to play” game even remotely enjoyable, at least for the duration of a bus ride or a prolonged poop. What? Don’t give me that look. Everybody plays with their iDevices on the toilet.

Out of the gate, Iron Man 3 managed to surprise me. The graphics are polished. There’s some good voice acting for Tony, Pepper, and Jarvis. It wasn’t quite a cinematic experience on par with my first play through of Infinity Blade 2, but Gameloft certainly seemed to be making the effort. And then things started falling apart.

The game’s tutorial mission introduces the ins-and-outs of flight and combat mechanics. While the former worked quite well on an iPhone, the drag and zap mechanics of the latter were clearly designed with an iPad in mind.

As I fumbled my way through shooting and crashed into buildings, I also noticed some pretty severe frame rate drops. Granted I’m playing on an iPhone 4, thus placing me two generations behind current Apple tech and right on the periphery of planned obsolesce, so maybe that’s on me for not throwing enough of my money at Cupertino.

Then there’s the waiting. At the time of this review I’ve spent more time waiting to play Iron Man 3 than I have actually shooting down AIM agents and avoiding Malibu’s numerous low flying blimps. How so? First and foremost is a bevy of load screens. One would think they were playing something on the PS1 for the amount of time this game spends spinning an ARC reactor load wheel. Granted, I could put up with the loading if there was a post-mission “play again?” option that didn’t require using premium in-game currency. Otherwise the end of a flight offers a leader board, a couple load screens, and a mandatory trip to Stark Industries’ repair bay.

Taking a cue from the likes of World of Tanks, wrecked armour requires a fixed amount of real time to repair itself. Though it is easy enough to secure a second Iron Man suit, allowing a player to use one armour while the other repairs, the differences between the mk. 3 and mk. 5 in terms of overall in-game longevity is painfully noticeable. Naturally there is an option to skip the waiting and keep using the mk. 5, but that comes at the cost of, you guessed it, premium currency.

Yet for the sake of game play, which even includes a daily boss fight, I was willing to overlook Iron Man 3’s shortcomings. The waiting seemed worth it for a dose of Stark branded ass-kicking. Then I tried to buy my third Iron Man suit. Disaster ensued.

The suit I wanted looked like the bastard child of War Machine and Rumble from G1 Transformers. After about 30 missions, I finally had enough experience points to unlock the mk. 25 aka “the Striker”. Except that I didn’t.

12,000 experience points only unlocked the blueprint for “the Striker.” I needed to use an equal number of “Stark Credits”, the game’s base currency, to actually build the armour. I was scoring about 200-300 Stark Credits per mission. You do the math.

On that note, let’s turn our attention to the big question: how much does the game cost if you want to unlock everything with cash money? Securing the blueprints for the game’s eighteen Iron Man suits costs, wait for it, $99.99. Keep in mind this is before you grind or buy the Stark Credits required to build the damn things. I’m not able to tell you the real money cost for the required Stark Credits as the game keeps the experience/credit cost of higher tier suits locked. I love my readers, but I do not have time to research that one out.

Bottom line: You’ve really got to wonder what was going through Marvel/Disney’s hive mind when they let this game get branded as Iron Man 3: The Official Game. Load screens, painful in both quantity and duration, shatter any sense of immersion within the game. Though fun enough when it actually lets a player fly, the action is short lived and marred by frame rate drops. Ultimately the grind to buy ratio for additional armours frames this title as nothing but an attempt to squeeze players for fast cash. Howard Stark and Obadiah Stane would be proud of what Gameloft has put together; the rest of us would do well to avoid this title.


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TV Review: Spartacus – A Brief Retrospective

By
Adam Shaftoe
– April 22, 2013Posted in: Reviews, TV Reviews

It’s a challenge to look back on a series like Spartacus. When it began in 2009, I took it as a juvenile attempt to bring together over-the-top 300-style violence with the baseline hetero-male audience’s collective desire to see Lucy Lawless naked. I had all but written the series off until it showed signs of transforming midway through the first season. Shock and awe-yeahhhh camera work gave way to actual narrative. Sure, it wasn’t HBO’s Rome, but that didn’t make it uninteresting to watch John Hannah curse Jupiter’s cock as he attempted to climb Capua’s social latter. Subtext began to appear within the series’ imagery and long form story-telling found its way into the mix. I offered a public mea culpa before admitting to being hooked on Spartacus. For my last official Spartacus War of the Damned post, I thought I would talk about some parts of the show that have really stood out to me over the last few years.

Target Demographic

In the final episode of War of the Damned, Agron promises a dying Spartacus that his legend will live on throughout history. It’s a touching meta moment in the series, and perhaps the best thing a dying leader can hope to hear. But who actually carried Spartacus’ memory through history?

Until Spartacus entered popular culture in the 1960s, he was relegated to the realm of classists and historians. The legend of Spartacus, as written by the Romans, was not about the triumph of individual agency, but the validation of Roman law and civilization. Much to the fictional Agron’s horror, Spartacus spent the better part of two millennia as a ghost story for aristocrats. He was a warning for what happens when the higher orders push those under them beyond the breaking point.

The last fifty years have seen Spartacus appropriated from the narrative of “haves” and rebranded as a populist figure – historical accuracy be damned. Steven DeKnight’s Spartacus is perhaps even more a folk hero than the character directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Howard Fast. The post-modern Spartacus began as a soldier within the Roman Auxiliary. He only became a slave when a betrayal from his Roman commanders saw him fighting in an imperial conquest rather than defending his homeland. A subsequent decision to desert led to Spartacus’ capture and colonization into the lowest order of Roman society.

I won’t presume to guess how much this resonates with the working poor of America, but it’s hard not to see the contemporary influence on the Spartacus story. How many disenfranchised Americans want nothing more than a chance to be a part of the system, yet find themselves betrayed and marginalized by those institutions? How many people put themselves into the spectacle of the internet in search of fame, glory, and a lasting memory by entertaining the masses? In this, DeKnight’s Spartacus is quite successful in continuing the democratization of Spartacus, as initiated by Kubrick and Fast. Moreover, the desire for individual recognition among an alienating global community, where the Internet is our arena, further allows the series’ gladiators, the rock stars of Rome, to inhabit a conceptual space common to a broad audience obsessed with getting their fifteen minutes of fame.

Spartacus and Gay Culture

When I was in high school I wrote a review of Spartacus (1960) for a writer’s craft course. When my teacher asked why I didn’t devote more time to discussing Spartacus’ queer-friendly scenes, I answered with a rather flip, “People were cooler about gay stuff before Christianity. The movie didn’t make a big deal out of it, why should I?”

Upon first watching DeKnight’s Spartacus I found myself a little put off with series in terms of its approach to sexual identities as well as the critical discussion surrounding them.

During Spartacus’ first season bonafide television and culture critics, I mean people who get paid to do write about TV for a living, would not shut up about Crixus’ and Spartacus’ apparent unresolved sexual tension. I was unimpressed. Neither character was gay. Characters are allowed to hate each other without wanting to have sex with each other, deal with it. Meanwhile Barca, one of the series openly gay characters, inhabited a character space akin to one of the gang rapists from The Shawshank Redemption. Simultaneously, all the women, once again playing into sophomoric fantasies, were secretly bi-curious. Yet critics could not seem to move past the juvenilia of Spartacus’ and Crixus’ non-existent tension.

Thankfully, the series seemed content to grow up while a great many other people were trying to figure out pitchers and catchers. Vengeance, the series’ second chronological season, saw the creation of a new same-sex relationship. In a series where seemingly every other relationship was forged out of convenience, politics, opportunity, lust, protection, or revenge, Agron and Nassir proved to be the only healthy and mutually supportive paring of the show.

I’m sure a great many people, likely with more legitimacy to speak on gay-advocacy than I possess, have written at length on the importance of Agron and Nassir as an openly gay couple within a very hetero-normative cable TV series. But if I can revisit a modified form of my high school thesis on Spartacus (1960), I think this series has done a great thing in crafting a space where everybody is cool with same-sex couples, even if it has to do a little girl-on-girl pandering along the way.

Spartacus Vengeance’s Fatal Mistake

Point 1 – Losing Andy Whitfield was a tragedy. Not finding a way to keep John Hannah in the series was a mistake. When a long form drama has the chops to maintain multiple leading men (John Hannah, Andy Whitfield, and Manu Bennet) it can’t afford to lose two of them at the same time. Gods of the Arena didn’t even have the decency to make its half-season arc focus on Crixus. Such a decision would have facilitated an introduction to Liam McIntyre couched in a greater attachment to Crixus.

Point 2 – Rather than having Batiatus survive the attack on the Ludus, and subsequently be elevated to desired station, thus giving the series an actual reason to be rooted in Capua, we were introduced to half a dozen new Romans with one-off intrigues. The Upstairs Downstairs element of the show was lost at a time when McIntyre was uncertain as Spartacus and the writers only saw fit to have him speaking in dry speeches. Even if John Hannah was only used for five episodes, it would afforded enough time to allow Galber to become a leading man in his own right.  Meanwhile having Batiatus concentrate a half-dozen new intrigues into one character would have made the story telling infinitely more efficient.

Historical Accuracy

I’ve taken issue with the series’ historical accuracy from time to time. All too often Spartacus seemed to get the minor details right while buggering up some of the bigger ideas. Upon re-reading some Plutarch and Appian I’ve been reminded of one of my earliest lessons in Roman history: The Romans are the biggest liars of them all.

Seriously, history is a hell of a lot easier to write when the goal is not to be accurate to fact, but to create a legacy for your allies while simultaneously vilifying your enemies. Bearing that in mind I’ve put together a point-counterpoint on some of the series ongoing historical “liberties.”

Ancient Romans were a pious and proper people. Nobody had sex like they did on Spartacus.

Right, and Silvio Burlusconi would have made sure his biographer included the part about Bunga Bunga parties if the press hadn’t found out about them.

Spartacus died in 71BC.

Maybe, maybe not. The “I’m Spartacus” moment/sequence in Kubrick’s movie and DeKnight’s series, respectively, reflects the fact that in an ancient army few people can recognize their general. Most people in Spartacus’ army were just following the person in front of them. Only a handful of Captains would have been able to recognize Spartacus or Crixus. Of course, the Romans are not going to be apt to write a history where the man who undermined the Republic escaped to perhaps one day threaten Rome again. Spartacus died as an idea in 71BC, the man bearing his name may have survived.

Roman swords are great for cutting off people’s heads.

False. The gladius is a short sword that would be quite terrible as a tool for beheading. It is best used when partnered with a legionaries’ shield and used as a stabbing weapon.

Final Thoughts, for now

I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t more to say about Spartacus. When three big themes and three smaller ones run nearly 1700 words it probably indicates a need for me to write an actual paper on the subject.

In the end, Spartacus’ legacy will be as a show that began as tawdry titillation and grew into a series which questioned the way we interact with history. It didn’t seek to subvert what we think we know, rather it looked for gaps in the primary sources and choose to live in those spaces, spaces where perceptions of the past are checked by modern historical sensibilities. This is no small feat. Arguably something like Game of Thrones, though similar in format and tone to Spartacus, will never be able to do what Spartacus accomplished. For that reason, as well as countless others, Spartacus will prove to be a pop culture event worthy of much critical discussion and dissection.

Thanks to everybody who kept up with these posts over the last ten weeks; it was a hell of a ride. A special thanks to the Google+ Spartacus Circle for allowing me to promote my work every week. Further thanks to Jennifer Adese who has been a fantastic supporter of these reviews, and this website, since I got it off the ground.

Nos morituri te salutamus


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Book Review: Cascade Effect by Leah Petersen

By
Adam Shaftoe
– April 19, 2013Posted in: Lit Reviews, Reviews

Cascade Effect is Leah Petersen’s follow-up to her debut novel, Fighting Gravity. In the first book Petersen skillfully paired world building and narrative pacing to introduce readers to a galaxy spanning empire and the relationship between Jake, a scientist born in the slums of Mexico, and Pete, emperor of all creation. The sequel, set some years after Jake’s and Pete’s marriage, dives headlong into a world of court intrigue and interstellar governance.

This change in focus presents some potentially daunting challenges. Petersen’s ability to design an empire that is honest to historical precedent becomes something of a double edged sword; therein it is very hard to put an Emperor and his Prince-Consort into the center of action. Despite Jake’s hot headedness, he is part of an institution where things are done for him. In terms of story structure, this means we witness the principal players reacting to external factors far more than they act upon their own volition. Left to the hands of a lesser writer, such a situation could get boring very quickly. To Petersen’s credit, she mobilizes a number of effective conceptual spaces for Pete and Jake to inhabit during their reactions, which in turn work to draw the entire novel together.

Most obvious is the novel’s allegory on class and entitlement. Though Fighting Gravity gave readers a taste of a future world strictly divided into orders which would have made a French nobleman blush, Cascade Effect delves deeper into the institutional discrimination of Pete’s empire. Not only does this shade the setting in a more interesting way, but it also justifies some of Jake’s perpetual thick-headedness as a character. When Jake puffs his chest, intent to confront a powerful Duke, he receives a stern Cersei Lannister-like rebuff on the rules of the world in which he now inhabits.

Where being an un-class, the lowest of all social orders, was perhaps a convenient excuse to alienate Jake in the first novel, it now shapes the way in which he interacts with the world. Though this is a clear commentary from the author on contemporary issues of poverty and wealth, as a reader we are invited to seriously consider the merits of meritocracy paired with aristocracy. Despite Jake’s low birth he was elevated to a position of prestige and comfort by virtue of a system which seemingly oppresses the rest of the un-class. Even if the characters that defend this system are distasteful, it does not preclude a discussion on effective ways to order a society and a broader question on nature versus nurture in class distinction.

Concurrent to the politics of Cascade Effect’s world, is the unfolding story of Pete and Jake’s marriage. Much of the court intrigue and various assassination attempts visited upon Jake stem not from an overt hate of him individually, but what he represents as an un-class marrying into the royal family. This, combined with certain events from Fighting Gravity, places a strain on Pete’s and Jake’s relationship.

Even as a reader who has no measurable appetite for “romance” I found these sequences to be well handled. Pete is all forgiving, arguably to a fault, and Jake is stubborn to point of palpable frustration. This should result in a zero-sum game when it comes to their interactions. Yet I still found myself invested in their domestic squabbles as those conflicts are so intimately linked to the grander story of looming civil unrest within the empire.

While there’s no doubt in my mind that the core story works quite well, there were some elements along the way which felt underdeveloped. Amid perpetual scandal and disdain from the imperial court, Jake takes solace in his science. When his research is usurped for military purposes, Jake’s outrage seems restricted to that particular movement within the novel. Granted, I could be picking at nits in this point, but the prose is rather intense in the way it sets up the potential for destruction at the hands of Jake’s would-be weapons. In turn, I was expecting something on the magnitude of the Manhattan Project, or some other suitable game changer. Perhaps this is a theme which will be revisited in the next installment of the series.

Overall, Cascade Effect is a worthy successor to Fighting Gravity. With the focus shifting to Jake’s life at court, the novel is free to use the entirety of the empire as a means of bringing the story to the characters. Leah Petersen has done well to weave together the social science of science fiction, themes of court intrigue so often found within fantasy novels, and a thread of honest romance to bind it all together.


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