May

The Avengers Assemble Review- All Available Actors Are Avengers Apparently

I was raised on a healthy diet of Marvel comics. The Fantastic Four were my personal favourite with the friction between the group often being a key source of the drama. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. An 11 year old me wasn’t interested in character development, he wanted explosions with a few funny one liners and the Thing to smash in a more articulate manner than his green counterpart. In my later years (said as if I wasn’t 19 years old), I’ve grown more attached to the edgier dark-side of Batman. Writers such as Grant Morrison in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth and Alan Moore in The Killing Joke have done things which to me went unprecedented within the graphic novel medium. Much the same has happened in recent years with the outbreak of comic book movies over the past decade. While the Christopher Nolan Batman series has transformed the camp caped crusader of yesteryear into a completely realistic and believable character based on motivation and psychology the Marvel heroes have stayed light and action-packed, and you know what? That’s perfectly fine.

NEWS TEAM…ASSSEMBLE!

I would be lying if I said this summer between watching Avengers Assemble and The Dark Knight Rises I would pick

the former. Simply put, I have been anticipating the final chapter in the Nolan Batman trilogy ever since the final words of Gary Oldman’s final monologue from The Dark Knight. If it is as good as it should, and deserves to be, I think that people will put the series on a par with The Godfather trilogy and other pinnacles of film-making. So will Joss

Whedon’s The Avengers Assemble rival ol’ Bats? No it will not. Will it satisfy fans of a good action film and those with a penchant for super-heroes? That is one thing I can definitely say it does better than many other summer blockbusters of the past few years. (Cough, Michael Bay)

Take for instance the plot of the movie. It made a bit of sense to me, although it

should be noted that the only Marvel film I’ve seen over the past few years is the original Iron Man, so I’m a tad out of the loop. It all revolves around this mysterious thing called the Tesseract. Loki, Thor’s brother, has been promised by The Other that if he can retrieve the Tesseract from earth he will be given a Chitauri army that he can rule over the earth with. Keeping up? Neither was I, but that doesn’t matter. The film isn’t really about a Norse demi-god in questionable headgear attempting to rule over the earth. It is about 6 superheroes trying to get along with each other. Whedon is a clever man and he knows how to play on conventions which is why he seems to be the perfect man for this film. While another film he has co-written, Cabin In The Woods, toys with the accepted conventions of the horror genre with character types Avengers Assemble attempts to do a similar job.

Stark is wearing a Black Sabbath t-shirt for the entire film, but I think that this is a more appropriate tune for him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1D9wWxd2w

My initial reaction to the combination of stars of their own respective films into one ensemble cast was one of dread. I was infuriated as the film played out in front of me. Chris Evans was the characterless alpha male, Chris Hemsworth was the ludicrously spoken Norse demi-god, Scarlett Johansson played the sharp-witted femme-fatale, Jeremy Renner the instantly forgettable Hawkeye and Robert Downey, Jr played Robert Downey, Jr. The only actor I came away from the film praising their performance was Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner aka the Hulk. He was the only actor who was apparently not fighting for the scene at every possible juncture. Robert Downey, Jr. surprisingly quite aptly describes his performance. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly he disclosed his original discourse with Wheddon stating that “Tony needs to drive this thing”. While he might have given up trying to make Stark the centrepoint of the film he makes sure that you know he’s in the room. The same could be said for all the lead parts, save for Ruffalo’s reserved Banner. So I was initially going to slate the acting of the film (don’t get me started on Samuel L. Jackson’s attempt to rekindle the flames of ‘cool’ from

I can do things too!

his Pulp Fiction days), but then remembered that this is probably the kind of reaction that Whedon would want from me. It’s a popular term to be thrown about at the moment, but similar to Cabin In The Woods, Avengers Assembleis very meta. It’s almost as if the film is a commentary on a-list actors as much as it is about superheroes. Despite this line of thinking, Captain America doesn’t get away without a telling off. There is frankly no reason for him to be in this film. He serves no dramatic purpose except for being a bit moody and having a moan at Tony Stark. In the action sequences he is seemingly the most ineffective of the group, having no skills except for being really, really, ridiculously strong. To give him something to do there are a few scenes where he’s shown doing things, such as jumping into a building to save people and fight bad guys, just to remind you he’s there. His is a character taken out of his own time, planted into the modern day and told to get on with it. The film is just too short, ironically with a run time of 143 minutes, to flesh out this aspect of his character and that’s a shame.

I wasn’t lying about the headgear

Again though, while it is a film about these characters, people aren’t really paying to see the character development. This is for an audience who want (I hate to use this phrase) a thrill ride. There’s tension galore and plenty of explosions to keep the young ‘uns occupied. If you go into the film expecting something to rival The Dark Knight then invariably you will end up short-changed. Avengers Assemble is an action film first and foremost and in that it is a lot better than most of the schlock out there.

Apr

The Walking Dead Review- A Morality System I Subscribe To.

Fallout 3 was not a game about the apocalypse. It was a game about the nature of humans when they have nothing left to lose. If anything the core storyline is a hopeful one, trying to show that while humans have the destructive capabilities to nigh on destroy the world we inhabit they also can rebuild, albeit having political quarrels along the way. Why then do I begin a review of Telltale’s latest outing The Walking Dead with a brief analysis of Fallout 3? Because while Fallout 3 was not about the apocalypse, The Walking Dead is not about zombies.

The game of tv show of the comic. Wait, what?

This man created the most popular comic series of the past 20 years. Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.

The tagline from the comic series, masterfully penned by Robert Kirkman is fitting of not only this franchise but the fascination with post-apocalyptia as a whole: “In a world ruled by the dead, we are finally forced to finally start living.” In The Walking Dead more than any other ‘zombie’ franchise the primary focus is on humanity. Not as in a struggle for the human race to survive, but rather on a more philosophical question of humanity as an idea. Are we defined by our possessions or our relationships with others and the world as a whole? What the comics, the tv series and now the game does is to strip away any sense of frivolity from 21st century conventions. The inhabitants of the world talk about who they were with the key point being that they have changed, have been changed.

Rick Grimes as played by himself and Andrew Lincoln respectively.

With character development being at the heart of the series, it is important to distinguish the differences between the comic and the tv show from the game. The tv series roughly follows the same plot as the comics with occasional creative license being taken but with nothing to upset hardcore fans of the source material. Fundamentally the story begins with police sheriff Rick Grimes waking up from a coma to find the world turned upside down. From a sociological point of view it is interesting to follow a man who’s career and life is based on the morality of the established system of laws thrown into a scenario where he is no longer the ‘alpha’ of the society. It is hard then to see the introduction of Lee Everett, the protagonist of the game to be, a coincidence. Lee is the dramatic juxtaposition of Rick as Lee has broken the law by murdering a man. His status as the lawbreaker is firmly established in the game’s opening as he is in the back of a police car. Lee however seems calm, rational and above all controlled. The zombie outbreak breaks society and levels out the playing field, so to speak: Rick and Lee effectively become the same. Lee is not a bad man, and Rick is not a good man; the world reaches an equilibrium of karmic neutrality.

The way Lee (right) discovers of Clementine's (left) parents' death sets up the 'no-holds-barred' emotionality of the game within the opening 20 minutes.

When it comes to The Walking Dead it is easy to get bogged down in analysing one character. There are so many memorable characters within the franchise which readers, viewers, players will and have become attached to. Readers of the comic however will also know that a great deal of the drama comes from just how fatally human the characters are. Some of the most heart-wrenching moments in the series are when characters that you have known and loved die. This ain’t no Batman comic; once they’ve died, they’re dead for good: forever. As one of the most important features to the series the game takes it to another level. While the reader has previously been a passenger to the story, seeing who the writers want to kill off next, in the game the decision is often left up to the player and this is the main reason why I think The Walking Dead is such an important game.

You might have noticed that I haven’t spoken much about the part of the game that you spend playing. The game itself is nothing revolutionary. Anybody familiar with Telltale’s previous outings will get be in familiar territory. It’s a slight variation on the old point-and-click adventure games with a bit more of an emphasis on action. Similarly the graphics aren’t breathtaking. They’re obviously lifted from the comic with a cell-shaded style. It’s bright and a nice contrast to the grey-brown-grey palate that modern gaming has taken to in this generation. The voice acting is stellar and is a major contributor in selling the game’s characters. In the review of the last game featured on the site, Dead Island, I spent a lot of time talking about the gameplay and how it makes up for the story. It seems interesting then to contrast The Walking Dead with Dead Island. The latter was enjoyable as it was a fun game mechanic but ultimately skin deep and should be enjoyed as such. In The Walking Dead however the game itself is merely a medium to tell the story, much like Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain or Team Bondi’s swan-song, L.A. Noire. In those games the story was definitely the driving force behind the games’ development and this is much the case with The Walking Dead.

The start of something beautiful.

There is one main reason why I think that The Walking Dead succeeds where other games fail. In games such as Mass Effect and Fallout 3 I cared about the world. I cared so much about the world; but in The Walking Dead I care about the characters in all their fallible and human qualities which makes for an ultimately much more fulfilling, and sometimes heart-breaking, experience. If I’ve learnt anything it is that in the event of the apocalypse, the company you keep is more important than the arms you bear if not for safety but for the purity of human conversation.

Film, music and game reviews

Tag Archives: Adventure

The Avengers Assemble Review- All Available Actors Are Avengers Apparently

The Walking Dead Review- A Morality System I Subscribe To.