There is a screenwriter. He or she is serving overpriced and under-portioned food to fat, wealthy, guffawing executives smoking cigars and their shrill trophy wives. He or she smiles and even flirts a little to make a better tip even though it feels dirty and dishonest. The screenwriter finally reaches home, exhausted and stinking from the day's toil, decides not join the other servers at the local bar, and not to collapse on the dirty mattress that serves as the studio apartment's only seating. No, the screenwriter sits down in front of an outdated laptop and writes the next chapter of an epic science fiction film that will never be made. It has love, betrayal, robots, the end of the world, and a candid look at the human condition. Few will ever even read it.
Apparently, we need to revisit Watchmen instead.
I suppose it was inevitable. The massive surge of film adaptations of comic classics had to crest with Watchmen. Despite the very obvious timing and pacing issues involved in said adaptation, despite the danger of fallout for despoiling a loved and respected and seminal work of art, it is too great a prize. I knew someone would take a stab at it.
And stab they did. You see, unlike Spider-Man or X-Men or one of the many other graphic titles which became films, Watchmen is a short, contained story. There is no allowance for narrative dysfunction resulting from the need to boil decades of serial down into two hours of film. Its makers are responsible for every omission, every unnecessary line, every stumble. Granted, there is more nuance in a single page of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's original comic than in the entire run of, say, The Punisher, but they knew what they were getting into. It's no excuse.
Much of the film is a straightforward, panel-by-panel interpretation of Watchmen the comic's central characters. However, many of the subplots were cut, leaving only a few glimpses of the characters involved as a wink-and-nudge to the fans in the audience. Given the fact that the climactic ending of the comic relied heavily on this material, it had to be changed to fit the far thinner movie version. I understand that the Marooned story is going to be released as a separate animated feature titled Tales of the Black Freighter. I suppose it's for the best as it wouldn't have worked as part of he full feature anyway. It ties in through another axed subplot with another set of characters. The source material is straining within the confines of its medium.
To be fair, the artistic work is very good. Although Nite Owl II and Ozymandius look a little latter-day Batman, the aesthetic is hardly out of character for either of them, and it's an honest modern interpretation of the comic heroes they represent. Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, on the other hand, were designed quite well. I may relinquish some nerd cred when I say this, but it was very fulfilling to see the two of them on screen.
The sets and camera work deserve some praise as well. It's obvious that the original comic served as a storyboard whenever possible, and the artists who translated it to film did so with honesty and grace. Some of the segments were so beautifully rendered that it's a real shame they felt they were unable to stand on their own.
The film's hideous soundtrack booms in periodically during these scenes to remind you you're not actually having a good time watching Hollywood kidnap and murder another artistic masterpiece. It's a gaudy assortment of period pop music and a few other highly recognizable numbers (yes, I like Philip Glass as well, but can we give that song a rest, please?). It's boisterous and inconsistent. It does not heighten the emotional impact of the scenes in question, it distracts from each and every one of them. This is doubly embarrassing when you consider that most of the songs on the soundtrack are excellent. It is an insult, not just to the movie-goers they seem to think are easily distracted by shiny things, and not just to the musical artists being taken advantage of, but to the film's own art and direction by making the viewer cringe with disgust rather than be awed.
Awed by the visuals, at least. Thematically, the film utterly fails to fill the shoes of the original. Watchmen was obviously adapted by someone who read and enjoyed the comic, but assumed no one else got it. All those messy supporting characters and confusing subplots were trimmed. Where the comic was a diverse tapestry combining the stories and perspectives of many characters, the film is interested in only a few threads.
Even when it gets it right, the movie version doesn't even trust us to interpret what we see on our own. The dialogue is re-written in several places to dumb down and explain the emotions and motivations of the characters despite the fact that the imagery (usually taken directly from the comic) has already done so far more eloquently.
Take Dan Dreiberg's dream sequence, a scene I did not expect to see at all. In the comic, Moore and Gibbons trusted that their readers would understand what it meant. Apparently, the filmmakers felt this was too complex a metaphor for their audience and inserted some disjointed lines into the following scene to explain it.
This occurs repeatedly throughout the film. Now, I don't exactly have a lot of faith in the movie going public myself, but if you're going to go through all the trouble of adapting Watchmen into a film, why in the world would you cater to the unwashed simpletons who either never read it or didn't get it? The fans will hate you and the uninitiated probably weren't going to enjoy themselves anyway. It's as if half of those involved were interested in an honest translation of our beloved comic and the other half thought it was just a little too cerebral and wanted to broaden the audience. The result is a mess. Watchmen the comic is a dense piece of art, there is no question. There are layers to it that a single reading cannot penetrate, but at least it trusts you enough to figure it out for yourself.
It is perhaps unfair for the Watchmen film to shoulder all the blame for this phenomenon. It's a systemic disease in all aspects of our artistic culture. We don't create anything anymore. We just take the old ideas, dress them up in new black costumes and send them out there to bring back more money. All the capital, talent and effort are devoted to simplifying and remaking the classics when we are responsible for creating the new classics.
The next time something you love is turned into a film, don't go. If you absolutely must see it, download one of those screener leaks. Every time you pay them not to do any creative work, you decrease the value of creative work as a whole and our screenwriter has to spend another night waiting tables instead of giving us the rocking space opera we deserve.
Showing posts with label speculative fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speculative fiction. Show all posts
Fallout 3
The first time I played Morrowind, I picked up everything that wasn't nailed down. I completed the character creation interview and immediately started pilfering flatware. I was halfway through the grain sacks in the basement of the first house in the game when I was informed that my stealthy thief character was overburdened and unable to move.
It was the first game I had ever encountered that did so much for the cause of immersion. I had, of course, played Grand Theft Auto's contemporary incarnation, but this was different. I felt as if I had entered a virtual world that was even more open than the GTA sandbox, not to mention it had a vocabulary wider than "run, steal, kill." That first session lasted hours. I was awestruck with the extent to which I could improvise. There may have been drooling.
In Morrowind, I had no fewer than twelve different characters. Each one had a different set of skills and attributes, they had different allies and enemies and went through the game in different ways. I also gave them personalities, but that was just for me.
I'm probably crazy.
Morrowind is perhaps the earliest success in a genre I like to call "RPG fusion." You see, as video game technology progresses, the old turn-based, random battle-plagued, attack-magic-item, Final Fantasy-style RPG becomes less and less attractive. The modern personal computer or gaming platform is capable of so much, it's not easy to sell a title where the players have to wait their turn. In response, many designers have started adding RPG elements to other forms of gaming.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's progress. Back in the day, the RPG was distinguished from its rivals by being immersive, persistent and by granting each player a unique experience, even if the story always ended the same way. These are good things, and they live on in the many RPG fusion titles. Granted, they still make old-school RPGs, but honestly, I'm done with them. I like steampunk, I liked the premise, but I could not play Lost Odyssey. Maybe I was a more sophisticated gamer back when I was into Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, but I also lived in a basement and didn't know anything about girls.
I consider Fallout 3 to be a successor to Morrowind by way of Oblivion, at least as far as the technical construction of the gaming world is concerned. It differs from its predecessors in that the setting has changed and ranged combat is far more important, but the general formula is the same. Although there have been many shooters which incorporate RPG elements, I don't think I've seen it done as successfully as Fallout 3 since Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.
The inherent problem with merging the shooter and RPG genres is that the player's combat effectiveness in a shooter is based not on levels or attributes or dice rolls, but on sheer twitchy aiming skill and an understanding of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses. These two gaming styles are fairly disparate, and Fallout 3 makes it work using V.A.T.S. It stands for Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System and I refuse to put all those periods in there every time I type it, so just get used to VATS.
A Fallout 3 character can specialize in a variety of skills that allow him or her to interact with the world, but the wasteland is a rough place. Sooner or later, you are going to find yourself looking at a charging super mutant, and they are seldom impressed by your hacking skill, Junior. It's an action game, so you need to be able to defend yourself. Naturally, a gamer who favors shooters is going to have an advantage here, but VATS lets you pause the game and queue up a series of shots the quantity and rate of success of which are determined by the character's agility and level of familiarity with the gun in question.
The catch is that at the bottom end of a gun's skill level shots will occasionally go wild even if the player decides to eschew VATS altogether and go with pure first-person shooter skill. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I for one will not kowtow to the Red Bull- swigging, trigger-happy, homophobic FPS purist demographic and I'm glad Bethesda didn't either.
VATS does a good job of smoothing out the edges where FPS action meets RPG character-building. Unless the character you've created is Numbnuts the Fingerless, Who Knoweth Not Which End of the Gun is Dangerous, then most of your shots will hit their target when you pull the trigger, but if you're taking a time-out from World of Warcraft and you prefer to let your numbers do the talking, VATS takes you by the hand and kills the mean old rampaging mutated bear for you (if you've got the skills, that is).
It's like Footprints in the Sand for simulated violence.
As I've come to expect from Bethesda, the quests and general world design are fun and inventive. The game is a bit shorter than the Elder Scrolls titles, but there seems to be quite a lot of ancillary game material and you could spend hours or days just messing around exploring the map.
Lest I forget, there is an upcoming expansion which will allow your character to explore post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. The core story could be a big steaming turd and it would still be worth it just for that. Can you say "easy supplemental review?"
Here's the problem. I practically shit my pants as I grasped how vast the game Morrowind was. That feeling was tempered by disappointment when I started Oblivion because I realized that they had dumbed the system down a bit to attract a wider audience. I still played it, because the graphics got a serious bump, the melee combat was superbly visceral, and the physics engine made the setting immersive enough to forgive the more limited stats and abilities aspects. However, it still infuriates me that a good game could have been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that sixty dollars from the wallet of an imagination-deficient simpleton is worth the same as my sixty dollars and I hold a grudge for that. Oh yeah, and I preferred the aesthetic in Morrowind to that of Oblivion. Where the former takes place in a unique alien landscape, the latter was the same castle-and-cottage tripe that makes me throw up into my mouth a little bit when I try to read traditional fantasy.
Fallout 3 is basically just an Oblivion clone which substitutes the Elder Scrolls' original leveling system for the more traditional one found in Fallouts 1 and 2 (presumably to reduce the frequency of crazed Fallout fanboy assaults on their studios), and takes place in a nuclear wasteland other than a cut-and-paste medieval fantasy world. Right off the bat they get points for the new setting, hell, they get points for just doing what they do because nobody else makes games like these and I'm thankful that they do.
But Morrowind was innovative when it was released in 2002. Since then, its progeny have seen changes, some good and some bad. However, that openness that allowed my first Morrowind character to fill her pockets with junk until she couldn't move has remained fairly constant. Now, I don't like to think about how much time I've spent in their games because during that span I could have learned a marketable skill, trained in some exotic fighting style, or collected a really intriguing assortment of sexually transmitted infections, but the point is that there's a very strong draw to letting the players go their own way and I was hooked. What I want to see is Bethesda (or someone else) take this to the next level. Yeah, I can break into someone's house and re-arrange their personal possessions while they sleep. And yeah, that is as innovative as it is utterly pointless and completely balls-out insane. However, couldn't that energy have been put to better use making the world a little more dynamic? I understand that, unlike my paranoid fantasies about reality, everything in a video game is put there for my benefit. I'm also fully aware of just how daunting it is to fill a virtual world with enough stuff to even make the sandbox, non-linear thing worth doing at all.
The problem is that it's all about stuff. I had really hoped to see major improvements in the area of social interactions and AI, but it's more of the same. I like the game, but I feel like it's capable of more. Maybe I've just spent too much time with Bethesda titles. I know where the walls are already, and when I looked for them in Fallout 3, they were right were I left them when I pulled myself away from Oblivion.
My advice for you, dear reader, is to play Fallout 3 if you haven't already. It's charming and fun and utterly unique. If you've never played Morrowind or Oblivion because you think you're too cool or whatever, this advice goes double. You can vacation in Fallout 3, but playing the Elder Scrolls series is a lifestyle choice.
My advice to Bethesda is to do away with the central story in these games. I'm serious. The biggest selling point for me, the thing that made me run out and buy Morrowind way back when was the fact that I could ignore the story, strike out into a fantasy world and weave my own tale, even if it involved random acts of pointless vandalism, petty theft on a massive scale and public indecency. This should not be a sideshow to the game, it should be the game. Will Wright already proved that you can sell a game without grand goals, you can just build things and dick around. I'd like to do that in an inventive, dynamic fantasy world. I don't know what this would look like, but I honestly believe you can do it.
And please do it before Peter Molyneux takes another stab at it because it's getting so embarrassing to watch him try I'm tempted to remake The Office and set it in Lionhead Studios.
It was the first game I had ever encountered that did so much for the cause of immersion. I had, of course, played Grand Theft Auto's contemporary incarnation, but this was different. I felt as if I had entered a virtual world that was even more open than the GTA sandbox, not to mention it had a vocabulary wider than "run, steal, kill." That first session lasted hours. I was awestruck with the extent to which I could improvise. There may have been drooling.
In Morrowind, I had no fewer than twelve different characters. Each one had a different set of skills and attributes, they had different allies and enemies and went through the game in different ways. I also gave them personalities, but that was just for me.
I'm probably crazy.
Morrowind is perhaps the earliest success in a genre I like to call "RPG fusion." You see, as video game technology progresses, the old turn-based, random battle-plagued, attack-magic-item, Final Fantasy-style RPG becomes less and less attractive. The modern personal computer or gaming platform is capable of so much, it's not easy to sell a title where the players have to wait their turn. In response, many designers have started adding RPG elements to other forms of gaming.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It's progress. Back in the day, the RPG was distinguished from its rivals by being immersive, persistent and by granting each player a unique experience, even if the story always ended the same way. These are good things, and they live on in the many RPG fusion titles. Granted, they still make old-school RPGs, but honestly, I'm done with them. I like steampunk, I liked the premise, but I could not play Lost Odyssey. Maybe I was a more sophisticated gamer back when I was into Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, but I also lived in a basement and didn't know anything about girls.
I consider Fallout 3 to be a successor to Morrowind by way of Oblivion, at least as far as the technical construction of the gaming world is concerned. It differs from its predecessors in that the setting has changed and ranged combat is far more important, but the general formula is the same. Although there have been many shooters which incorporate RPG elements, I don't think I've seen it done as successfully as Fallout 3 since Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.
The inherent problem with merging the shooter and RPG genres is that the player's combat effectiveness in a shooter is based not on levels or attributes or dice rolls, but on sheer twitchy aiming skill and an understanding of each weapon's strengths and weaknesses. These two gaming styles are fairly disparate, and Fallout 3 makes it work using V.A.T.S. It stands for Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System and I refuse to put all those periods in there every time I type it, so just get used to VATS.
A Fallout 3 character can specialize in a variety of skills that allow him or her to interact with the world, but the wasteland is a rough place. Sooner or later, you are going to find yourself looking at a charging super mutant, and they are seldom impressed by your hacking skill, Junior. It's an action game, so you need to be able to defend yourself. Naturally, a gamer who favors shooters is going to have an advantage here, but VATS lets you pause the game and queue up a series of shots the quantity and rate of success of which are determined by the character's agility and level of familiarity with the gun in question.
The catch is that at the bottom end of a gun's skill level shots will occasionally go wild even if the player decides to eschew VATS altogether and go with pure first-person shooter skill. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but I for one will not kowtow to the Red Bull- swigging, trigger-happy, homophobic FPS purist demographic and I'm glad Bethesda didn't either.
VATS does a good job of smoothing out the edges where FPS action meets RPG character-building. Unless the character you've created is Numbnuts the Fingerless, Who Knoweth Not Which End of the Gun is Dangerous, then most of your shots will hit their target when you pull the trigger, but if you're taking a time-out from World of Warcraft and you prefer to let your numbers do the talking, VATS takes you by the hand and kills the mean old rampaging mutated bear for you (if you've got the skills, that is).
It's like Footprints in the Sand for simulated violence.
As I've come to expect from Bethesda, the quests and general world design are fun and inventive. The game is a bit shorter than the Elder Scrolls titles, but there seems to be quite a lot of ancillary game material and you could spend hours or days just messing around exploring the map.
Lest I forget, there is an upcoming expansion which will allow your character to explore post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. The core story could be a big steaming turd and it would still be worth it just for that. Can you say "easy supplemental review?"
Here's the problem. I practically shit my pants as I grasped how vast the game Morrowind was. That feeling was tempered by disappointment when I started Oblivion because I realized that they had dumbed the system down a bit to attract a wider audience. I still played it, because the graphics got a serious bump, the melee combat was superbly visceral, and the physics engine made the setting immersive enough to forgive the more limited stats and abilities aspects. However, it still infuriates me that a good game could have been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that sixty dollars from the wallet of an imagination-deficient simpleton is worth the same as my sixty dollars and I hold a grudge for that. Oh yeah, and I preferred the aesthetic in Morrowind to that of Oblivion. Where the former takes place in a unique alien landscape, the latter was the same castle-and-cottage tripe that makes me throw up into my mouth a little bit when I try to read traditional fantasy.
Fallout 3 is basically just an Oblivion clone which substitutes the Elder Scrolls' original leveling system for the more traditional one found in Fallouts 1 and 2 (presumably to reduce the frequency of crazed Fallout fanboy assaults on their studios), and takes place in a nuclear wasteland other than a cut-and-paste medieval fantasy world. Right off the bat they get points for the new setting, hell, they get points for just doing what they do because nobody else makes games like these and I'm thankful that they do.
But Morrowind was innovative when it was released in 2002. Since then, its progeny have seen changes, some good and some bad. However, that openness that allowed my first Morrowind character to fill her pockets with junk until she couldn't move has remained fairly constant. Now, I don't like to think about how much time I've spent in their games because during that span I could have learned a marketable skill, trained in some exotic fighting style, or collected a really intriguing assortment of sexually transmitted infections, but the point is that there's a very strong draw to letting the players go their own way and I was hooked. What I want to see is Bethesda (or someone else) take this to the next level. Yeah, I can break into someone's house and re-arrange their personal possessions while they sleep. And yeah, that is as innovative as it is utterly pointless and completely balls-out insane. However, couldn't that energy have been put to better use making the world a little more dynamic? I understand that, unlike my paranoid fantasies about reality, everything in a video game is put there for my benefit. I'm also fully aware of just how daunting it is to fill a virtual world with enough stuff to even make the sandbox, non-linear thing worth doing at all.
The problem is that it's all about stuff. I had really hoped to see major improvements in the area of social interactions and AI, but it's more of the same. I like the game, but I feel like it's capable of more. Maybe I've just spent too much time with Bethesda titles. I know where the walls are already, and when I looked for them in Fallout 3, they were right were I left them when I pulled myself away from Oblivion.
My advice for you, dear reader, is to play Fallout 3 if you haven't already. It's charming and fun and utterly unique. If you've never played Morrowind or Oblivion because you think you're too cool or whatever, this advice goes double. You can vacation in Fallout 3, but playing the Elder Scrolls series is a lifestyle choice.
My advice to Bethesda is to do away with the central story in these games. I'm serious. The biggest selling point for me, the thing that made me run out and buy Morrowind way back when was the fact that I could ignore the story, strike out into a fantasy world and weave my own tale, even if it involved random acts of pointless vandalism, petty theft on a massive scale and public indecency. This should not be a sideshow to the game, it should be the game. Will Wright already proved that you can sell a game without grand goals, you can just build things and dick around. I'd like to do that in an inventive, dynamic fantasy world. I don't know what this would look like, but I honestly believe you can do it.
And please do it before Peter Molyneux takes another stab at it because it's getting so embarrassing to watch him try I'm tempted to remake The Office and set it in Lionhead Studios.
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