Thursday, 24 May 2018
Battlefield V - NACHTHEXEN
Battlefield V's reveal is an unbroken gawp at the kind of chaos players can hurl themselves into when the game releases in October. Developers DICE have jettisoned any sense of narrative storytelling for their pitch, electing to build their advert around the sequel's refresh focused gameplay systems instead. Naturally, a sizeable band of people (men) with absolutely nothing better to do have taken it upon themselves to cry foul at the inclusion of female combatants. Apparently it's just not on having women in historical war games. Facts be damned eh? Considering my Call of Duty: World War II avatar has been a brown-haired lady since launch, I'm hoping that I've inadvertently wound up a few of the bores who stick with the square-head male default.
Wednesday, 23 May 2018
Sunday, 20 May 2018
Friday, 18 May 2018
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Reloaded swaps its predecessor's carefully plotted reveals for a ticking time bomb, urging our heroes forward through a series of loosely connected set-pieces. A swarm (shoal? squad?) of robotic squid is tunnelling down into the Earth's core to murder the freed people of Zion. They must be stopped. While Harry Lennix's exasperated, stick-in-the-mud Commander Lock plots a unified, mechanised defence, his love rival Morpheus gathers the cool kids to put all of humanity's eggs in Neo's basket. Raised to the level of a superman at the end of The Matrix, Neo is the rootless heart of Reloaded, a reality-defying monster who has tasted limitless strength yet finds himself butting up against automated wheeler-dealers attempting to talk him down from his privileged position.
While it is commendable that the path The Wachowskis have chosen for their heroes is a little more complicated than a simple rehash of the previous film's leetspeak cop-killers, the messiness their abstractions invite leaves the film feeling acutely directionless, particularly in its first half. Early scenes deal with the wrong kind of exposition, details and directions that pile-up around organic opportunities for the kind of confrontation studios presume keeps an audience awake. Where The Matrix felt fresh and finely tuned, Reloaded reads as churning and overwrought, a rash of scenes desperately seeking some kind of unifying tone or performance. This disconnection is also felt in how Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss' Trinity conduct themselves in private. There is no change in their demeanour, no sense of a secret, jealously guarded interior to their relationship. Given ship rest, they stay buttoned up. Neo remains a distracted waif, while Trinity never shifts out of grim-but-determined.
Even the film's action takes a hit. Neo's newfound Godhood means interactions with basic enemies have a palpable sense of boredom. He isn't fighting for his life anymore, he's batting away the pathetic swipes of children. Again, it's a conceptually pure idea but not necessarily fun to watch. The much-trumpeted Burly Brawl between Mr Anderson and dozens of identikit Hugo Weavings quickly loses all sense of weight and collision, sputtering on as a boring tech demo of Keanu Reeves rendered as a computer generated doll who has lost his stuffing. Above all, Reloaded's fights lack bite. There's none of the sweaty headbutts or eardrum bursting claps that landed the first film in hot water with the British Board of Film Classification. The Matrix kept an emotional component in its fights. Combatants, regardless of whether they were human or data, expressed pain and frustration, allowing the viewer to get their teeth into a situation. Reloaded repeatedly fumbles this simple premise.
What Reloaded does have though is Lambert Wilson's aristocratic obstacle, The Merovingian, and an incredible freeway chase built around an extended cue of Juno Reactor's pulsing, propulsive, Mona Lisa Overdrive. Merovingian arrives just as the film threatens to go into terminal decline, puncturing the dour, humourless, proceedings with a grandstanding slice of smug. His verbal assault then tracks nicely into a feature set-piece refreshingly free from Neo's weary grandstanding. Morpheus and Trinity escort Randall Duk Kim's Keymaker across a seething Autobahn pursued by the police, three new (hunkier) Agents and The Merovingian's phantom muscle. The sequence manages to be both breathlessly entertaining and a better expression of each character's physical and psychological disposition than any other scene in Reloaded. Trinity flees relentlessly - whizzing back-and-forth, up and down the packed, panicking, lanes - ruthlessly attuned to the task at hand. Comparatively, Morpheus is a human roadblock, a surprisingly spry barrel-chest who plants his feet then refuses to budge.
Thursday, 17 May 2018
The Matrix
Considering the sheer weight of exposition required to get the audience up to speed, The Matrix really moves. Writers-directors The Wachowskis ration out their (relatively) hard science-fiction premise expertly, using paranoia imagery and a grab-bag of throbbing, pre-millennial, worries to tell the tale of a future in which mankind has been reduced to a bio-mechanical battery. Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus shoulders the majority of this burden. The actor prowls around mouldy sitting rooms, flashing mirrored eyes and a knowing Cheshire Cat grin while bombarding Keanu Reeves' spaced-out Neo with the swirling rhetoric of a fanatic.
While The Matrix's core concept takes some explaining, the film's through-line is refreshingly simple, recalling classic mythology. Old hand Morpheus believes Neo is The Messiah while the younger, scrawnier, man cannot believe he is so important. After a bittersweet meeting with Gloria Foster's all-knowing Oracle, Neo is able to compartmentalise the dreadful expectation that has been foisted upon him. Despite what he is being sold by his handler / master, Neo is now able to take himself out of the anointed one equation, subordinating himself to Morpheus' dream. So when Morpheus sacrifices himself to ensure his protege's escape, Neo hurls himself back into danger, convinced his life is expendable when judged against Fishburne's magnetic prophet. The development is basic and transitional, but self-sacrifice is a key trait when considering a hero.
Although The Matrix secured its place in the public consciousness with John Gaeta and Manex Visual Effects' fluid time-slice photography, watched today the effect that lingers longest is the pounding, pistolero crack of the film's one-on-one fight scenes. The Wachowskis and fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping present both their heroes and villains as low-level super-beings crashing about a fragile, easily shattered, world. It's an effect shamelessly swiped from Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell films, where this pliability had more to do with the sheer tonnage inherent to a fully-mechanised secret agent. The sight of reality bending then breaking around our warring parties stresses a vivid and personalised physicality though, one almost entirely absent from the hyper-expensive films that have followed and attempted to iterate on The Matrix's success.
Wednesday, 16 May 2018
Ready Player One
Discombobulation doesn't quite cover the experience of watching Ready Player One, a film that posits eternal poverty and the total defeat of imagination as acceptable prices to pay for the human race to live in a Funko-Popped wonderland. Everything in Steven Spielberg's film is a reference, from feature players to props and laser gun foley. Not the kind of massaged, satirised call-backs you might find in a Bush Sr era episode of The Simpsons either, this is the cold, naked replication of Family Guy. Characters and ideas are torn out of their original context then played, at length, as subordinate structural mulch in a narrative that revolves around an unstoppable trivia bore.
Strangest of all, Ready Player One presents your standard heroic journey freed from an overarching sense of defiance. Tye Sheridan's Wade Watts isn't trying to sweep away the dominant culture of zapped-out destitution. He's complicit; a collaborator. A zealous fanboy deep in the thrall of a dead billionaire who couldn't navigate a conversation unless it explicitly catered to what he wanted to hear. There are asides about food riots and ruinous ecological shifts but it's Mark Rylance's James Halliday that appears to have done the most damage to mankind. Apart from creating an accessible drop-out box, he's tied up trillions and a generation of thinkers trying to decode his death bed tantrum. To wit, the wealthiest company in the world is dedicated to propagating Halliday's (almost) unwinnable treasure hunt while the second wealthiest company in the world runs Victorian workhouses committed to pulling this task apart. Pizza Hut's still pumping out pies though.
Ready Player One's ceaseless use of propulsive movement does, occasionally, threaten to capture the imagination though. Spielberg taking a similarly chaotic tact with computer generated cataclysm as his pal George Lucas did with Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith's opening space shoot-out. Layers and layers of detail are baked into each other resulting in big money shots absolutely swimming with animated actors, each devised to attract your attention. Action in Ready Player One is seldom used to excite in terms of character or accomplishment. It's plotted to overwhelm, rolling over its audience like a crushing wave of hyper-expensive magma. As the film cascades towards its conclusion, the seizure-inducing vistas begin to numb. The prevalence of licensed properties - that turn up to look pretty then do nothing - inspire nothing less than the acute disinterest felt watching an overplayed sponsored ad.
