In the Lost Lands

Adapted from a very short George RR Martin story, director Paul WS Anderson's In the Lost Lands is a slight piece concerning comeuppance that find itself distended and swollen thanks to the action-packed demands of the medium it is being transposed into. Milla Jovovich's wasteland witch Gray Alys, of course, knows far more than she lets on about the expected outcomes of the magical rites this fallen future's royalty have her perform, but her wry perspective is never allowed to feed back into the finished film. Anderson and his co-screenwriter Constantin Werner jealously guard any debriefs, saving them all up for a conclusion that twists in ways that would be pleasant enough following forty-five minutes of television but end up being too little too late when playing at feature length. Very much a digital backlot film, In the Lost Lands is often handsome but desperately static. Establishing shots are packed with beatific, computer-generated rubble and straining light sources that recall similar apocalypses from video games, Zack Snyder pick-ups or even bubble-era anime but, whenever the film is in (slow) motion, Lost Lands very much fails to match the sublime notes of that latter, elasticated inspiration. Given that this is yet another Anderson and Jovovich team-up, it's hard not to let your mind wander when watching, wondering if the pair intend for this film to function as an unofficial cap on their Resident Evil entries, a series that has long since been handed off to other filmmakers. The evidence is flimsy - Jovovich plays another superhumanly capable woman named Alice who battles against awful men who have allowed greed to so completely sink into them that it has physically mutated their bodies - but it beats giving Lost Lands your full, undivided attention. 

E3 - Elden Ring

After a few years of radio silence, we finally get a good, rolling, look at Elden Ring, the latest game from Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware. At first glance this latest iteration of the studio's finely tuned dark fantasy template looks to be selling itself on an idea of vista - vast, horizontal, expanses to plunder, necessitating a phantom steed. A closer look at these gameplay clips reveals, not just context specific jumps and launches but, at least when riding your horse, a double-jump mechanic. These stacked, player inputted, leaps imply vertical exploration, an entirely new dimension of nosing about that, more than likely, builds on the pagoda sneaking seen in 2019's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

E3 - WIDOW'S WAIL

Elden Ring presents an interesting tension, how do you juggle the contribution of superstar writer George RR Martin with a game design approach that tends to be wilfully obscure, if not outright open to interpretation? Hidetaka Miyazaki's next game promises a massive field of landmarks to conquer, a customisable main character, and a story that steers Tolkienian anvils of power down dark, dismembered directions.