Batman Begins

      I watched this because I was told to buy it by the same friend who made me play Arkham Asylum (AA, I’ll need to reference this later and so retroactively put this in as I was much too lazy to type out ‘Arkham Asylum’ again). Even though he’s yet to play Dead Space or read ‘Dog Blood’ and ‘Them or Us’ (by David Moody) the second and third part to the ‘Hater’ trilogy – the best horror thriller story I’ve ever read; a terrifying glimpse into societal breakdown and the following broken society.

      But anyway.

      Let’s talk about the movie; which is perhaps... The best movie of all time ever! Flawless in every way I can’t imagine how any movie could ever be better than this. It’s got Batman in it and Qui-Gon Jinn and NINJAS! It has mother fucking ninjas! And a British butler with a British accent – if I had a uterus I’d father a child from every man involved in its production to ensure a new generation of excellent – and beautiful – film makers.

     Sarcasm (and indeed a weird sort of sexism) aside this movie has problems. Pretentious deep and looks-and-sounds-a-lot-like-Keanu-Reeves-but-I’m-assured-he-isn’t problems.

     The first half of this is pretty slow, which isn’t a bad thing in itself (The Beach is positively glacial at times but doesn’t suffer for it) it’s just slowed by trying to cultivate sympathy by showing us Bruce Wayne’s Parents and then killing them and it, actually, sort of being his fault but not really. I mean even at my most causally aware of Batman I knew that Joker killed his parents which ruins the pay off in either ‘Dark Knight’ or the one after (I am under the impression it’s a trilogy).  Granted the arc of him mastering his fear of bats is interesting and a good theme – but then he uses his mastery of fear to “turn fear against those who prey on the fearful” surely making him someone who preys on the newly fearful who in turn will need someone to scare him?

    Enter scarecrow, played by Cillian Murphy, who uses a gas to create fear and mental breakdown in his victims. A truly cruel villain but I learned nothing about him I didn’t get from AA. I get that they’re separate media but they use the same universe and I feel they should bring new interpretations to an old idea. Isn’t that what fan fiction is about? I mean has every Batman thing that’s ever come out just been more of exactly the same? I can’t judge but that’s the impression I’m starting to get.

     Then there’s the time it takes up trying to square away the fact that batman isn’t descending to the criminal’s level. Taking the law into his own hands and battering and terrorising people who – for the most part – seemed to have been bought under the threat of murder if they don’t take the offer. The irony is I’d have been totally behind Bats if I’d known he was enjoying himself. Instead he’s oh so terribly compassionate in that irritating holier-than-thou way that pisses me off to no end.

     It almost convinced me of his ultra-moral stance but right after I was thinking it might not be as much of a contradiction as all that he burns down the League of Shadows’ training facility that he’s been living in for seven years – killing at least three people and severely injuring others all because they asked him to murder a man who killed a whole family for some extra land. You see my problem here? Then at the end he lets a nemesis die in what can only be described as manslaughter with intent. This isn’t a flawed character it’s a broken one, trying to get you to accept two contradictory sides to him as moral. This would be acceptable – if infuriating – if the doublethink was offered to you by the character alone, but it’s the movie.

     Like I said I’d totally be up for the ride if it weren’t for the fact he was so righteous. If Batman dispensed nosebleeds and brain damage with a sense of pride and enjoyment as he cleaned up the city while slowly becoming the evil he set out to deliver justice to, that’d be fine. Instead he does it dispassionately; which isn’t virtuous it’s psychotic.

     It’s a shame really, vigilantism is a romantic idea – it’s what makes Kick Ass such a fucking brilliant movie – and in the context of a city as utterly corrupt as Gotham, one that may actually work.

    Talking of Gotham I was really impressed with how well defined it was – it felt like its own city while also drawing inspiration from cities like Chicago and London; rather than just being a rehashing of New York or being so generic it wasn’t worth caring about. I was more interested in its storey than Bruce’s.

     I suppose you’re meant to take Batman and Bruce as slightly separate characters – they’re never in the same room together – if that’s the case we could probably add Split-Personality to Psycopathy and Messiah Complex in the list of mental disorders this man has. It would also make him repulsive. In one utterly and irredeemably pointless scene he drives up to an expensive restaurant/hotel thing in a tiny little sports car with a random beautiful woman. When the valet opens the door to let her out it’s revealed she was sitting on top of another woman.

     Is this because money is so irresistible to women that they’re willing to cram themselves into an impractically small vehicle with an ugly man who has a train wreck for a mind? Is it because any woman under fourteen stone doesn’t have enough matter to retain a soul? Seconds after this shocking screenshot, the bitches are diving around naked in the fish pond. The manager admittedly is distressed by this, he’s getting complaints, is a public place, he doesn’t need the trouble. So he goes over to them, smiles awkwardly and says “ok ladies you’ve had your fun but I’d appreciate you getting dressed now or we’ll have to ask you to leave.” to the man they came in with and demands he control his women. To which Bruce whips out his penis – wallet! – and buys the hotel so he can change the rules. Fuck him. The most terrible thing about this scene is it was so colossally unimportant.  

     Perhaps my favourite scene in the movie was at Bruce’s birthday party, his house is full of rich people associates he inherited from his parents, I think, and he learns that they’re about to be killed unless he makes them leave. So he insults them, quite thoroughly and with style. I liked the ambiguity here, yes he’s saving them from dying in a fire, but I did get the sense that he kind of meant it. Which does beg the question why he’s bothering with the city at all if both the rich and desperate are toxic to him.

     I’ll give this a ‘worth watching’: the action-ey bits were generally entertaining and towards the end when the Shadow Proclamation turn up there’s a real sense of threat to the whole city, so you do side with Batman if only because he’s not being genocidally righteous.

Batman Arkham Asylum

     I realise I’m a little late to the game here given that its sequel is out and proud and doing well but I just completed Batman Arkham Asylum for the Xbox 360. A friend lent it to me*, enthusiastically batting away my indifference to the Batman universe – insisting “it’s a good game, even if it wasn’t Batman, it’d still be good”; which suggested to me they were too lazy to create something new and instead surfed on the back of something already popular. I’m right about that but, admittedly, it is a quality game.

      The basic premise is that Joker takes over a prison/come asylum in order to create an army of super mutants and take over Gotham City or the world or similar. Spoiler alert. The storey is told well, it’s revealed and foreshadowed and isn’t just expanded in a contrived way like when some games hit six hours they – because that resonates with the zeitgeist – pull some terrorism out of their ass and continue for another pointless four. I really enjoyed it over all and it’s a great example of storey telling in video games.

     On the other hand. The characters, for the most part were a little anaemic. There were a lot of villains in it that were – I assume at least – returning characters like Scarecrow and Killer Croc and Zsasz to which I was introduced and given a sense of but I felt like that was it. There was nothing else to them. Even with the psychiatric recordings littered around the place. I suspect this is just a problem with the source material: comic books. These characters have to survive years and years of re-use so they have to be vague lest they implode like their cousins in soap land. Yes it’s true good characters can be summed up in a sentence (Zzasz: self hating serial killer with a god complex. Killer Croc is a metaphor for the animal in us all and Poison Ivy is a nasty evil naked Greenpeace liberal fag) but with great characters you want to say more. I didn’t.

      But it’s a game. Examples of great characters are a little sparse *cough – Kazooie cough cough*.

     The game play is split into three main parts, rooms of baddies that you have to punch into unconsciousness – the moral alternative to murder – room of baddies to you have to suffocate into unconsciousness one by one causing panic and fear in your future victims – the moral alternative to murder – and very infrequent side scrolling-ish pieces that end up with you shining a light on Scarecrow – the much less effective alternative to murder.

      The crowds of baddies are what make up the majority of the bits of the game, and it’s done well enough. Most of the time it just comes down to hitting X a lot, but as you progress through the game you have to think about what you’re doing a little more some enemies shock you if you attack them head on and some have knives and guns making them higher priority targets. There are some moves you can do after building up a high enough combo but I found that it rarely responded quickly enough and I lost powerful finishing moves. Even the simple counter move didn’t always work – especially later on when there were lots of baddies. You either had to pre-empt the counter prompt or if you’d successfully countered you’d get attacked by someone else which just simply wasn’t fair.

      The predator bit’s were my favourite, you were given a room full of armed guards (in this game bullets kill you dead) and you had to take them out one by one and silently, reminiscent of how you’re ‘meant’ to do things in Assassins Creed. They require a lot of thought and if you fuck up it’s always your fault, not the game’s. They evolve throughout the game, as you get gadgets you can distract guards or blow out walls to take them out. It’s very satisfying to complete one without being caught and to watch the guards get more and more freaked.

       The Side scrolling-ish bits were a nice change of pace. But they never really evolved and I thought they were foreshadowing something bigger as they were linked to Scarecrow but they never followed through.

        Boss battles! I’ve missed playing games that have such things. However these were either at the end of the game or let downs. Killer Croc especially was disappointing, he’d been referenced all the way through and when you got to the sewers all you had to do was slap him back into the water thirty-two times while you were trying to do something else. I get that it was trying to build tension and stuff but it went on so long it became terribly predictable.

      Flaahgra from the Metroid prime games made an appearance towards the end. “How’s it going?” I asked surprised to see her, it’s been a long time. “How’s the family? Are you still eating Vigilantes for a liviaaaaghhh!” Poison Ivy was a fun boss if a little simple. In fact all the bosses in this game are simpler than some of the combat arenas and predator rooms which you will have to retry. But they give the game good pace and stop it being too repetitive.

      I played through on hard mode and once I’d nailed the basics I coasted through a lot of it until about three quarters the way through when I just hit a wall. I was trapped in a tiny room with one huge enemy and like twenty thugs armed with metal pipes for four hours hearing jokers three taunts half a billion times and no doubt in my sleep for the next fortnight. It was difficult to the point of tears. It was the game’s fault. The area so small it was impossible to fight both the mini-boss and jokers devoted minions at the same time. It didn’t seem to want me diving to the right, there was always something to get caught on and diving to the left got you slapped by goons. When I realised that this was actually a puzzle-fight (you have to use the Titan to thin out the crowd of smaller guys) it was better but still frustratingly difficult – enemies were taking more hits than they had in the last room and the game never lets you counter two people at once even when two people are coming at you at once.

        The difficulty spike in the minions seemed really unfair given that the conditions were very different plus you had to neutralise a Titan at the same time. When I finally completed it, it wasn’t as satisfying as some of the other trickier bits – it felt more like I’d gotten lucky.

        Over all though I did enjoy the game. It’s exiting when you get a new gadget to play with it and it opens up areas you were previously locked out of – particularly if you’re hunting down all the Riddler trophies. There are great details too like the chattering teeth that guide your way and your costume deteriorating through a pretty rough night. Things like that can really strengthen a game.

         Like I said I’m late to play it but if you haven’t already, it’s worth picking up – even if you no like Batman.  

      

*The same friend that bullied me into buying the recent Batman films. I assume it’s necessary for them to be Batman lest something as original as a toxic idea escape from the film industry.

Scre4m

Scream. Nearly my earliest sojourn into the illegal realms of 18 certificate movies and one of my favourites for a long time. It’s witty, relevant and scary (at least when you’re scared of what’s under your bed/you don’t know who the killer(s) is) it’s even educational in its charmingly self-aware way. The characters are interesting, likable and believable, if a little similar to ones from a popular sitcom. The other two parts of the original trilogy (one can only assume a modern trilogy is on the way) had a lot going for them too despite the fact that the conclusion to 3 was a little contrived and didn’t give you enough reason to care.

     But anyway. Witty, relevant and scary; “Scre4m”, as it likes to be called, is perhaps one of those things if you count it as being half of each of the first two.

     I can’t help but liken it to a dinner party, you and your significant other have invited an old friend from high school round because he was in town and you remember he was a really funny guy back in the day (before he disappeared from your lives to go live with wolves or something). You open the door he hands your wife a bottle of self referential wine and cracks an in-joke with you, you laugh he laughs your wife laughs, as you move into the hall he pet’s your dog calling it by name. You arrive in the lounge where he promptly takes out a broken piece of glass and slashes his wrists crying “you did this – YOU!”.  Then you wake up.

       You open the door; he hands your wife some familiar-looking flowers you get an old joke, you, wife, guest, dog all laugh and then he calls in an air-strike levelling your neighbourhood. Then you wake up.

       You walk to the door, not even sure if you want this friend to come round anymore – it’s been a long time and, Christ what do you have to talk about? He was always really into his films right and all you did was read – what if it transpires he voted for the Tories? You open the door he hands your wife a bottle of self referential wine and cracks an in-joke with you, you laugh he laughs your wife laughs, as you move into the hall he pet’s your dog calling it by name. You arrive in the lounge where he... ungh.

       Back to the movie and after the opening false starts and then start, it starts to get bad. The three pillars of Scream – Sidney, Dewey and Monica – have all changed somewhat. They’re not just older and out-of-shape (I don’t mean fat, in Sidney’s case she’s taller and more skeletal and alien looking) but they have less substance and allure than two mini digestives lying on top of each other pretending to be an Oreo. Which I concede must have been the intention as there is a full packet of Oreos in most of the new cast, the new high-school kids. I can’t help but feel they should have just done away with the old three (or at least Dewey and Monica) as they do very little until the end and for most of it just get in the way, like people a head of you in line for the ATM. Perhaps a full reboot, like they do with every second series of Skins. Still the pretty new cast drag you through the first hour or so.

     And I do mean drag. Through broken glass and salt.

     Going back to our suburban dinner party and this time assuming the role of the charismatic guest; after moving to the table the subject of the good old days has been brought up and your laughing and joking about some old teacher and some good feeling has started to stir. Like that rumbling in your guts juts before you let out a wet fart. Everyone pretends not to notice now everyone is smiling as they try not to hurl. You shift your weight around and. Fuck. You’ve followed through a bit, you realise as your ass cheeks slip and slide as they come together. You march on as you tell some of Ye Olde Jokes but the stench doesn’t go away. Your new jokes aren’t flying either as your confidence is all shot up and your aware that this isn’t the first time this has happened – even though you were drunk most other times you can’t help but wonder if this is the thin edge of full faecal incontinence.  

     It’s not a good hour.

     One of the things I really liked about Scream was the way it embraced new technology, mobile phones (which I’m aware were widely available in America since 1902 but when I first watched Scream the concept was as good as science fiction). Before mobiles if you got a death threat via the phone you were safe in the knowledge that the person threatening you was as immobile as you were and that you were probably a car journey away. But Scream brought us the possibility that you were getting a death threat from your porch. Or wardrobe. Or under your bed. So I expected FaceBook and twitter and things to play a bigger role, instead they made cameo appearances and the notion of how much we live and breathe social networking et al was only nudged in our direction, like some leftovers we may want but could always be given to the dog.

     And as we enter the third act of the movie and the third act of this review lets return once more to the dinner party metaphor I’m enjoying entirely too much. We’ll assume the position of the wife, for the sake of symmetry.

     Your guest get’s up slightly shiftily and red faced, explaining he needs the loo and inquires its location.  You tell him and as he shambles towards the door you look at your husband with a raised eyebrow and slight frown. Five to seven minutes later your guest returns, fresher that he’s been since he got in. As he sits down a new passion has returned to the conversation as he tells you about his ability to juggle Molotov cocktails. Naturally your husband issues a challenge and before you know it your favourite piece of imitation art is in cinders the walls are bleeding and Fido is meowing in the corner. Then you wake up.

      I didn’t hate this movie. My main obstruction to loving it though was the ‘main’ characters – but I was conflicted; I didn’t want the ghost to kill them I just didn’t want them there. The fact that it was so relentlessly self-aware and self-conscious was a huge problem too – it seemed like every conversation was about slasher movies and characters were aware that they were going to be murdered as opposed to meagrely entertaining the idea.

     The thing that really annoys me about it is it seems to have this internal debate with itself; it can’t decide if it’s perpetuating serial killer violence (it’s not) or if cinema violence is just harmless fun (it is). Fair play raising the pointless discussion but then squirming around about it just gets in the way of all the bloody fun.

     And that’s the thing. The good parts of this movie are fun – it’s entertaining, playing with its audience – which we love really – and surprising us. It’s just a shame that all that good stuff doesn’t really start until it’s almost over.

     Then you wake up.