Captain America: The First Avenger

            I’ve really enjoyed Marvel’s road to the Avengers so far.  In the same year that DC released The Dark Knight, a dark, intelligent superhero movie, Marvel released Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, two movies that focused on one thing: being fun.  And they were.  The Dark Knight was definitely the better movie, yeah, but Marvel’s movies were everything you’d want out of a superhero movies.  The sly references to the comics continuity, a nice dose of humor, some big action sequences against some big villains, and excellent special effects.  And this has been kept up through Iron Man 2 and Thor.  So it’s with some disappointment that I end up feeling like Captain America is the first mis-step so far.

            Set in World War II, Captain America has the origins of the hero, starting with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the weakling Brooklyn kid who wants to join the army but is too weak to.  His luck changes when he gets picked by Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci) to participate in the Super Soldier program and stop Johann Schmidt, aka the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) from using a Norse artifact to create weapons that could win the war for the Nazis.

            Since I feel the movie is pretty evenly split between good and bad, I’m going to split my review in the same way.  Starting with the good, we have the cast.  Not Chris Evans.  Between Push and Fantastic Four, it’s like he so badly wants to be an action hero, but he’s so unremarkable.  He fits the suit and the look well, but he just never pops off the screen.  Instead, he gets completely overrun by the supporting cast, starting with Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull.  He hams it up a little, but not so much that it overwhelms.  He spends half the movie in a (really good looking) makeup job, and yet his personality always comes through.  He’s powerful and intelligent, but you feel he could snap right into pure madness at any point, which is how the Red Skull should be.  I also like how they handled his origin in this movie.  I tried to figure out how the Red Skull got his skull a while ago, and I just ran into a wall repeatedly before giving up.  It’s simple here: He was given a early dose of super soldier serum.  This gives him a good enough dynamic with Cap as a villain, and it doesn’t overcomplicate things.  We don’t see the villain develop next to the hero, but instead we see a villain that’s so far ahead the hero has to catch up.  I think the movie could’ve just been about the Red Skull, and I would’ve loved it.  Some of the other supporting cast that really stood out was Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, who’s rather charismatic, and the Howling Commandoes, who just basically overtake any action scene.  It helps that they’re led by Dum Dum Dugan, with his distinctive bowler hat and mustache.  While I can’t speak for non-comic fans, for me, it’s a total fanboy moment to see him on screen.

            I also really love the style and the art direction of the movie.  It looks like it has a filter applied to it to give it the right look, and it feels like the 1940s when it’s in the US.  A very stylized 1940s, but that’s the fun part of the movie.  It’s really World War II as it would’ve happened in the Marvel universe.  My dad was pointing out how the tanks are actual German tanks that have gotten ray guns attached to them, and some of the vehicles used were blueprints that never got made.  Hydra ends up overtaking the Nazis for most of the movie, and they’re kinda a cheesy villain (in modern comics, their constant catchphrase shouting of “Hail Hydra!  Cut off one head, two more grow back!” gets made fun of by anybody they fight), but they’re also a villain worth rooting against.

            Now the unfortunate part of the film, and it mainly comes down to the pacing.  The movie spends way too much time in the US.  It takes a solid 30 minutes to get Steve Rogers serum’d, and then even more time is spent with him as a propaganda vehicle.  Eventually, they put him on the frontline, and then the film takes off way too fast.  One action montage had my head spinning and me going “Wait, hold on, slow down!”  It was like they suddenly had to stuff as much slow-motioned, overblown action as they could in once they got him fighting Hydra.  And oh yes, there is slow motion.  Every punch and kick has to be slowed down and has the enemies flying back 30 feet.  It gets ridiculous fast.  The movie also makes some rather unfortunate choices with how it handles subplots.  Bucky’s character is never really developed in a satisfying way (hell, I don’t even know if they called him Bucky at any point in the movie), and (spoilers to a 50 year old comic here) the way they kill him off just isn’t very emotional, changed in a rather unsatisfying way from his original death.  They should’ve either worked it in better with the climax of the movie, or gone the Ultimate route and had him just not die.  Either way would’ve been much better.  The movie also tries a romantic subplot, and compared to Thor, it falls flat on its face.  There’s no chemistry, and it just feels like Cap fell in love with her because the movie said so.  There’s other problems with the movie I can point out, although some of that has to be put on other media.  We already know Johann Schmidt is the Red Skull from the trailers, but the movie plays up what his appearance is going to be a lot.  I read one article that said shield throwing would be reserved for epic moments, and instead Cap gets his shield and starts throwing it all over the place.  Can I put the blame of these problems on the movie?  Eh, maybe, but they’re small points compared to the big ones.

            Captain America succeeds in parts, fails in other parts.  Does it stand on its own while also leading into the Avengers?  Yeah, it does that well enough.  Is it a big, fun summer action movie?  Yeah, I guess it does that well, too.  Is it a bad movie?  Not at all, it’s just a movie that needed to be tightened up a bit and given a new lead actor.  If somebody was offering me a free movie ticket to see it again and had nothing better to do, I would go ahead and see it again.  As a movie to pay money to see, you could do worse, but you could also do better.

Ruminations on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

            So this is one of the toughest reviews I’ve had to write.  Normally, after I watch a movie or beat a game or whatever, I organize my thoughts for a while, maybe a day or two, and then just sit down and write them out.  It’s been almost a week since I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, and it’s still hard to figure out how to write this.  The biggest problem is that there’s really no swaying either party.  If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’re going to see this.  If you’re not, you’re not.  There’s nothing like, “Well, I liked the first movie, I guess maybe I’ll see this one”.  If you’ve gone through 7 movies, you’re sure as hell not going to stop before the 8^th.

            I’m a rather mid-level Potter fan myself.  The first time I read the books wasn’t on the wave of popularity, but a classmate in the 5^th grade who had done a book report-type thing on the first book.  So I picked it up from the library and read it on the vacation afterwards.  Now, for the future books and the movies, I’ve always been all over the place.  I’m definitely not one of those people who was in the bookstore at midnight in my wizard robes to get the latest book.  I tended to read them, the later ones in particular, a while after they were released.  Some of the movies I saw in theater, some of them I waited for the rental.  There’s something about Deathly Hallows Part 2 that has to be seen in theaters, though.  It’s an epic conclusion.  The first movie came out 10 years ago.  I’m never going to pretend there haven’t been longer-running franchises, but Harry Potter was one of those that always had a set conclusion, and yet started before we even knew how it ended.  It’s crazy to think that I was watching Sorcerer’s Stone before I even knew what some of the books were going to be called.

            Oh yeah, I’m supposed to talk about the movie somewhere in here.  Again, what exactly can I say?  It’s a fine adaptation of the book.  There, that’s it.  Oh, fine, I guess I’ll do a little more.  I guess first I should talk about the splitting of the last book into two parts.  On the one hand, it’s set a very bad precedent.  Now the last Twilight book and The Hobbit are being split into two parts, and we all know this isn’t going to be the last.  On the other hand, there was a very good reason for doing this.  Part 1 was a very darkly paced movie that had some of the most soul-tearing parts of the franchise (that entire section where Ron was gone?  I despaired.  There are Best Picture winners where I haven’t gotten that emotional at any point).  Part 2 is…still a pretty dark movie when you get down to it.  But it’s also a huge action climax.  What feels like the entire last half of the movie is dedicated to the Battle of Hogwarts (that capitalization is required for it), and it deserves it.  But it still has to slow down for some of the deaths and some downright heart-breaking sequences.  And it works.  I never felt like the movie’s pacing was off.  It makes you root for the heroes when the action is going on, it makes you want to cry when you see one of the characters killed off.  You’re always given an emotion to feel, and I always felt it.  And I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing.

            On the note of deaths, I think the movie handled some of the stuff that the book didn’t handle well better.  Some of the random deaths are…well, still random and pointless.  It also dropped details involving them, and that actually helps them.  In the books, it almost tried too hard to generate drama with two of the deaths.  In the movie, it effortlessly creates a moment where you see they died, and the imagery of it is just heartbreaking.  It’s hard to talk about something like this in vague terms, but it’s one of the film’s strongest moments.  The final battle against Voldemort and the moments after it are a lot less anticlimactic.  I thought it was more suitably epic and emotional.  The epilogue scene…is still pointless.  The movie at least feels a lot less ham-handed about the way it does it.  It’s probably a scene that should’ve been saved for post-credits, but whatever.

            So what do I say in the end about Deathly Hallows Part 2?  It’s an worthy ending to an epic franchise.  It’s a summer blockbuster.  It tugs at your emotional heartstrings.  It immerses you in a fantasy world that you’re sad to leave.  It’s a movie that was worth the 7 movies it took to get here.  Yeah, I think that’s a good summary.

Indie Game Face-Off: And Yet It Moves and A.R.E.S.

            Steam has been a pretty big portal for indie games recently.  I think part of the reason is that, unlike XBL where the indie games are hidden in a certain corner for the world, Steam’s indie releases are put right on the news page with the same text that would be given to any big release.  Their recent summer contest even used getting achievements in indie games as contest entries.  So in my time on Steam, I’ve picked up a few packs of indie games.  Today we’re looking at two wildly different games, And Yet It Moves and A.R.E.S.

            We’ll start with And Yet It Moves.  I would normally take the time in this paragraph to talk about the game’s story, but honestly, it’s nonexistent.  Which is rather strange since I’m pretty sure I got it in an Indie Story Pack.  The only “plot” to speak of is that you play as a nameless guy, who ventures through a cave, out into a jungle, and then gets bitten by a snake and goes on a drug trip.  If there is anything more than that, it was clearly lost on me.  Now, if it had been released in an Indie Gorgeous Graphics Pack, then I would’ve understood.  The graphics are one of the big features of this game.  They all look papercraft.  Your character is a sketchy drawing of a guy.  Construction paper has been assembled to make the cliffs and trees of the world.  The animals that you run into are pictures of real animals.  It’s instantly unique and visually appealing.

            The other big feature are the gravity changing mechanics.  Besides running around and jumping, this is the only other action you can take, turning the world around either 90 degrees or 180 degrees.  It’s the kind of mechanic I would expect to see in a flash game, but it really takes it to a great level through the various ways you have to use it.  In one early level, you have to maneuver bats around to get to certain locations.  Considering you fall down and the bats always fly up, it’s a really interesting puzzle.  I did find the mechanics a bit hard to grasp at first, but after a while, I felt like a pro.  Even with the many times I managed to collide into a wall, the game never got too frustrating.  The biggest problem of it was that it’s short, with only 3 worlds and around 16 levels between them.  It took me a hair over 2 hours to beat it, and besides time trials, there’s really nothing else to do in the game.  But it’s the interesting twist on the platformer and the ways that it uses this twist that really make the game worth playing, and it feels like a true indie game.  Not quite worth the $10 asking price, but a fun game.

            I think I bring up this truly unique independent game first because A.R.E.S. is quite the opposite.  The plot involves a space station which has had its human occupants taken hostage by robots, so Ares is sent in to kill the robots and rescue the hostages.  It’s a plot that’s simultaneously simple and too convoluted.  Thinking back on it, it’s like the game couldn’t handle something this simple.  Most characters are dropped, there’s no personalities being passed around, there’s just nothing to it.  And the villain is one of the most generic “HUMANS ARE DESTROYING THE EARTH” spouting robots I’ve ever seen.

            But hey, the gameplay can surely match up, right?  Er, no.  It plays out like a side-scrolling action shooter, using your mouse to aim.  It’s something that’s been done before, and there’s nothing about this game that does it particularly differently.  It doesn’t help that the game really has balance issues.  It gives you 4 guns, but as soon as I got the SMG, I just used that for the entire game and never saw any reason to switch.  The upgrade system is the game’s biggest flaw.  You’re given recyclable parts with red, blue, and yellow colors, which you use to upgrade your weapons.  The problem is these are the same parts you have to use to buy health packs, which are probably going to be a much higher priority.  But they use too many parts in an uneven way, by making you use 50 blue but significantly less of red and yellow.  In other words, my red and yellow pools were in the 300s at one point, while my blue pool was struggling around 30.  They really should’ve just made it one upgrade pool for everything.  In the end, though, it really didn’t matter.  I never had much trouble with any of the game, but I also didn’t really enjoy the game at all.  It didn’t challenge my shooting skills or my thinking skills.  It was just a game.

            So there you have it.  Two wildly different games, one that’s extremely indie and I love it for it, and the other that’s not and is downright forgettable.  There’s ultimately nothing comparable about them besides being independent, but it really shows the significant difference between indie sensibilities.

Dragon Age: Origins

            After beating Dragon Age: Origins, I’ve been trying to collect my feelings on it.  Did I love it?  Did I hate it?  Well, neither of those.  In a way, the game’s far too over my head to have me make an educated decision of my own opinion.  I remember when I preordered it simply based on it being Bioware’s next original IP, started playing, and…I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing, constantly getting tossed around and destroyed in combat.  It was a pretty defeated feeling.  This time around, I went in with a guide from GameFAQs on character creation and a more educated feeling of what I was doing.  But what follows is still going to be my second not-review.  In this case, while I have finished the game, I don’t feel like I can fully give my opinions on it in a way that’s actually constructive.  So this is a collection of my thoughts on things, the community’s (or, at least, TV Tropes’) thoughts on things, and reasonings as to why this game may be excellent, but not for me.

            The game takes place in a fantasy setting, with a story you’d expect.  There’s an orc-like threat called the Darkspawn, and the only people that can stop it are the Grey Wardens.  After various events, you and one other character are left as the only Grey Wardens, and you have to collect the city of Redcliffe, the elves, the dwarves, and the mages to help fight against the Darkspawn.  The story is a bit too standard fantasy, but it works.  Part of it is some of the political parts of the game, when it becomes less about fighting the demons and more about fighting the other human factions.  The other part is the real strength of the writing.  It really shows that you can take a plot that could’ve been scribbled out by anyone who’s read Lord of the Rings, and take it to a more powerful level.  The characters are all unique, and the voice acting on them carries it through.  Your party members alone don’t feel like they’ve been pulled out of some other fantasy game and given clichés to spout.  You have the dark magic girl and the warrior dwarf, but they’re both given backstory and snarky lines that make you fall in love with them.

The big initial draw of the game for me, and the reason for the title, are the origins.  There are six different origins, which are playable prologues.  I don’t know if it’s justified enough in-game for people to go through the game six times, especially since there’s only 3 classes, although each of those classes can go in different directions.  While the origins do have you meeting characters that may become important later, it’s not quite enough to completely change your experience.  Being a mage, it’s just the difference between people at the Mage’s Tower saying “Hey, I remember you” and them not saying it.  It’s kind of cool, but not cool enough that I wanted to go back in and see what I could’ve done different.

The other interesting part of the game is the approval system.  I’m really not sure how I feel about this.  I outright feel like I’m going to be contradictory after I gushed about Fallout New Vegas’ faction system, but sometimes that’s just the way it goes.  While most Bioware games have a karma meter that shifts between good and bad, this game ditched that.  Instead, each of your party members (besides the dog) has an approval bar.  You can affect their approval by giving them gifts, by talking to them in camp, or in certain conversations throughout the game.  For instance, you have the choice to release an evil mage from jail, and each of 3 your party members will chime in on how they feel about you doing so.  It’s a good idea for a system, and it avoids the standard “Help the old lady or kick her and rob her” karmic choices.  On the other hand, some party members are just too high maintenance.  Morrigan in particular has become infamous since it’s very easy for her to become mad at you.  I even had to kill a potential party member just because Morrigan was with me, and my choices were either “Sorry, you die” or “You shut the hell up, Morrigan”.  There was no negotiating choice, I had to do one or the other.  There’s several difficult decisions like this in the game, yet it came down to “Hold on, I need to see if anybody’s going to leave me if I do this”.  I had my party set so early on that, when it came down to the tough choices, it was less about them as characters and more about making sure my perfect combat party didn’t get screwed up.  That’s just not how it should be.  There’s also the fact that there’s still obvious karmic choices in the dialogue tree, and yet they’re completely useless.  At one point, I accidentally killed an innocent shopkeeper, and my party members didn’t even bat an eye.  They mainly just seem to speak up when there’s a necessary choice, not in any of the optional spots.  So you can completely switch between being a cutthroat maniac and the nicest person ever in some spots, and the game just won’t care.

I have now spent two and a half pages of this review without talking about the combat.  I guess that’s a testament of the story and writing of Bioware that I can spend much more time caring about that than I do writing about, y’know, the actual gameplay.  The other reason I’ve been putting it off is that, again, I’m not the right person to do this.  I used GameFAQs to create my characters and develop the skills of my party members, putting them into the right roles.  I had my party members set on Auto-AI the entire time, not even using the system that lets you set things like “If this happens, use this skill”.  I played the game on Easy, where you have to use pretty much no tactics, in a game where a lot of the richness apparently comes from setting up your party members just right.  Putting the rogue in the shadows, making sure your mage stays out of the line of fire.  It’s been well-complained about, though, that for a game that has this focus on stuff like that, there’s too many spots where you enter a room and are suddenly teleported to a conversation, screwing up any tactics you might’ve had.  So from my standpoint, I did like how my character got developed.  I was a mage, and the FAQ I used for this character called it a spell-flinger build.  I could lock down enemies with paralysis, throw hexes on them to make it so that they couldn’t hit my party, and heal my party members.  The progression meant that it was a little difficult early on before I got some of the more important spells in my repertoire, but generally, the game’s difficulty didn’t spike or lower too much.  It stayed steady throughout, besides throwing a few “Holy (*$# what was THAT?” moments at me.  I was perfectly able to make it through the combat to get back to the dialogue, but I wasn’t in love with it nor did I hate it.  I just did it and accepted it.  I certainly didn’t get the most out of it.  I’d say if playing around with tactics and character builds sounds like your thing, you are going to be in heaven here.

            So in the end, I really did like Dragon Age Origins.  The characters and the writing really got me in, and the combat...well, I made it through it and dealt with it.  It’s a good game that I’d recommend to anyone who likes dark fantasy settings, high quality writing, or tactical combat.  It took 30 hours to get through the game, which I consider to be a fairly good time since I was avoiding sidequests near the end, and it has a good bit of DLC, not to mention an expansion.  Which I am interested in playing sometime, if only to go back to the world.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

            I rather enjoyed the first two Narnia films.  They weren’t fantastic fantasy, but they were highly enjoyable.  The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is classic fantasy that worked really well on screen, and Prince Caspian had a lot of good action.  It’s quite clear that something just did not click with Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third movie based on the Narnia series of books.

            The plot has Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) Pevensie returning to Narnia, along with their annoying cousin Eustace (Will Poulter).  They encounter Caspian (Ben Barnes) and Reepicheep (voiced by Simon Pegg) again on the titular ship.  It’s discovered that there’s an evil mist being evil, and so they set off to collect 7 magic swords and stop the source of the mist at Dark Island.  I am not even joking, it’s called Dark Island.  I might as well put this out here now: I read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe once when I was really young, and that’s all I know about the Narnia book-verse.  So while stuff like this might be taken right from the book, I am taking it as it shows up on the screen.  My point is that, even if C.S. Lewis himself named the place Dark Island, I think changing the name would’ve been entirely justified.

            The movie’s plot in general is a silly collection of morals and pointless wandering around.  They beat you over the head with every point.  Lucy wishes she was beautiful, at which point she becomes her sister in a world where Lucy didn’t exist, so the Pevensies never went to Narnia.  Fine, we get it.  Then Aslan has to come in and reexplain the moral.  Then later on, Lucy has to repeat the moral to another girl, who’s there for no apparent reason other than so that she can be told the moral.  The overall plot also just doesn’t feel as epic.  There were very clear goals and very clear villains in the first two movies.  Here, your villain is mist.  There isn’t somebody controlling the mist, it’s just…evil mist.  And the plot in general is just going to an island, getting into some magical wackiness, finding a sword, and then moving on to the next island.  Eustace whines into his journal on the ship inbetween, and you wait for him to get to that inevitable “Oh, Narnia really is magical!” moment.  There’s a line between making a character unlikeable and making a character that’s a terrible person but still has likeable qualities.  Eustace is just straight out unlikeable, a caricature of the standard annoying cousin.

            The special effects are also a strange mixed bag here.  Reepicheep looks great, and Aslan’s few appearances are beautiful looking.  But a dragon that has a major role in the movie looks wrong.  His eyes don’t look right, his scales don’t fit in.  I can’t quite place it, but he doesn’t look good.  The only time he fits in is when he’s with other CGI characters, and he would’ve fit in perfectly in a computer-animated movie, but not next to live-action actors.  And the evil mist is an absolutely terrible effect.  I think it’s been well proven that, if your villain is any sort of sentient fog, mist, etc., it’s going to look awful.  Coloring it green certainly didn’t help, making it look too thick and quite clearly CGI.

            Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn’t quite a bad movie.  It still has some passable moments of character and acting, which border on good until they get swept up in a plot that simultaneously has too much going on and not enough happening.  At the end of it, I didn’t want to stay in this magical world.  I just wanted to get out.