I would like to see it again to confirm my suspicions, but I believe that Christopher Nolan has outdone himself once again, writing himself out of the unparalleled challenge of both Heath Ledger and the Joker’s deaths, and facing down the negative stigma of horrifying recent events. This movie shines as a reminder of why thoughtful filmmaking will always overrule crass cinema, and why movies should emulate Inception not Battleship. The plot is contrived like a hard-boiled detective novel. The pieces are set in motion expertly. Batman is no longer Batman. The man formerly known as Batman is now billionaire shut-in Bruce Wayne, a wounded bearded shadow of a man. Wayne is still torn-up about the death of his either-actress girlfriend Rachel who exploded in the previous movie. The threat of a new criminal mastermind, Bane, looms over Gotham City and Batman is nowhere in sight. Gotham needs a hero. Should be easy work for Brick alum Joseph Gordon Levitt who ends up chewing a majority of the screen time. While this story is about Bruce Wayne’s personal journey, don’t be mistaken. This is a puzzle with many working parts. As usual, this movie centers on a core moralistic mythology, and the way in which its story unfolds is masterful albeit weighty.
Catwoman was the nicest surprise of this entry in the trilogy. After the Halle Berry botch-job and the tough-to-follow Michelle Pfeiffer act, Anne Hathaway surprisingly rises to the occasion in a wonderfully charming performance. It’s enough for the ticket price, actually. While not as breathtaking or mind-blowing as Ledger’s Joker (what is?) the comparison is hardly fair as the two characters share a disproportionate amount of screen time and serve functionally different roles. Bane is the challenger for the villain of Gotham throne, and while Hardy’s performance is admirable, I do not think it quite measures up. That being said, I think it is an interesting and charismatic portrayal of an oft-maligned character (see Batman & Robin, no wait don’t). His delivery of the key moments is impeccable. But even as written, Bane is not meant to be a sole successor to the Joker. He is the delivery boy for the League of Shadows, those dark bastards you’ve probably forgotten about from Batman Begins. That’s right folks. This is a trilogy. And like Harry Potter, or any other shamelessly self-important thing, it deserves your respect! So pay attention!
I like Bane in small doses, and that’s exactly how he’s delivered. After a skillfully shot opening sequence in which Bane decimates Tommy Carcetti on an airplane, the terrorist sneaks right into Gotham turning Wayne Co’s own weapon against them. Uh-Doy! Watch your back door Lucius Fox! (That must remind him of Shawshank.) Speaking of which, the oldies in this movie (Morgan Freeman and Grandfather Time, I mean, Michael Caine) deliver immensely subtle and beautiful performances, showing just how much they care about this supposedly overblown picture. The nuance in this movie thrives in abundance and almost outweighs the unwieldy plot, which meanders into an Inception-level conundrum or two in the third act. It’s one thing to hint at a twist, and it’s another thing to rewrite history. With five seconds left in the clock, The Dark Knight Rises throws a few hail marys. Their success or failure depends on your individual level of involvement with these characters and knowledge about their universe. I saw one of the twists coming a mile away, but I was surprised by how long they waited to reveal the cloak and dagger. There was more to be done with the character in question, and clearly very little time in which to do it. That being said, it’s not bad if a movie series leaves you wanting more.
I am impressed that I have gone this whole review without admitting how much I love Batman, Nolan’s style of filmmaking, and the weird strange places this movie takes us (like that desert prison- yikes!). I think that upon repeat viewings I will be just as enamored with, confused and thrilled by The Dark Knight Rises as I was the first time, even if I don’t completely understand it until the fifteenth. In preparation for this movie, I watched the first two again, and what I noticed is that all three are vastly different movies that all center on the same man in the same universe. What is most consistent about the universe is his character. The one thing that Nolan really understands is Batman. And while some of the edges are polished to make the story slicker and more cerebral than it ever really was in the comics, the psychology behind it holds true and believable. There is rarely a question of motivation in this series, which is strange given the questions of motivation raised by the villains in most superhero fare (see: The Lizard, Whiplash, Loki). In this case, all you need to answer your questions is a Netflix account and a DVD player. The story’s only weakness is ending here in its current form. A fourth movie in this universe would be nice, but I know whatever Nolan makes next will be spectacular. He’s always surprised me, and the Dark Knight Rises is no exception.
Do you have Netflix Streaming? Want to try something new? Download my new comedy podcast and commentary track! Simply download the m4a audio file, play it in iTunes or your audio player of choice, and follow the directions. If you’ve ever seen Mystery Science Theater 3000 or listened to RiffTrax, this should be right up your alley. For those poor uninformed masses, here’s the rundown:
This Spider-Man Comedy Podcast mocks the first episode of the 90’s Spider-Man animated series, available streaming on Netflix.
The audio file functions as a DVD commentary track to be played while watching the episode of Spider-Man.
The podcast begins and ends with a sketch. All jokes are written and performed by yours truly, Matt Shore. The podcast was also edited by me. I do not own the rights to anything Spider-related aside from my bug bites.
In order to ensure that the commentary matches up with the episode, you will have to sync the audio to the video. Lucky for you, I have made the process as simple as possible. Listen to my instructions and wait for me to say “5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – Go!” then press play on Netflix and let the commentary roll.
If you’re interested in more thwips and quips or commentary tracks for any other shows on Netflix streaming or otherwise, feel free to leave a question or a comment below. Thanks, and let me know what you think! Hope it’s funny!
To say that L.A. Noire has visual appeal is an understatement. The people in the game look and behave so much like real humans, that it’s uncanny. Moreso than Heavy Rain or even Uncharted 2, it feels like a movie. In fact, you might have more fun watching than playing. The writing is top-notch, and it’s definitely Rockstar’s finest effort in terms of storytelling. The problem with L.A.Noire is that its epic story and captivating performances only momentarily distract from the wonky, uncoordinated game play. It’s almost annoying to have to pick up the controller again when a cut-scene ends. You can guess that whatever you’re expected to do will be less interesting than the short film preceding it. Maybe some players get off on walking fifteen feet across a room to dial a phone, or carefully and pointlessly rotating an empty cigarette carton, but I’d prefer to actively know what I’m doing when I’m supposedly solving a mystery.
Graphically speaking, L.A. Noire is a masterpiece. The game oozes charm thanks to its impressive recreation of body language, expressions and mannerisms. These come largely into play during the interrogation portions of the game, where you are expected to study a person’s verbal and non-verbal responses in order to tell whether or not they are lying. This sounds fun at first, but quickly becomes tedious when you discover that all interrogations can be easily solved (or failed) by rote. They rarely have bearing on the overarching story. This is a problem considering that they are the selling point of the game. Whether or not you do well with the interrogations, some loophole or piece of flimsy evidence will inevitably propel you to the next set piece, forcing you to perform some ridiculous task before the villain reveals himself.
To study the interrogation system is to delve into the core of the game. A player is given a few options to decide if a suspect is lying or telling the truth. If the suspect is lying, you may accuse them of it directly (providing evidence to support your claim) or indirectly (doubting their statement without supporting evidence). In order to successfully accuse someone of lying, you need to have the exact piece of evidence that refutes their claim. If you found the right piece of evidence, you need to select it from your notebook when prompted. If you select the wrong piece of evidence, the suspect will say something jerky and you will get a naughty X-mark next to that question in your notebook. The more happy check marks you accrue, the more clues you will have to solve the case. But when it comes to actually solving the case, there are always two outcomes. Either the killer will present himself by leaving the murder weapon next to his glass of milk on the bedside table, or the game will prompt you to choose between two likely suspects and charge them with the crime regardless of whether or not they did it. Your captain only cares about fast and thorough results, not the legitimacy of your evidence. This means that there is constantly grey area when it comes to solving cases, and regardless of how highly you are rated at the end of each chapter by the invisible detective-ratings-commission, there is a good chance that you are still miles away from solving the mystery.
There is a huge discrepancy between the quality of the writing and the way in which the writing interacts with the game play. Our main character, LAPD detective Cole Phelps walks just awkwardly enough to make the platforming elements of this game frustratingly awful. There is this weird compulsion in the mechanics to spice things up and make them more exciting, resulting in repeated fisticuffs and on-foot chase sequences that just feel redundant. Instead of re-committing to the player-as-human-lie-detector premise, L.A. Noire has moments of identity crisis where you’ll find yourself wading deep into tar pits or running like mad from an exploding movie set. These would be fun in a game designed for movement, but Cole’s wobbly turning makes him an unfit candidate for the job. It’s a game obsessed with realism, until the part where you have to shimmy up a drain pipe like Mario looking for his hat. It feels out-of-place amongst the grit.
This is not to say that all its action game play suffers. The shooting and driving sequences are largely indebted to the mechanics of Grand Theft Auto, and if you’ve ever played a game in that series, they will be largely familiar. Unfortunately, the cover-based shooting is a little clunky. To compensate for this, Cole is seemingly impervious to gunfire whereas the enemies take a few hits and drop. “Sorry we forgot to tell you there would be a lot of shooting in this game. There is. We ran out of ideas. Don’t worry, we made it really, really easy. Copasetic?” Another thing the designers forgot to tell you is that driving in Los Angeles is not a fun experience, especially when all of its most obvious and recognizable landmarks have yet to be built or weren’t included in the game. (Was Mulholland Drive too scary for you guys?) It might be a modern problem now that the city is a China-like wasteland, packed to the brim with wall-to-wall zombies hoping to suckle at stardom’s tea, but it just doesn’t feel like Los Angeles without the traffic!
Getting around is too easy, and damned if it isn’t boring. The game tries to rectify the boringness of travel with the ability to skip to destinations, but it’s only when you’re aimlessly driving around that you get the chance to do semi-boring side missions that amplify your detective ability by giving you cool auto-cheat points for perks like “reveal all clues,” or “make me a high-ball, woman!” (For that last one the combat system comes momentarily into play if she doesn’t move fast enough.) Oh, if the gameplay wasn’t boring or easy enough, your neat auto-cheat points allow you to deduce things faster and basically ruin the game in the process. There is a cool feature that lets you “phone-a-friend,” wherein you poll the online gaming community to see which answers they chose on average for specific interrogation sequences. What’s cool is that they are not always right. This is a great way of incorporating online game play into a single player experience. Unfortunately, you can only get more of these awesome cheat points by playing the arbitrary side-missions that are found while driving around like an idiot. Unlike Grand Theft Auto, there are no open world sandbox parts between missions. You can only drive around like an asshole when you’re in the middle of a more important mission, and the game often chastises you for not going to specific locations fast enough. So when am I supposed to drive around and hit, er, hurt, er, help people? It doesn’t seem like this portion of the game was thought out properly, and with over forty side missions and ninety different vehicles, it stands to reason that this game should have had a slightly more sandbox-y feel.
It all feels like a lot of work for nothing, especially considering the fact that the story unfolds whether you play well or not. The story is fascinating, well-written and structured like a great Hollywood movie. The problem is that it’s not really a mystery story, and it doesn’t serve the premise of the game. For example, you’ll find newspapers throughout the game that give you access to cut scenes with information that your main character never sees. That means the player has access to evidence that Cole can never use to solve mysteries. It’s frustrating to know more than the character you’re controlling, especially when your chief weapon is information. Worse yet, the newspapers and post-case flashbacks have more to do with the overarching story than any of your cases. Instead of wanting to skip the movies to play the game, you’re slogging through boring game play to get to the next movie. Why don’t you just read a book? No boring game play and you actually get to solve the mystery. Plus, there’s no incentive to buy add-on content!
I want a game to fulfill the promise of the premise. I want the mysteries to reflect the feeling of noir, not the sensation of driving around pre-smog Los Angeles. In a game packed with femmes, not one one of them was a fatale. Can you believe it? Haven’t you ever heard of tropes, writer/director Brendan McNamara? Formula exists for a reason and mostly because it works. If you’re going to buck formula, at least give it a good reason. You do a good job of making us care about cut-scenes, but by severely limiting the player’s interaction with our main character’s choices and dialog it didn’t always feel like I was directly involved. There were times when I had the right evidence, but the questions were so awkwardly phrased that I didn’t even know how to use it. Sometimes I would guess correctly and feel none the wiser. Other times I would just wander around rooms waiting for controller vibrations and meaninglessly tapping the X button in hopes of finding a clue. Inevitably I would find one, and be propelled into some sort of fisticuffs, which I would deftly win by continuing to press X repeatedly. Maybe the suspect will break free and run away and I will have to press X to tackle. Who knows? It’s a long game. The real mystery is how a writer so gifted at dialog can be so bad at communicating with the player.
I did not love L.A. Noire. I really wanted to, and was charmed initially by its polish and commitment to authenticity. Its subject matter was fun and interesting, but its schizophrenic game play really bothered me. I’m a fan of L.A. Noire’s attempt to introduce a new deductive game play element into the mix. It might have done better to re-commit to the style of classic Lucasarts adventure games. That would have made the puzzle-solving matter more and not seem quite like an exercise in rote. There is no reason to give the player solutions in a game about solving mysteries. Portal 2 didn’t need a cheat mode. Make the player work to understand something, and allow the player to be pleasantly surprised by the result. Don’t make the player work to understand nothing. That’s just an exercise in futility. There is something to this franchise, but it needs more focus on interrogation and less focus on picking up and rotating empty coffee cups. Clear dialog trees with the opportunity for morality-based cause-and-effect could really take this type of game play to the next level. Sometimes I would verbally accost a suspect on accident, simply because my character was compelled to do so. That signifies a lack of control, and the more I played, the more I felt like Cole would do whatever the hell Cole wanted to do, whether or not I was controlling him. Maybe Brendan McNamara should stick to non-interactive art.
Dead Space 2 is the only game I’ve ever beaten and immediately played through again. It’s something of a twisted marvel. I got the same sort of sensation that I had playing Metal Gear Solid as a kid, like I was experiencing something synonymous with a movie rather than a traditional combat-based shooter. Scary isn’t always the operative word in Dead Space 2, not to say there aren’t make-you-jump moments. The really masterful strokes in DS2’s design are found its slow-burning interaction with the human mind, something the story’s subject matter embraces with a sinister grin.
I’m not going into too many story spoilers. After all, this is a Dead Space game, and using the term story at all is loose at best. Dead Space falls into the category of games that feel like theme park rides, in this case a haunted house. The haunted house is a huge city-size complex in outer space, crawling with reanimated corpses, twisted and mangled and granted with bestial sentience. That sounds pretty scary, but the game does well to desensitize you to violence in the first few minutes, introducing you to the absolute hell you’re about to endure with one of the most shocking kills on any screen. The game is not short on gore, and those who are faint of heart should probably play Barbie’s Horse Adventures instead. I’m not one to shy away from gore (after that one scene in Hannibal where the guy eats his own brain, I’m pretty much broken as a human being), but this game made me wince from time to time. There’s a specific sequence with a horrible twisted machine in the game’s final moments that is enough to render you unconscious with either fear or disgust.
I’m going to talk about this game as an experience. As an experience, it is incredible. Fans of the Dead Space franchise will find a few improvements, like more mobility for zero-gravity monster combat, but otherwise there is a fairly standard pattern of wandering into a darkened room and waiting for something to jump out at you before you shoot it to pieces. The monsters in the game, or Groovy Ghoulies if you will, play an insidious game of hide-and-seek with the player, forcing them to tip-toe into seemingly innocuous environments with the expectation of terror. There’s a specific breed of undead creature made from dead babies that explode on proximity contact to the player. Now if you’re a parent, you might find this hilarious. But for the rest of us more even-tempered mortals, this is decidedly unsettling. The dead baby necromorph’s older cousin is something of a rambunctious ten year old, howling with delight as it and its friends tear you to pieces during recess. The game is not short on frightening material, to be sure.
Players star as the hero of Dead Space, engineer Isaac Clark. He’s picked up a few silver hairs since his last tango with the necromorphs, thanks in no small part to the designers’ ability to accurately portray human beings in virtual shells to a compelling and revolting degree. The game has a trope carried over from survival horror trend-setters like Resident Evil. When you die, you don’t simply see ‘Game Over.’ You instead watch your character, Isaac, torn to shreds during increasingly brutal depictions of monster murder. It makes you really want to stay alive.
Like the best of modern shooters, Dead Space 2 commends you for studying its opponents and devising the best strategies to pass them. In terms of design, this game is Legend of Zelda if Zelda were all dungeon. The real Zelda is packed with back-story to make the experience more epic. Dead Space 2 is packed with fear and uncertainty. This fear begets the driving force of the game: “I’ve got to find a way out of here, or else I might lose my mind!” That fear drives Isaac Clark to take incredible risks and face a surprising series of challenges along the way. He’s willing to do anything for survival, and so must the player in order to succeed.
The best portion of the game for me is the New Game +. After you complete Dead Space 2, you can start a new game with the same weapons and armor statistics from your previous game. The second play through is even more fun, because you get to absorb more of the experience and fret less about the puzzles. There are some hardships to endure, to be sure, and again, this is not for the faint of heart. But I think the marketing team made that very clear.
Matt Shore 