Desolation of Smaug

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

Oh my, it is late. I'm not talking about the hour either. I'm talking about the crushing realization that I didn't do a nerdview of last year's An Unexpected Journey. Whatthefrak, nerd? Well, last year's failings aside, here's a toasty nerdview of the second film in The Hobbit trilogy.

Expectations 'Odor': I was not blown away by the first installment of The Hobbit. I didn't hate it, but the fact that I wasn't rushing to review it last year is really damning evidence that the movie just wasn't that spectacular. (Did I really not review it?! What planet is this? Am I just losing it after one midnight showing too many?) An Unexpected Journey didn't have the same heart as each movie of The Lord Of The Rings, and too much of the story felt compromised for flashy additions to the world and total BS action sequences. The skiing derrick down the rock face of the goblin caves was especially eyeroll-inducing. I didn't like the abundance of CG baddies--especially the George Lucas Goblin King that was just outright gross. And they didn't include "fifteen birds in five fir trees", which I had already said I really really wanted to see included.

But this next movie stands to include so much more that I'm excited about. Mirkwood and Thranduil's creepy elves. Laketown and Bard the badass the bowman. Erebor revealed. Mega Nibelungenlied imagery. The battle with Smaug over Laketown.

And, if I'm honest, I'm intrigued by the inclusion of an auburn-haired elf-maiden. And by intrigued I mean, intrigued…

But seriously, I expect Bard to really shine as a common man hero in this film, taking the spotlight completely from Thorin and maybe even Bilbo. I want Smaug to be intelligently scary. But I want them to tone-down the over-the-top BS of the first Hobbit film and stick closer to believable, visceral action. An Unexpected Journey had very few action sequences that weren't cartoonishly unbelievable. And while you could say that this is deliberate because the films are actually a recreation of Bilbo's book, that's not highlighted as a theme of the movie and is a poor excuse to make such ham-handed glittery special effects pieces instead of real hands-on fights like the ones that made The Lord of the Rings popular. Overall, I want a film guided by a more controlled and focused plot than last year's film.

Appreciation 'Beef': Well, frak that feldercarb.

No, seriously. Bad bad badness.

First let me begin with a non-spoiler spoiler alert. This movie is pointless. I am totally going to spoil the crap out of this movie in the course of this review because none of the so-called plot movements actually matter and there's no real dynamic--no change--to the characters or setting in this film. It is seriously just a long piece of exposition to get us to the third movie.

Before I really let into the movie, though, let me get the good stuff out of the way. The opening of the film is interesting, showing a scene based on Tolkien's notes that shows Gandalf was the one to strong-arm Thorin into starting his quest for the Lonely Mountain. That's followed by a nice bit with Beorn, a shape-shifting bear/Liam Neeson type. But the film starts to dip with the spiders of Mirkwood sequence--it's well-done, but it's too long compared to how rushed most of the film is, and the fighting begins to get implausible here. Characters repeatedly free-fall from hundred-foot tall trees only to be conveniently caught by spider webs, just-right branches, or outright plot protection.

Bard is cool, and is probably the only character in the film that is worthy of his depiction in the book. That's not to say that he's faithfully adapted from the book--not even close--but he is at least as cool as the literary Bard the bowman, and just what I'd hoped from him. I do think that Thorin, Bard, and Kili look way too much alike, though, and considering Thorin should have like at least one foot of beard this is just salt in the wound. Luke Evans plays Bard perfectly and he looks the part, but coming in alongside Thorin the visual similarities tend to wash him out as a tag-along.

Let me spell it out: Thorin Oakenshield uses his beard as a measurement of masculinity in the books. He wishes people well by saying stuff like "may your beard grow ever longer". We should have no clue what his cheeks look like because it should be underneath three pounds of beard.

Of course, Bard is also mired in the middle of one of the dumbest settings in the movie: Laketown. Rather than being a hardy bastion of men living in the wet blindspot of Smaug, the Laketown of the movie is a frigid derrick of the same Tudor-style buildings we saw in Bree except suspended over water. The culture is soulless and the people accordingly bland to the point where no one even seems to register that they're living under the tyranny of the most toothlessly impotent mayor ever. I might consider this a dramatic criticism of society if the police state imagery was consistently realized, but the town guards only come out to prolong the plot of a film that is mostly filler. Bard makes a big deal out of needing to smuggle the dwarves into Laketown--which was no problem in the book--and the sequence of him bringing them in is good for a little tension. But later in the movie, a band of thirty orcs in armor and two elves just show up in Laketown without any mention of how they did so or any recognition from the rest of the town at all. Seriously, with orcs jumping across the rooftops of the town for like twenty minutes in the middle of the night, no one seemed to notice. When I'm in my basement and my toddler's running around in his room, I hear it above me like a sack of potatoes being bounced around a port-a-potty. I think thirty armored orcs would be slightly less stealthy than my two year-old son, as hard as that may be to imagine.

Evangeline Lilly as Tauriel is hot without showing any skin. Here endeth the nice part about her character. Tauriel is the dumbest, least articulate, reactionary, over-powered Mary Sue sleaze I can recall from any movie ever. An "original" character forced into the plot of the movie, they decide that in order to make us like her she should be better than everyone at everything. She out-BSes Legolas in terms of absurdly super-powered shots and moves. Like shooting an Orc's arrow out of the air to save Legolas. She also heals Kili from a Morgul wound with so much ease that it makes Elrond look like a stuttering poseur rather than a three thousand year-old sage. And when she meets Kili, she immediately puts on the googly-eyes at him and proceeds down a clumsy romance sub-plot that ends with her being the worst person ever.

Before I explain that, though, let me spell out another gem of truth from Tolkien's Middle-Earth: elves and dwarves do not get along. Gimli and Legolas' friendship is supposed to be a historic exception by a wide margin. Let alone romantic compatibility--labradors do not mate with spaniels, so to speak, in Tolkien's books. Heck, human-elf pairings are so rare in the setting that every one of them is well-known and eminently proven to be a bad idea. That's the whole subtext of the tension in Aragorn and Arwen's relationship--which was a century-long courtship that was still awkward for them.

Anyways, back to how Tauriel's randiness ends up making her the worst person ever. So after getting all oo-lala over Kili, Tauriel meets with Thranduil, Legolas' d-bag lush of a father. Thranduil, tells Tauriel that Legolas wants her bad, but he won't let his son get his elf on because Tauriel is a common elf. She acts hurt by this even though she was just checking out the dwarf meat she tossed in the dungeon. Later, when Kili is wounded while escaping Mirkwood, she abandons her home to try to catch up to him and help him. When Legolas, too dumb to know better, follows her she immediately smirks and wiggles her nose at him, saying she knew he'd follow her and help. Yeah--she leads on the prince of the elves to get him to commit treason all in an effort to save the dwarf hunk she met one day before. Then, when they finally catch up to the dwarves, Tauriel ditches Legolas in the middle of a fight to go play doctor with her favorite beardy-boy.

Worst. Person. Ever. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh included her as a tack-on character to try to give the film some grrrl power, and instead they made a cliched slander against the entire female sex.

There are more BS moments throughout the film, but one of the biggest is molten gold apparently having a melting temperature of Hershey's chocolate. First, century-old kilns full of gold are melted faster than defrosting a Thanksgiving turkey. Then Thorin rides a river of molten gold on a metal bucket with his bare hands inches from the molten ore. Finally, Smaug gets completely submerged in it and hops out as easily as a kid getting out of a hot-tub.

What began as a hopeful improvement on the first film quickly slides down into every mistake made by the first movie. The drama is drowned out by over-the-top posturing and wide angle shots, ensuring that you can't even see the actor's expressions during the most tense moments. There is no close up face-twitching drama of Denethor's hall in this flick, just shouting in front of beautiful backdrops. The fight sequences are dazzling displays of special effects with no practical integration to make it feel real or plausible. It's so bad that Gandalf's encounter with the Necromancer is literally him standing still, staff upraised while putting out a Sue Storm shield of white light while a shadow shrinks his personal bubble.

Really.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': Oh man, I think you can guess I did not enjoy this flick too much. Amongst its many flaws, this film indulges in way too many Byrne holds for any one plot to bear. A Byrne hold, named after comic artist John Byrne, is when a character holds another aloft by the throat. It's a moment of abject helplessness, where the victim is spared from death only by the capriciousness of the one holding their throat. And usually the only reason the villain doesn't snap their neck then and there is because of bad writing--the writer needs the victim to survive, so the victor hesitates for no good reason.

In this movie, we have 13 dwarves, Bilbo, Gandalf, Tauriel, and Legolas who all directly fight bad guys throughout the movie. The antagonists have Azog (the white orc), Bolg (his strapping son), Smaug the dragon, and the Necromancer. All of them engage in personal combat at least once in the movie. Bolg several times. None of these characters die in the course of the film. Twenty-one principal characters all actively fighting and trying to kill each other in a three hour film: no one succeeds. And when you remember that most of these characters were in An Unexpected Journey, you have the worst kill ratio of all storytelling time. And that's not for being able to. For fully one half of the movie, Azog and the Necromancer could easily execute Gandalf but don't because of the Byrne hold effect. The dwarves dump a dwarven statue of liberty's worth of molten gold on Smaug, and he not only isn't wounded by the attack but he also doesn't kill them as he so easily could at that point. Smaug's entire conversation with Bilbo is twisted from the casual biplay of the book to be "I am totally going to kill you, but I won't just yet…cuz." It's infuriatingly stupid and I can't comprehend how we're supposed to be engrossed in this action when every character is plot-protected anyways. Heck, a mortally-wounded Kili falls down a circular staircase with an armload of swords and axes and he even makes it to the ending credits. It's an absurd lantern hanging on the fact that these characters are invulnerable to stupid flashy plot twists until the third movie, at which point two-thirds of them will die. The only character they could have been killed off in this movie, but wasn't, was Tauriel. And she's never in any peril in the film because she's superwoman.

I've got a lot of other issues with this film, many of them relating to comparisons between the book and the film, but these ones are just issues of a clumsy movie itself. The film has no natural arc--no beginning, middle, and end, no development of the characters. Though we did get some of that in the previous film, this one just throws "action" and scenery at us until it ends in the most unforgivable manner possible--in the middle of a fight.

This movie was supposed to be about Smaug, yet he wasn't in half of it and he survived the non-climax of the film. Not to be dramatic, but I wouldn't blame anyone wanting their money back.

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': This film stretches my goal as a reviewer--I'm not sure someone reading my words would decide to see the movie. Unless their mind was already made up, of course. And I think I'm happy about that. This is the sort of big-budget clusterfudge that I use to weed out bad reviewers in my own reading. See someone who liked this film? Idiot. Complimented its pacing? Hack.

Now, I'm not saying you can't enjoy this film. I'm really not. I think people with no love for the book and a sort of Harry Potter expectation of events could enjoy what they see. But for people who love the first trilogy and even merely like the books, I don't see how they could enjoy it. And I don't see how anyone at all could honestly look at this movie and say it was really necessary for anything more than introducing a few elements that could have been elegantly fit into the other two movies.

Then again, Peter Jackson doesn't seem to know about elegance anymore. Like Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim or George Lucas when making his prequel trilogy, he seems lost in a sea of funding and yes-men glad-handing along his bad ideas.

So not worth an all-nighter.

Yeah, desolate is right

Agents of SHIELD (First 6 Episodes)

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the Nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

This is my first review Nerdview of a television series, and as such it's perfectly appropriate that I weigh in on the latest Marvel media property: Agents of SHIELD. I've got several other more important projects on the blog-burner right now, but this is probably the most immediately timely, as I can actually sound off on the series in the middle of its first season.

Expectations 'Odor': If you read my blog post earlier this summer, then you know that I've been looking forward to Agents of SHIELD for some time. I love the way SHIELD stories interweave the greatest characters and plots of the Marvel universe into a coherent story, especially in the post Civil War continuity (which at some point in the future I'll probably cover for those who aren't Marvel-fans). Secret War in particular was a great mini-series that showed how SHIELD and The Man push around superheroes to make the world safer--whether they like it or not. In particular, I like the SHIELD stories that expound on the ways mundane or low-powered agents of SHIELD are able to stand on the same field as Hulk and Iron Man. Sure, individual SHIELD goons don't last, but as an organization it pulls the strings of many of the heroes in the Marvel universe while still being a fundamentally mundane organization. As a fan of watching little guys push big guys around, it resonates.

So with Agents of SHIELD I want to see at least a bit more development of that theme: what place do NSA-types in suits have in a world of girder-grinding, lightning-throwing, super-sonic super-humans? But I also know that what we've got here is also a Joss Whedon series, and with that we're pretty much guaranteed several specific elements. First, that means a women-heavy cast of primaries, women warriors, and not necessarily in in believable roles or casting. I mean, Eliza Dushku kicking more butt than Tahmoh Penikett in Dollhouse--the heck?! Second, it means that disestablishment themes are probably going to either erode this version of SHIELD, or the team will be some sort of Black Ops splinter group to maintain Whedon's happy for rogue heroes. Third--and this is really something to be excited about--it means that the show will probably have different ages played on-screen and in the plots. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had Giles' personal life and character growth become a significant plot thread while also making us endure Buffy-as-waitress type plots. Firefly had Book alongside Kayleigh and River. Even Dollhouse, which revolved around brainwashed youth themes, showcased a lot of drama amongst the middle-aged conspirators being mocked by their own vapid creations. In Agents of SHIELD, then, we can look forward to Coulson and the youngest agents having distinct characterization and focuses in the meta-plot of the series.

But do I think Agents of SHIELD will be good? Yes. Great? Honestly, maybe. Just maybe. Because there's one element that I think could make a SHIELD show superb that I don't think Whedon would ever touch: the procedural. The thrill of investigation, of plots having certain core steps repeating to represent that the characters are in fact doing their jobs and not looking for this week's interesting thing. The Mentalist, Law & Order, and detective classic shows like Columbo are all great procedural series. In those shows you're guaranteed certain steps to get thrown into the matrix of a new mystery for nearly every episode, and it works. The most critical procedural to compare to Agents of SHIELD, of course, is The X-Files. Even though The X-Files featured outlandish plots, special effects monsters, and conspiracy theories, most of the episodes fell into a procedural format that established that even in the BS-filled land of The X-Files, they were still part of the FBI, which was a job and an organization that stretched beyond the cast of the show. Heck, they even had a petite warrior-woman mismatched with a physically uninspiring nerdy guy, all the better for Whedon to take notes.

But at least it won't be Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD.


Appreciation 'Beef': Bumbly bumbly bump. What's that? Oh, Agents of SHIELD is on? I mean, we're six episodes in and I'm still waiting for it to get started. I feel like these first six episodes have been part of a long, exceptionally badly-paced pilot episode. The writing is weak with only brief commercial-length moments of good scripting. The cast ranges from sublime to bland all the way down to absurdly annoying.

"As a fan of watching little guys push big guys around, it resonates."

In terms of the greater plot of the show, they've introduced a good number of elements from the greater Marvel universe, with Extremis, (proto-)Graviton, and the Chitauri being featured in the show so far. I'd probably suggest they slow down with their inclusion of these diverse elements, taking their time to establish more drama and mystery around them, but for the most part these kinds of Easter eggs are the most exciting thing in the show for Marvel-philes like me.

The action is fairly well-done, with Ming-Na Wen pulling off the physicality of warrior-woman Melinda May capably. Brett Dalton as Agent Grant Ward definitely does a better job of selling his stunts and action, but that's to be expected. So far two of the six episodes aired ("Girl in the Flower Dress" and "FZZT") have not featured much traditional action, and that's a positive trend I'd like to see emphasized in this series. In a world of superpowers and eldritch gadgets, combat should be brief and deadly, and there's a very real trend towards inserting bland fist fights to pad out the show where drama and actual investigation should sit.

Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson is great, and when he's actually placed in a scene where he gets to chew the scenery a bit, it's awesome. His moment with the terminally ill firefighter in FZZT was a gripping bit of drama that helped shed a little light on his seemingly spastic behavior--he's a man crushed by his own brush with death. I think the mystery around his revival/resurrection/reboot is a bit over-played, but since it is the only real over-arching mystery of the show right now, I guess I'll have to take it.

The rest of the roster, though, makes very little sense. First of all, six principal characters always feels light to me. (Heck, if you include Zordon and Alpha Five, the Power Rangers show started out with seven.) And that tiny roster is exaggerated by the red shirts of this show who are so paper-thinly developed that names and characterization are hardly ever given. In "Eye Spy" and "Girl in the Flower Dress" there are way too many scenes where there's no one on screen except two or three main characters, which is silly when you stop to consider the enormity of these plots, SHIELD itself, or even the density of SHIELD personnel in the movies. You can try to justify it by saying they need a small independent team or whatever handwaving goo-gawing you want, but in the end it's just a way to cheap out on production costs with a smaller cast, and it shows. Heck, half the episodes don't even show an actual flight crew for the massive plane they fly around--and if that bird can be managed by a lone pilot and no flight crew, then I'm a body double for Chris Hemsworth.

(I'm not, by the way.)

Setting the light weight of SHIELD in the show aside, though, the simple composition of the team is ridiculous, both in a contextual sense for the purpose of the team and in a meta-textual sense for the purpose of the show. They have a combat-competent leader in Coulson, but his almost petulant need to flout the regs is pretty vain since the show doesn't seem to have a boss for him to report to and have conflict with. As it is, having Coulson as leader constantly have to explain himself to basically all of his subordinates is not only tiresome, it's eminently stupid. Agent Ward is pretty strait-laced for a SHIELD agent type, but in a group full of recalcitrant misfits he ends up being either a sullen by-the-book regs-thumper or broody pretty boy by way of compensation. Melinda May is also very capable in combat, but reluctantly so due to her unexamined backstory. And in any case she's the only character we've seen piloting their plane, so the lady should be sitting in the plane most of the time anyways. Fitz and Simmons are a victim of their own silly premise--both annoyingly interchangeable, mutually-dependent, and inept at combat. The plot of "FZZT" revolves around the two characters being plot clones of each other, highlighting how they're doubly tiresome. So all in all, we have a SHIELD roster of a six person team with only three combat effective members, two of which do not ordinarily want to be in potential combat situations, and two who are incredible liabilities in combat situations.

"...we're six episodes in and I'm still waiting for it to get started."

And then there's the sixth member of the team: Skye. Skye is a former info-terrorist hacker the team brings on…'cuz. Normally a television show brings an outsider into a team of specialists to give the audience--also outsiders--a sympathetic window into the specialists' world. I call this a schlub (see my post on Gerard Butler for another example), and Agents of SHIELD has no need for a schlub, because everyone is largely ignorant or obtuse to each other team member's area of responsibility. So what does Skye bring to the team? Smug uselessness and pathetic attempts to be sexy with a smoker's voice? At first I thought they'd use her to introduce a sinister traitor meta-plot to define the first season, as it was clear she was maintaining contact with her Rising Tide info-terrorist group. Instead, that betrayal plot gets ham-handed four episodes in with the revelation that she was just doing it for her boyfriend, and that her acts of treason that got federal agents killed were mitigated by her stupid hormonal love connection. Not only do Coulson, Fitz-Simmons, and the plot itself give Skye a pass on her crimes, but the cast collectively tells Agent Ward to just get over it by the next episode. What was the point of introducing the betrayal and treason plot if the end result was to ditch it at the earliest and clumsiest opportunity?

Ugh. I can rant about Skye all night, but I won't. I will just sum up with this thought. The crew of the Serenity, assembled by luck and lowest-bidding to accomplish odd-jobs of the criminal underworld, was better selected, more disciplined, and more capable of addressing most SHIELD-oriented threats than the team in Agents of SHIELD. They had four combat capable crew (five on River's good days), a dedicated pilot, tech person, medic, and a seductress who could stay in character long enough to actually pull cons off.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': Agents of SHIELD has got me going through the motions. Don't get me wrong, I'm still watching this show every week, and I honestly believe there's potential in the show they've created, but so much of it is bumbling along right now that I feel like a Marvel-holic getting a watered-shot of a simulacra of the stuff to which I'm actually addicted.

Now, it may seem like I'm being a little harsh in light of the excellent Marvel movies, but wait: I'm going to get even more acerbic as I dial in my disappointment. We're six episodes into this series. Let's put that into perspective. By this point of screen-time (using show chronology, not airing chronology), Firefly had introduced Niska in "The Train Job", developed the entire crew's fabulous rapport in "Shindig", and blown everyone away with "Our Mrs. Reynolds". The X-Files had already given all of us the uber-willies in "Squeeze" with a boneless super-malleable cannibal serial killer, and established a good procedural investigative style and partner dynamic with "Conduit" and "Shadows". And Agents of SHIELD's stumbling is made even more unforgivable by the fact that The Blacklist, which started the same week, has been superb--especially in the ways that the Marvel show fails. They've got a great team that is diverse-yet-plausible, fantastic writing, good pacing, and several interesting meta-plots.

I'm waiting for Agents of SHIELD to come into its own, but I'm not holding my breath.

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': As it stands, I think Agents of SHIELD will only appeal to a very small section of fans of the Marvel cinematic universe. I'm not going to assume everyone is going to get annoyed by the same elements the same amount as me, but there are just too many compromises to something that needs a very focused formula to work as a show. It still has too many superhero and genre elements to appeal to viewers who don't like the movies or comics, but those elements are so watered-down and subverted by the cliched action of the show that the movie and comic fans are going to feel let down at best or outright alienated at worst.

I hope that people will, like me, give Agents of SHIELD a chance to fix their problems, but even more so I hope that the creative team behind Agents of SHIELD will actually take the effort to fix these problems to make a series worthy of Mordor five or more seasons.

After Avengers, Joss Whedon is the magical summoner of comicbook fans.

(Fourth post this week, so the deficit is down to 3 out of 31)

Nerdview of Thor: The Dark World

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

This past weekend was the US release of Thor: The Dark World. As you could probably guess from my two reviews of Thor (regular and Thor-speak), from my glowing praise of Avengers, or my general love for Marvel, I have been anticipating this film for some time. What's more, the trials of parenting two babies demanded that I see the movie twice this weekend: once in 3D with my Friday gaming group, and once in 2D with my wife on Sunday. (Spoiler alert: I liked it)

Expectations 'Odor': As a Marvel-phile, I had a lot of expectations for seeing Malekith brought into the cinematic universe. In the comics, he's a magically-grounded half-dead dark elf, but based on the primordial narrative of the movie trailers, I imagine the film's origin for the dark elves would be more primordial, which can be a fine and elegant way to bring comic book issues to the theater. The first Thor movie had a bit more deliberate pace, with the most exciting combat front-loaded and the later action much smaller-scale skirmishes. Without the burden of origins and introductions for so many characters, I expected The Dark World to feature more evenly-paced, epic action sequences. Coupled with that, since the first movie already introduced us to so many Asgardians, I wanted to see the supporting cast develop and get their own moments to shine. Except for Jane Foster. I wanted her to get killed off and free up Thor for his true love: Sif.

Appreciation 'Beef': The first observation to make of Thor: The Dark World is that it has a definite sci-fi flavor to the action, as the opening sequence throws you into a fight that is part Battle of the Last Alliance, with fantasy-flavored Asgardians wading into dark elf laser fire while their dagger-like ships loom over head. The myth-as-science-fiction was established in the first movie, but in Thor it was more of a token explanation to make it easier for Thor to relate to Jane Foster. In Thor: The Dark World, however, that motif is brought to the foreground, as the bad guys use energy weapons, point-singularity grenades, have spaceships and agile fighters. Even the Asgardians show off some artillery and their own boat-like fighter craft. That, of course means dogfighting, and they actually do it quite well for a movie where such aerobatics aren't even expected.

Ornate and manufactured, but with a serial-killer sinister feel as well.

The overall aesthetic of the movie is just as well-done as Thor, with Asgard fleshed out a bit more this time around in its golden beauty. There's also glimpses of most of the other Nine Realms, but nothing to really evaluate other than variety. Though I must say that Svartaflheim (the titular dark world) was a really neat realization of that realm: blasted with ash and black sand, sky a sick not-quite-illuminated sickly mellow yellow with clouded veins giving the alien sky a thoroughly distinct look, and at the same time alluding to the twisted base perceptions of the dark elves themselves. Malekith and his people stand out against the fantasy look of the Asgardians with baroque sci-fi designs that reminded me of the Necromongers in The Chronicles of Riddick, which I really enjoyed. The dark elf foot soldiers in particular wear expressionless pale-faced masks with black eyes that I found really eerie and elegant at the same time.

Minor spoilers in the next paragraph.


I was pretty massively disappointed in Jane Foster as a character. And considering I was expecting, hoping, and needing her to die in this movie, that's saying a lot. To start with, she doesn't die. But we get teased as she comes oh so close to dying. What's worse, though, is that Jane Foster is by far the worst, most uninteresting character in the movie. She's snippy and childishly petulant for no reason, she drags down her scenes with cardboard delivery, and she's in general just a plain old plot cow. It's so bad that at one point in the film she's so useless she faints for no good reason other than to let Loki and Thor riff off each other while she kindly stays out of it.

That's right, I saw Battlefield Earth, and I haven't even purged it from my memory.

Foster's big fail notwithstanding, the rest of the cast is terrific. Chris Hemsworth is as at home and mature in the role of Thor as ever, showing genuine growth from the previous two movies. Tom Hiddleston as Loki reminds the audience of his chops, modulating between impishly mischievous comic, brooding schemer, and jealous brother. Plus, you'd have to be blind not to get lost in his smoldering stares in the first act cell-block scenes--just saying. And once again, Jaimie Alexander as Sif dramatically outshines Jane Foster on the screen. Physical, decisive, witty, and intuitive in her relationship with Thor, Sif in thirty minutes completely outshines her mortal competition for Thor's affections, and only the plot spares Foster from being shown up completely. Finally, Christopher Eccleston as antagonist Malekith gives a searing performance even through the hefty face prosthetics and voice distortion. Even when he's speaking in the dark elves' language, I got a kick out of his resonating, careful enunciation and the vile sneer he carries with his voice alone.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': Having seen the movie twice in its opening weekend, I think it's fair to guess that I enjoyed this movie. It's got most of the elements I wanted, and in greater quantities. Odin gets some token raven-time (important for us mythology enthusiasts), Idris Elba gets a bit more screen time to be awesome and thunder great Heimdall lines, and Darcy returns and has a slightly expanded role. (If Jane Foster has to come back, then so should Darcy. Although in order to avoid upstaging Portman's Jane Foster, Darcy is in three layers, a scarf, and a wool cap for about 90% of her on-screen time. And she's still more watchable than Jane.) Thor is mature in both his powers and character, and yet there's still a sense of growth in both areas, which is especially apparent in his interactions with Loki. And Loki....oh Loki, you're so awesome. I can't really think of anyone I'd rather see staring down a Kursed Algrim.

But Jane Foster! Grrr, in a movie that grabs me by the nerdlies so easily, it's very frustrating to have to endure her throughout another film. Expect a more in-depth, spoilerific rant about it in the future. Suffice it to say for now that she is, at best, a non-entity in the movie and probably the only thing I can pick out as an outright flaw.

I want to make a note here: I don't think this movie is worth the 3D up-charge. I rarely noticed it even when I tried, and those times when I did notice the 3D effect was normally in foreshortening shots. There it created a powerful depth of field, but I don't think it enhanced the movie as much as Captain America of Avengers did. I mean, subtlety in 3D is nice, but if you don't consciously notice or get at least thirteen bucks' worth of wow out of the experience, you might as well enjoy the movie in its 2D format.

Seriously, how the heck is this not the leading lady?!

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': Anyone who enjoyed Thor should enjoy Thor: The Dark World. It does almost everything just as well if not better than the first movie. And for those who didn't like the first movie will likely still find stuff to enjoy. The action is much more kinetic and spread out, the emotional content is dialed in even more in this movie as it doesn't have to deal with stranger-on-earth tropes as such, and there's a lot of great performances spread out throughout an excellent cast.

Who definitely won't like this? People who don't like the juxtaposition of mythological figures and science-fiction elements. This seems to be a common cry amongst professional critics--I guess they weren't listening to Thor in the first movie.



After the disappointment of Iron Man 3, it's nice to see Thor: The Dark World getting it right. They change Malekith quite a bit to fit him onto the screen, but he's still riveting and adroitly meets all the thematic demands set by the comic book version of himself--unlike the Mandarin in the last Iron Man flick. Everyone other than Jane Foster shows growth in this movie and is an improvement over their earlier portrayals, while Portman's character is a dull cloud in the middle of an otherwise sterling film. Regardless, though, she can't sully this movie for me, and it's definitely set the bar high for the next Marvel movie. It's doubtful I'll get to see this again in theaters, but if the opportunity came up I'd definitely accept. In the meantime, I'm counting down the days to Winter Soldier.

144

The Enemy's Gate Is Down

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

Last night was the premier of Ender's Game, the film adaptation of one of the greatest pieces of sci-fi literature of the past 30 years. Based on a book published in 1985, and long in production with the author Orson Scott Card serving as screenwriter and producer in the past, this movie had been in an interminable production for years. During that time, the series has expanded to include a dozen sequels, comic book adaptations, and short stories. And it's still growing, with at least one more sequel and another prequel planned to be released soon. But the most important question, now that the movie has been released and the inevitable talk of a cinematic sequel has already begun: is it a good science fiction film?

Expectations 'Odor': If you've read my blog for any amount of time, you know that I've been waiting for this for a long time. I first read the book fifteen years ago, and it's important to note that I helped work on a screenplay adaptation of Ender's Game within a year. It wasn't long after I worked on my script and read the followup The Speaker for the Dead trilogy that the first rumors of an Ender's Game movie surfaced. Originally Wolfgang Petersen, director of Das Boot, Enemy Mine, and Air Force One, was attached to the primordial movie websites. Later, several X-Men alum were rumored to be on the project. Ultimately, I stopped trying to follow the pre-production limbo of Ender's Game. It just hurt too much. But Ender's story has remained important to me, and with this movie I've been getting progressively more and more excited since that first full trailer's release. I even wrote a tribute to my grandfather's passing in a format very similar to a Speaker for the Dead.

So my expectations are high. Probably a little higher than most fans of the book. The casting choices, as they've been revealed, have been extremely exciting--Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff seems an unintuitive-but-perfect fit, as is Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham. But at the same time, the trailers have done very little to indicate how much of the book's psychological depth and exhausted desperation--key themes in the novel--will make it to the screen. With not much to go on, I think my expectations, my enthusiasm, my criticism, and my hope probably all meter out to something fairly optimistic in the end. We'll just see what the pay off is like.

Appreciation 'Beef': Ender's Game is very pretty and well-acted. I hope you can hear the negative conjunction coming from around the corner because I've got a big 'but' coming... Ender's Game is very pretty and well-acted, but the plot is rather clumsy and unfocused. There's a lot of strong elements and really polished performances, but in the end the narrative suffers from a lack of strong direction.

The general design and cinematography of the film is really stunning. Without cashing in on sleazy characters or cheap visuals like a J.J. Abrams movie, the look of the film is simply legit and epic. Particularly for a new sci-fi brand that can't rely on established designs for anything, the principal designs of the suits, the game arena, the battle school itself, and the ship designs are all distinct, top notch, and largely fit the limited descriptions of the book. What deviations there are from the descriptions largely make sense, too. The bulkiness ascribed to the game suits was a lot more relevant in the 80s, but the form-armor of the movie looks contemporary and still somewhat protective. The game arena goes from the book's description of being a formless cube to being a glass bubble floating over the planet, giving the Battle School matches a dizzying backdrop to help ground the audience's disorientation. These three-dimensional battles were really well done and did a decent job--though overly condensed--of intimating the tactical geometry of the book's fights. The ship designs were rather more utilitarian than the John Harris cover art I'd grown accustomed to, but the proliferation of Harris' covers throughout 80s and 90s sci-fi means that using his covers for direct inspiration might not have felt that authentic. Heck, I just discovered that the original Ender's Game cover art was re-purposed from an earlier novel called Drunkard's Walk. In any case, I ate up the special effects and visuals of the film.

The acting was really gratifying, and predictably I found Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff and Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham really stole the show as Ender's mentors. Viola Davis also did a great job as the military warmachine's bleeding heart, Major Anderson. I wasn't especially gripped by Asa Butterfield's performance as the lead, but Hailee Steinfeld as Petra did a great job of playing off of him and adding a bit more heart to their scenes together. And Moises Arias, who played Bonzo Madrid, gave one of the most convincing portrayals of childish maliciousness I've ever seen in this sort of movie. In fact, for a movie containing so many young actors, I was pleasantly surprised that every actor seemed suited to their roles and those who didn't stand out were at least capable. Even Abigail Breslin did a good job of realizing the mature-but-impotent philanthropist Valentine Wiggin. And that's from someone who really didn't like her in Zombieland.

But.

I understand that this is a movie and plays by different rules than a novel. I've always said that a strict adaptation is not necessarily a good one. But it seems every plot change the movie made was antagonistic to the themes that made the book popular and made the film's own voice dwindle. The timeline of the movie is a shambles. Apparently, the entire ordeal of selection, Battle School, and Command School takes only about 40 days. Literally, about thirty minutes into the movie they show a timer that says "28 days to alien homeworld." Not only is it eminently stupid to put a timer on a frakking third-act plot twist, but it is a slap in the face to much of the plot where Ender is being tested and refined. You have one month, dill-brains! Just start training him outright! They also overlook the second Bugger Invasion completely, which undermines the sociological and psychological topography of the threat. The whole point of the book is that the Formics first attacked with a scout force and then sent a proper invasion years later when they found a seemingly weak target.

One of the hurdles that Orson Scott Card has personally mentioned in an interview with Wired was that the book is very insular--much of the action is internalized within Ender's mind. The movie rather clumsily tries to flesh this out by vocalizing Ender's e-mails back to his sister, Valentine, but the correspondence is so bland it feels like a kid reporting on summer camp and doesn't really seem to fit the character or the setting--almost like he's self-censoring to avoid spilling classified info. If that was the case, it could serve the story, but it's a significant plot-point in the movie that Ender is being open with his bland, uninspired letters, and so it defeats the purpose of even including them.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': I'm glad I saw Ender's Game, and I may even see it again in theaters. The battle scenes were gorgeous, and Ford's delivery of Graff's hardline strategy for saving the human race is engrossing.

But...

(minor spoilers ahead)

I can't say this is a very good movie. I'm not saying it's bad, but I find it hard to get into something that is so confused about what it wants to be. For a movie so rushed up until it happens, they take way too long to resolve the post-Command School plot. A part which I think would've been better left as a one minute post-credits scene, they draw it out more than any other scene in the entire movie when they didn't even build up to it properly.

They only partially met the three expectations I listed in my earlier post anticipating this movie. The third invasion of the Formics was not even a lie in this movie because there was no second invasion, and they seriously drop the bomb of that lie at the earliest possible opportunity so that the steaming dud doesn't even really impact the audience. And when Ender ignorantly wipes out the Formic homeworld, the emotional content of the scene is so backwards as to defeat the impact of the twist itself (for Ender, because with the timer reveal any audience member should see the twist coming). In the book, Ender is supposed to be mentally exhausted and spent, ready to quit when he petulantly 'breaks' the game with a suicidal and genocidal attack on the enemy's base. The observing leaders, however, are supposed to be relieved, cheering and crying and congratulating each other at that moment of victory. That cruel juxtaposition, then, beats Ender when he was already low. The movie, however, depicts the kids cheering while the adults somberly conference and inform Ender of the dire truth.

It may seem like a nit-pick, but the changes the movie made to the mind game Ender plays throughout his training was also tweaked in a fundamental way. In the book, when Ender commands his mouse avatar to burrow into the giant's eye and kill him, the giant then rots and becomes a green, rich hillside. This is not only dramatic symbolism that foreshadows how humanity will suborn colonies originally terraformed by the Formics, but it also alludes to Norse creation myths and the death of Ymir. The movie's simple omission of this detail robs the mind game of its elegance and symbolic force that could have really helped to elevate the quality of the narrative.

The changes to the timeline were especially illogical and unjustified. And omitting the Second Bugger War altogether entirely defeats the plausibility of Graff's position. That can't be overstated. I really had to insert the movie Graff into the plot of the book in order to have him make sense, and in order to match Ford's dour defeatism he brought to life. And that's not only imaginatively over-complicated, but it's rather pathetic.

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': Fans of sci-fi who aren't terribly in love with the book--or haven't read it at all--might be able to get into this movie. I say might because the plot holes and weaknesses that gall me are still visible within the context of the movie by itself, but less obvious. Fans of the book will at best be pleased with pretty lights and great moments that do adhere briefly to the novel, but mostly they'll come away with a story that is more "inspired by" than "adapted from" Ender's Game. Fans may be able to enjoy it if they're sufficiently braced against such disappointment, but they need to really understand that no moment in the movie compares to a comparable part of the book in terms of dramatic and emotional content or social commentary.

You know, as a fan of the book's depth and someone who wrote a better screenplay in junior high, I'm not sure I was prepared for the plot to be the weakest part of this movie. I doubted the job the young cast might do. I worried the three-dimensional Battle School scenes wouldn't translate well to the screen. I thought they'd outright cut large sections of the book. Instead, they condensed everything without making the tough decisions to cut out some of the elements they underdeveloped and under-delivered, and everything else is rather more anemic because of it.

At the same time, in a world where World War Z was turned into a dumb action movie without real zombies, socio-political drama, or one recognizable element from the critically acclaimed novel and still get 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, I think Ender's Game deserves its chance. It's certainly closer to the text, more reverent, and more consistently respectful of the fans who made the book popular in the first place.

State of Decay...

...Running, Screaming, and Bleeding Through the Motions

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the Nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

I was originally going to save this post for a more polished Nerdview later on, but I figure now is as good a time as any to put my thoughts out there, since I've now spent at least a dozen or so hours playing it within the past week.

Expectations 'Odor': State of Decay is an open-world sandbox game in which the player controls a small community of survivors in a world overrun by zombies. The player directs the survivors in scavenging for supplies and building a base from which they hold the zombie infestation at bay. Gameplay involves stealth, vehicles, and straight up combat with the player collecting scores of found weapons from baseball bats to shotguns to fight the shuffling menace.

I love zombie games. I bought Call of Duty World at War specifically because I heard about an unlockable Nazi zombies mode. Dead Rising was one of the biggest factors in my original decision to get an Xbox 360 in the first place. Left 4 Dead will never be too outdated for me to forsake its twitchy thrill-kill gameplay and epic standoff sequences. And I've also pledged for a Kickstarter project for a game called Dead State, which will be a gritty "true zombie" (slow and no special forms) survival game in which the player takes up turn-based tactical control over his band of survivors as they raid nearby homes and offices in their small Texas town. Hrm...wait a second...

Yeah, it sounds like State of Decay is kind of a ripoff of Dead State at first. That, and the fact that this game had crept under my radar until a mere three days before it was to be released, had actually muted my enthusiasm for this game, fearing it'd be a cash-in on a heavily populated game genre. And that's not the mention the name, which is so similar to Dead State that it might as well be a senile Yoda trying to recite his game library.



Appreciation 'Beef': Boy, was I thrilled with the differences. While superficially similar to the tactical promise of Dead State, State of Decay is a much more stream-lined and light approach to its themes. At its core, State of Decay feels like a focused Rockstar gameplay experience--the animations, controls, and rendering style all draw from that studio's distinct style. I didn't see Rockstar's name anywhere in the credits for this game, but I call straight-up shenanigans on that--especially after playing Undead Redemption, the zombie DLC for Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption. The games are just too tactilely familiar.

The game has that classic Rockstar/Grand Theft Auto action-style gameplay with lite RPG elements thrown in. You level up your skills in Cardio (the first of many Zombieland references in this game), Powerhouse, Fighting, and more through the regular use of the skills, increasing passive benefits regularly and occasionally getting a new ability or move as well. They also track a few keywords about each character's personality traits, as the clash or harmony of characters back at base mean you might come back from a long day of head-smashing to find your teammates at each other's throats. Sigh... Ed, you silly Idol-watching sluggard, I knew I should have dropped you off in that zombie-infested trailer park.

The base-building element of the game gives small, regular benefits that you'll definitely feel, but since the different facilities you'll build are going to be static set-pieces dropped in empty areas of your homebase, they don't necessarily feel as interesting as they are useful. Not to mention that getting the resources to build the base add-ons are a lot more work than you might be prepared for. Expect to spend 20 to 30 minutes gathering resources to build an addition only to have it take another 15 to 30 minutes to build. And that's assuming there isn't a delay due to a shortage of a specific resource.

The open world map is quite spacious. I'd compare it to about the size of one of the states in Red Dead Redemption. The following picture shows about one-fourth of the world map in the game, and it is dense enough with interesting terrain features, lootable buildings and little zombie surprises throughout. It's a well-realized and interesting world, as testified to by how much time I spent in the first town alone before even bothering to explore the second third of the map. I still haven't gotten to the third major region of the map.

This is about one quarter of the total real estate in State of Decay

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': Oh, it's been a while since I've played Red Dead Redemption or LA Noire, which are the games I'd compare most directly to this one in terms of primary gameplay dynamics. The zombies are typical video game undead in that their are several special boss forms and the rank and file zombie is given to running when they want to shake off the eerie shuffle of a true zed-head. Head-shots are the only way to take them down, however, and the rather clunky third-person aiming of the game engine means that dropping a zombie with anything but a shotgun blast takes a little practice and a cool head. And not trying to use the alcoholic accountant as a front-line scavenger.

I love it. The strategy of the game is really just a way to link your self-assigned missions with more narrative and importance, but it works for me. The coolest artifact that carries over from other Rockstar games, though, is the no-save gameplay. The only way to save your status in this game is to exit the game and fall back on your last checkpoint. And death isn't the safety net it is in other games, either. You command a whole party of survivors, or at least the ones willing to friend you in the game's trust meter. And when whatever character you're controlling gets turned into hickburger, your control shifts to whoever is left back at your base. It makes the game persistent and adds tension even when the zombies aren't that threatening. Because one screw up, one overconfident decision to press on to another mission without stocking up on meds, and your fiery assault-rifling Latina will get wishboned by a zombie. And then you'll have to replace her with Ed the American Idol fan.



General Enjoyment 'Cheese': By now you should really know if you'd like this game or not. It's well-crafted and pushes the genre forward in an interesting way, but it also doesn't break the rules or really surprise you, either. Sandbox fan? Get it. Zombie nut? Get it. Enjoy inexpensive games with high replay value? It's a $20 download through Xbox Live, and I find that the combination of base-building choices and character progression gives you a ton of different ways to approach the game. And the brutal way the game makes you lose vital characters and then just press on not only evokes the genre magnificently well, but it also makes you wonder whether it's worth it to restart from the beginning just one more time.

Iron Man 3: Now Tin-foil fortified!

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

So as you may remember from my over-due post a few hours ago, Iron Man 3 is coming out this weekend, and the nerd-gods have demanded my penance in the form of a post-midnight showing review of the movie. And I'm still going to work in a few hours.

I hope you're happy, Internet.

Oh, and I promise: no spoilers here, webbies. I love you too much for that.

Expectations 'Odor': Going into Iron Man 3, there's a lot of weight. We've got Warmachine as an already established character at the start, so Tony won't be a solo act for sure. And the previews seem to indicate Warmachine upgrades to a patriotic version of his amor reminiscent of Iron Patriot (which is an altogether different character in the comics). This is the first post-Avengers movie, so more than any of the following Marvel movies it has to address the dramatic and character-based aftermath. On top of this, Iron Man 3 is apparently going to feature one of Iron Man's most iconic foes, the Mandarin, and cover one of his biggest transitions as he encounters the Extremis. Extremis, for those of you who don't know the comic books, goes hand-in-hand with the development of a nanite adaptation for Tony's armor that basically makes it appear out of nowhere. It's a convenient way of mitigating Tony's greatest weakness--the hassle of donning his bulky armor.

I'll be blunt: I don't like Extremis. As a kid, I always loved that Tony had to pick between different specialized suits of armor: deep sea armor, space armor, or--when caught away from his base--the weaksauce suitcase armor. I also loved the occasional moments in the comics where Tony Stark would need help from engineers, mechanics, or robots just to doff his suit after a very violent encounter as Iron Man. Extremis limits the drama of catching Tony off-guard, it cheapens the drama of his schtick as being 'just a regular guy beneath that armor'. Because, let's face it, you're not a normal guy if you can think a happy thought and transform into a flying tank.

But I'm super pumped for this movie. It looks like they're dialing in the dramatic fallout of the Battle of New York from The Avengers, the added prominence of Warmachine looks great, and Mandarin as a terrorist mastermind fits really well with the continuity of the movies. All said and done, I'm expecting a drama-packed delve into Tony's tortured alcoholic, with maybe enough action and splendor to make me okay with the introduction of the Extremis armor into the second phase of Marvel's cinematic opus.

Maybe.

Appreciation 'Beef': So as expected, director Shane Black's addition to the Iron Man franchise was tremendously different from Jon Favreau's. There's a lot more plot crammed into Iron Man 3 than the other installments, and it does seem to get in the way of the film's pacing finding its flow. The beginning is slightly disjointed in a way that doesn't seem intense enough to evoke the suspenseful opening to Iron Man, but nor is it smooth enough to give the narrative you get in Iron Man 2. Part and parcel to that, there's a good deal less of Tony's personality in the first thirty minutes or so of the movie--less of Robert Downey Jr.'s facile charm and wit, which makes it that much harder to adjust to the new movie's style. That's also mainly due to the plot-filled pace of the movie though, as Tony is stuck in a reactionary role for much of the first part.

A short way into the movie, however, we get Tony Stark back in his usual spastic charm, and we're reminded of why Tony Stark is Iron Man and RDJ is Tony Stark. He's twitchy, raw, and yet still polished and verbose in an off-handed way that flows well through a rather unique set of trials for our protagonist. Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts gets a good deal more screen time in this movie, but she gets less opportunity to charm with the awkwardness one sees in the first two movies as the first part of the film brings the ceiling crashing down around everyone's heads. Don Cheadle as James Rhodes is good, but he feels lost in the plot of the movie. Especially since I was looking for Warmachine/Iron Patriot to be a fixture of this movie, I was disappointed that his badass suit got about as much screentime as in Iron Man 2 and he got even less dramatic fuel outside of the suit as he did in the previous movie. At one point near the middle of the movie he even struck me as a bit of a doofus--really, Rhodey? You're wearing tactical tank armor in a room of suspected terrorists and you don't think to mute your externals when sharing login info? How could a guy that obtuse get the rank of Colonel in the Air Force's experimental weapons division?

But Guy Pierce as Aldritch Killian, now there's a fun villain. He's introduced early on in a flashback to 1999, and in that scene his pimpled, scraggly idealism reminded me of Val Kilmer's nerd disguise from The Saint--fun, reckless characterization. The stereotypical dork role might get old quickly, but Aldritch Killian is just as quickly shown in modern times to be handsome, put together, and forcefully cogent in his vision of the future. Ben Kingsley as Mandarin...my, what do I say? I like what they did with his role on a dramatic, storytelling, and thematic level. But as someone who really wanted to be more engaged with Iron Man's nemesis, I found the role lacking. And that's not Kingsley's fault--he enjoyably romps in the confines of the role and works within each moment of a dichotomous character.

"...let's face it, you're not a normal guy if you can think a happy thought and transform into a flying tank."

Iron Man 3 features action that is wholly different from the other Marvel films so far. You get quite a bit more out-of-suit fighting that really makes the super-power mook antagonists seem almost too invulnerable, but then at the same time Tony's own armor suits are a little bit easier to crunch (like almost ridiculously so as the conflict escalates--are his new suits so mobile because they're primarily tin-foil parasols?) and less-tricked out than his previous suits. Part of that is plot-based handicap, but even when the plot opens up to indulge in a variety of bizarre Iron Man gadgets, it doesn't and instead relies on variations of the same actions instead. It's a little frustrating. But the action is kinetic and keeps your head on a swivel, and like other Marvel movies it rarely resorts to slo-mo and hand-holding to let you absorb everything. In the end, the action outside of the suits or in partial armor feel more interesting and exciting, though, partly because much of the full-suit action relies on the same gimmick we get to see about thirty minutes into the movie. In the end, the armored action scenes feel like playing a fighting game with a kid who learned just one cool move for their character and then repeats it at different intervals hoping it will be more effective...

Ah, got me in mid-transformation, huh? Well what if I keep fighting you until it falls apart and then I flip to the side and change into another suit before turning to face you? Oh, destroyed that one, too? How about I throw myself off a catwalk and do it? Weren't expecting that now, were you?

The most lacking part of the movie must have been the score. I say must have because I couldn't really follow it most of the time. As the third part of a series--and quite probably the last Iron Man film with RDJ in the lead--I really wanted more homages to the previous film's excellent scores. Reviewing it now I'm especially confused by this as Brian Tyler, who scored Iron Man 3, did a great job of uplifting Battle Los Angeles with his thrilling heroic themes. Maybe it got lost in the mad visuals of Iron Man 3, but in this genre that's hardly an excuse.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': Oh Extremis, why do you do these things to me? The realization of the Extremis enemies was very well done, with them proving a mid-level threat of being nearly untouchable outside of armor and yet still pretty easy to despatch once fully armored. With the exception of one who survives so much more than the others that, with no plot explaining his hardiness, I was left assuming it's a clumsy plot-protection. The armor improvement, while staying away from the nanite from-nowhere option, feels even more gimmicky and overpowered than the alternative. For the suit to deploy, the pieces now individually fly themselves onto Tony and then expand, latch, and envelop him. It's rather silly when a lone faceplate hovers up and flies to him, and it begs the question how many more toys Tony could fit into his new suit if he just decided not to make every single piece flight capable. It also brings up a WTF of how the disparate pieces are powered, since we're left with several scenes where the pieces fly a good distance to get to Tony. I can't believe it, but I think I'd rather see Tony progress to nanite armor than sticking with autonomous flying pieces that put me in mind of Iron Giant more than Iron Man. Also, there's a part towards the end where Tony says something either flat-out isn't true in light of something that happens in the first act or it's an outright lie and just a random douche moment between him and his sidekick.

"In the end, the armored action scenes feel like playing a fighting game with a kid who learned just one cool move for their character and then repeats it at different intervals hoping it will be more effective."

But I liked the boldness of a lot of the movie's choices. The drama of the plot was well-realized, even if it focused less on Rhodey than I would've liked, and it involved dwelling more on Tony being a temperamental bundle of nerves than a reckless alcoholic. His anxiety attacks could have been made to seem more urgent and frightening, but as it is they strike a powerful middle ground between being used for humor and a genuine threat to his confidence and ability to recover his gear. Making most of the action totally different from the other movies was a good move, too. I think one of my favorite action scenes was one where an unarmored Tony has to fashion much more crude gadgets to infiltrate a complex. I know the scene was too short for how much I enjoyed it, and I hope to get some more deleted scenes of it soon.

Overall, the movie passed the ball along. After Captain America: the First Avenger I suspected that my interest would lean further from Tony and more towards Cap, and it seems that hunch is starting to prove itself. I didn't get the payoff I wanted with Iron Patriot, nor the epic struggle I expected with Mandarin. Killian was capable and played his chaotic principles to the nines, but in the end I think I'm going to keep looking forward to Avengers 2 and be satisfied if Iron Man remains only a trilogy.

On the topic of the 3D experience of this film: I really didn't appreciate it. There were a few moments where it was definitely noticeable, and it created a faintly amusing effect, but for the most part I found it hard to feel like the movie was enhanced by the 3D. And since I always forget to wear contact lenses to midnight showings of movies, I was stuck wearing two pairs of glasses for over two hours wondering if I should just rest my eyes at some point. Not exactly the desired effect for a big budget movie's 3D markup.

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': Iron Man 3 is not going to draw in new fans to the franchise. I think that it may lose a few, but in the end it's going to keep the plots moving and the characters progressing. So that means that the foremost audience for this movie is going to be people who, like me, are looking to the future of Marvel movies. Now, amongst us there will probably be a good number who have better opinions of this movie than I do, but I really doubt any of those stellar opinions will last long as the rest of Phase Two comes out. I find it hard to imagine what might bring in people not already in love with the franchise and/or genre to see this movie: I mean there are regenerating minions with lava hands and fire breath as side effects of their healing factor. Not exactly an easy pill to cram down the throat of that person who scrunches up their nose and says, "Isn't that a comic book movie?"

(And no, it's a movie-movie.)

Avengers Reviewed!

So Unnecessary...or is it?

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

By now you should know my general opinion of last year's epic Avengers. I'd had a couple of posts in anticipation of it and I believe I've referred to it as sublime since then. It's true. I love it. But you should know from my stance on review rigor that I won't leave it at that and I hope you wouldn't accept such an unarticulated review from me, either.

But it came out so long ago. Why bother?

First of all, don't be a brat. Secondly, while the review of this movie in particular may be way past timely, there is another Marvel movie coming out this weekend which I also hope to be reviewing. So to help better explain my anticipation of Iron Man 3, and to give you a clearer definition of my Marvel fanboy mania, this review should go a long way to tide you over until you get the Iron Man 3 review.

Which is so definitely going to get posted this weekend. No promises here, just facts.

Oh, and as a tertiary reason for why this review might be helpful for you, at the end I'll tack on my opinion of the special edition Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase One set that came out this past month. You guys really are benefiting from my blogger's guilt today, aren't you?

(Minor spoilers shall flow, but you've already seen this movie ten times or more, right?)

Expectations 'Odor': So obviously, I had long been expecting great things from this movie. I mean, I remember talking about The Avengers while waiting for the first Iron Man movie's midnight showing to start. Before that, I read the first two volumes of Ultimates dying to see it realized in a big, live action movie. Heck, I nerded out over the two Ultimate Avengers animated movies, analyzing them to death as I tried to use them as a reference point for anticipating the live action adaptation. Plus, I'm a dyed-and-true browncoat and a big fan of the early seasons of Buffy, not to mention Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. And Joss Whedon's work on the X-men comics showed how adroitly he grasped these characters and the fans who love them. So Whedon's credentials added to the fiery anticipation as I devoured every little development update.

But I did have concerns. Whedon loves warrior women. And while that can be a fun asset in certain genres and certain films, the only warrior woman in the Avengers lineup for the film would be Black Widow. And in a roster containing Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, he'd have to pull some pretty unbelievable feldercarb to make Black Widow as dominating a presence as, say, River or Buffy. And I'd be downright pissed if Black Widow got godpowers to stand shoulder to shoulder with Thor and stand over him like Echo, for instance.

"...I've referred to it as sublime since then. It's true. I love it."

The single biggest expectation I had, though, was for party conflict. The Avengers have always been about party conflict. They're a team of the most domineering personalities and power levels thrown together specifically for high-stress and high-risk threats. Of course they're going to butt heads with each other...and possibly level some real estate in the process. And as a director, Joss Whedon excels at depicting party conflict. The crew of the Serenity is at its most gripping and engaging when they're fighting over what step to take next. Buffy and her cheer squad were at their best when they were trying each other, reminding one another of their faults, and still working together to kill the unholies. The Avengers movie would have to be full of the very best action and inter-personal drama, and Whedon would deliver. The only question is how inordinately large a part Black Widow might play in the movie.

Appreciation 'Beef': And boy, did Whedon pull it off. Action more complex and gratifying than anything in the superhero genre. Conflicting angles from all sides. One-liners galore. Maria Hill introduced and given a fair amount of face time. Just the right amount of Black Widow. In a dress. And actually playing the Russian angle.

Yes yes.

"Of course they're going to butt heads with each other...and possibly level some real estate in the process."

And the writing. Oh, the writing. The Avengers has one of the best and most under-appreciated scripts in television. Characters are summed up well in quick, catchy comments that capture the terse eloquence of the very best comics. When Captain America tells Black Widow "There's only one God, ma'am. And I'm pretty sure he doesn't dress like that," he's speaking volumes about his character. Whedon is affirming that Steve Rogers is still a God-fearing American traditionalist: respectful of women, and most importantly never cowed by the apparent power of his enemies. Captain America's most defining trait shines through in this movie at least as well in The Avengers as it did in Captain America: The First Avenger: a fight worth fighting is not diminished by your own odds of prevailing. For Cap, the decision he makes on a regular basis is that if a fight is worth fighting, it's worth facing certain defeat. And that is what makes him my favorite hero.

It gives me sissy goosebumps just to type it.

But the best highlight of the superb writing of The Avengers is the way misunderstandings between characters are rendered in such a believable manner. When Tony Stark tells Steve Rogers "Everything special about you came out of a bottle" you get at once the supreme arrogance of Tony Stark--who's implying that he's the worthiest hero because he's "self-made"--and you also recognize that his disconnect with Steve Rogers is that he doesn't understand what makes Captain America a hero. Captain America isn't special because of what he can do or how he can do it, but because of his innate identity--what he chooses to do. The fact that the writers couched the disagreement in these terms, though, shows that they understand both characters and how a believable dramatization of their biases would lead to a misunderstanding of each other. And of course, Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. recognize this as actors and do a great job of stubbornly holding their ground in their scenes together.

But an even better misunderstanding between characters can be seen in the absolutely delicious interplay between a captive Loki and Black Widow. It's the only significant interaction between Scarlett Johansson's femme fatale and Tom Hiddleston's emo maximus, but it is superbly written and played. At the climax of their little verbal joust, Loki tries to dig up emotional and psychological leverage from Black Widow, who is ostensibly bargaining for Hawkeye's free will:

Loki: Your world in the balance and you bargain for one life?

Widow: Regimes fall every day. I tend not to weep over that--I'm Russian...or I was.

Loki: And what are you now?

Widow: It's really not that complicated. I've got red in my ledger, I'd like to wipe it out.

Loki: Can you? Can you wipe out that much red? Drakov's daughter, Sao Paulo, the hospital fire?... Barton told me everything. Your ledger is dripping, it's gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything? This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer... pathetic! You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will never go away... I won't touch Barton. Not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he'll wake just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I'll split his skull! This is my bargain, you mewling quim!

First of all, I love the profane insult of mewling quim. It's archaic and disgusting, and if people in general had better vocabulary, it'd probably be an r-rated curse. Plus I never thought two years ago when I started this blog and committed to keeping my language PG that I'd have occasion to use the phrase mewling quim. Multiple times, even. Mewling. Quim.

But seriously, this exchange is great because the point in the scene where Loki gets excited, when he starts his evil rant, when he truly and passionately believes he's dressed down this mere woman, is all based on his own misunderstanding. Natasha makes a reference to a modern western convention, "red in my ledger", which refers to the practice of noting down debt in red, but with only a shallow understanding of modern western culture, Loki leaps upon red as the frail woman feeling guilty over shed blood. And so his diatribe begins, prematurely exultant of his social victory, building upon the allusion to blood with dripping, gushing, and violent threats. But what Loki doesn't understand is that his simple misunderstanding of the significance of red leads him to make the exact wrong conclusion. He thinks Natasha is a frail woman feeling guilty over her sins, but in reality the cold killer woman is doing the opposite--she turns killing into a sterile set of numbers in an imaginary book, some of which are red and need to be repaid, others of which must be black and no need to recompense. It's a beautiful scene in which Black Widow establishes that her true deadly arts have nothing to do with stopping beating hearts: it's about the game of outwitting one's opponent and getting them to do the work for you. And, since Loki is undone by a shallow appreciation of verbiage, it's ultimately a victory by English Major.

Boo yah. That's good writing.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': I loved every moment of The Avengers. From the first viewing to the umpteen times I've watched it at work (on my lunch break, of course), it remains a spiritual experience for me on a nerd level. Now, the big taglines I needed in this movie were masterfully accomplished: Captain America being awesome even as he struggles to find relevance in the modern world; Iron Man trying to find the balance between his ego and his personal insecurities; Black Widow being more Russian, using her Widow's Bite gauntlets and still receding into the background when the action gets too big. Hawkeye gets a wonderful amount of coverage too, for being a mere cameo character in Thor previously. And Tom Hiddleston as Loki is a fun villain that chews up the scenery and plays well opposite every character in the film.

"It gives me sissy goosebumps just to type it."

The one grit in my love for this movie--the one thing I would have done differently--is the treatment of Hulk. And bear in mind that I'm being tremendously niggly on this issue just so I can pretend to wipe away my frothing fanboy lather to look sane for a moment or two. I felt that the justification for Hulk to be under control at the climax was necessary, and while I think they gave a valid excuse for Bruce being in touch with his violent, angry side, I just wish the rampage would've either been more horrific, or bled over into more collateral destruction during the climax. Now, given how real and devastating the battle of New York was, I could understand if the creators were afraid of making Hulk add to the wanton carnage and destruction. And, to be fair, Hulk does leave a lot of unnecessary damage in his wake--plowing through an office building to fishhook a flying Chitauri leviathan definitely isn't covered by standard insurance, you know. But the moment that makes me feel just the tiniest bit...snerky is that moment when Hulk backhands Black Widow on the helicarrier and she doesn't even get knocked unconscious, let alone pulped. In fact, she comes back after a little quivering to whup Hawkeye, who probably could've won under some circumstances but definitely should have when Natasha was hot off of getting Abyss-slapped by the jade giant. Chalk this up to Hulk's rage usually getting slightly nerfed and Whedon's love of warrior women, because I still love it.

And of course, Captain America is awesome throughout the movie, but especially in the climax of the film. Seeing him mount a car in the middle of the chaos and assert himself as the inspirational hero everyone needs gives me the willies every time. And as the fight drags on and things look grimmer for New York's defenders, it's Chris Evans' portrayal of Steve Rogers that sells the grim determination and utter fatigue the heroes are feeling. Captain America, like the people he represents, shows the ragged edges even while soldiering on to prevail. Oh my, how I love this movie.

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': This movie is perhaps the ultimate in the genre, and as such people who aren't interested in superhero action are going to find it hard to sit still. And while I'd tend to say screw 'em and move on, there are a few things to watch for those not wooed by colorful characters and bold blasts of action. The script is interesting and engaging throughout, and it's crafted better than most movies with such a large cast of heavy principal characters. There's a decent amount of wry humor that is Whedon's signature, too. But in the end, probably the most compelling thing about The Avengers to those too cynical for superheroes is that it embodies a combination of the greatest aspirations and deepest flaws of idealized America. These heroes have problems, and much of the time wasted bickering adds to the villain's power and increases the final body count. But in the end, they're still willing to put themselves between innocent civilians and death. It's made all the more cogent by the brilliant holocaust reference in the first half of the movie, and I think should make for a fun objective analysis.

For the rest of us who can't be objective, though, for those of us champing at the bit to see high-flying combat and expensive battle sequences, The Avengers pays off in a big way. Fans of comics and the genre will be coming back to this movie for more for many years, and Marvel has probably set the bar too high for DC to attempt a Justice League movie this decade. Yeah, that's right. I said it.



Now for a review of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase One set. This appropriately long title describes a huge blu-ray boxed set containing Iron Man, Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and The Avengers all in one set. They also include the 3D versions of Thor, Captain America, and The Avengers, as the other movies were released before every big-budget movie had to have 3D features. There's also a tenth disc called the SHIELD Initiative that contains features relating to the other movies as a whole. Finally, there are a number of fun physical components to this set--a small intel folder on the principal characters from the movies. There's Black Widow's report on Tony's potential for Avenger membership, Captain America's World War Two era documents including three of his trading cards, and even a light-up cosmic cube. All of this is contained in a small plastic briefcase with the SHIELD logo on it, making for a fantastic presentation.

It's important to emphasize that since the constituent movies have all had multi-disc sets released in the past, the discs included in this set don't include every feature that has yet been released. So, unfortunately, this is not technically an exhaustive set. Rather, it's more the coup de grace for obsessive fans like myself or for those who held out to get all the movies for one combined price. The SHIELD Initiative disc, however, does offer some deleted scenes from several movies that you can't get anywhere else and features introductions to each movie by Agent Phil Coulson. The Coulson intros are a nice boon to those of us who couldn't put our entire day on hold to see the many all-day marathons of the movies theaters showed on Avengers' opening day. The physical components are a lot of fun and feel legit--Tony's folder contains a coffee-stained napkin with an informal memo to Pepper that they were going to stop selling weapons, for instance. One notable exception is the Cosmic Cube--it lights up, but it's a deeper blue than in the movie and it's a flat, featureless cube and features none of the ornate etching in the movie. That's disappointing to some, apparently, but made no difference to my son, who temper-tantrumed over it for hours. Another impressive bit of detail in this set is that each of the disc envelopes are emblazoned with bold, iconic art of their characters in almost cubist silhouettes.

Overall, I'd say that what makes this mega-sized boxed set worthwhile are the physical novelties and collector's factor. Don't take that as a lukewarm diagnosis, though. I love this set and I couldn't imagine my Marvel movie collection complete--or even adequate--without it.



Well, that's it for the next six or seven hours at least. I'm going to try to put up a slightly more succinct Iron Man 3 review immediately after the midnight showing. We'll see how that works out. Filmatleven...fifty-nine.