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

Marvel Hype: Cinematic Universe Phase Two

(...And Maybe A Little Bit of Phase Three?)

I'm not sure how necessary this is to constantly reiterate, but for those of you just joining or with the attention spans of Labrador Retrievers: I am a Marvel fan. I love the comics, I love the cartoons (erm...animated features, I mean), I love the movies. I love Marvel.

And right now, I am excited.

Why am I excited? Well first of all, this past week was Thor's day. No wait--that's not just a terrible pun/allusion to the etymological origins of the word Thursday--it's the night of the US release of the second Odinson movie, Thor: The Dark World. Apart from being a mega awesome sequel title (woot for sequels without numbers in the title!), the trailers for this film have had me totally stoked. I really liked the first movie, and this one looks poised to amp up many of the elements I loved about the first. Plus, with Jane Foster getting thrown into the thick of things for this movie, odds are good she'll get elf-kacked and replaced by Lady Sif--booyah! Either way, expect a movie review to be posted early tomorrow.

Most importantly, though, is the revelation that 3D screenings of Thor: The Dark World will have an exclusive peek at Captain America: Winter Soldier. Not only does this movie look poised to hit all the right notes in this first trailer, (Robert Redford?! Booyah!) but Winter Soldier is one of the coolest Cap-related storylines, and one of the greatest overall plots in the Marvel Universe. If you haven't read it, you owe it to yourself to check out the story arc--it's the first twenty issues or so of the Captain America series that began in 2004, written by Ed Brubaker--fantastic plot that brings back classic elements of Captain America and brings them to the fore with a shiny new appeal. It's like meeting your first crush years later and finding out she's just as cool as before, only now more clever, passionate, and into yoga. All-round win.

Throwing further fuel onto the fire of my enthusiasm, Marvel cinematic news is that James Spader is going to be portraying Ultron in the Avengers sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron. What?!

Whaaat?!

I mean, first of all, I want to throw a Marvel-fan hissy-fit over Ultron being the main villain in the next Avengers movie, which will come out before Ant-Man. I mean, Ant-Man is the creator of Ultron, and a lot of his (really really compelling) character quirks as a villain are directly precipitated by Ant-Man's personal character. This is totally putting the cart before the horse. (I wanted to say 'literally' there for emphasis, but the grammarian butt-hole living in my head wouldn't allow it) So clearly Ultron isn't going to share a remotely similar origin story to the comics, but does that mean that Hank Pym is going to be fundamentally changed as a hero in Ant-Man? Pym is very much defined by his world-threatening failure in Ultron's creation, and it's often as depicting his more self-destructive character flaws. The suggestion, then, is that those demons won't exist. What's next, are they going to make him a decent guy who treats his woman nice, is loyal, and always takes it slow?

Bah, who am I kidding? This is Joss Whedon we're talking about. You can say what you like about his creative choices, but he makes really interesting bad guys. Heck, if they made a Whedon Villains special like a Disney Princesses video, I'd buy it. And James Spader, too? I mean, they've already let slide that they scanned his face for VFX, so it's safe to say we're going to see some awesome acting from the man who is the pillar of Blacklist's early success. But I also used to be a big Stargate fan, so the role I'm really wanting to see him channel is Daniel Jackson, the rambling archeologist outcast.

Most recently, Marvel announced last week that they'll be partnering with Netflix to create four 13 episode serials over the next two years. Focusing in turn on Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage, the four mini-mini-series will culminate in a cross-over mini-series that will be called The Defenders. I already jumped the gun getting excited that Luke Cage would feature in Agents of SHIELD, so getting to see Power Man doing his street tank thing will be awesome. Not to mention the prospect of Daredevil being redeemed from the Affleck treatment he got in 2003. If they feature the lawyer aspects of Matt Murdoch, the Daredevil serials should be really engrossing--that pseudo mundane aspect of his character has always appealed to me. Same goes for Jessica Jones' wry private investigator angle and the post-tights drama that defines her. And Iron Fist's handwaved wushu business should be a fun splash of highly choreographed action to contrast the other three.

"Heck, if they made a Whedon Villains special like a Disney Princesses video, I'd buy it."

Oh, the next phase of Marvel's cinematic universe is already shaping up nicely with Thor and Captain America, and even Phase Three should be killer with The Defenders adding a lot of street-level mysteries and small-screen drama.

Myth Campaign: October 4, 166 Sword Age

Myth, The Shield Age: A dramatic synopsis of the tabletop RPG campaign I'm currently leading my friends through. It's a variation on GURPS, built up from and inspired by the excellent computer game Myth. In it, the player characters begin as a selection of relatively ordinary folk in an unremarkable town. Their adventures grow, the dangers swarm, and the PCs? They pretty much just have to deal with it without serious power progression. It's gritty, it's deadly, it's fantasy with a political and social edge and an emotional timbre: it's Myth: The Shield Age.

I've recently been watching a number of videos on YouTube depicting other people's role-playing game sessions, and it's really gotten my Game-Master juices flowing, so to speak. Wil Wheaton's Tabletop has chronicled two very fun RPG sessions in the past: the Dragon Age RPG was a fun and more traditional hack-and-slash adventure that got me to nerd-out to Sam Witwer's gaming style; Fiasco was a sublimely dramatic RPG without so much mechanics and direct violence, building a tableau of tragedy and drama and then setting it all on fire. Both are a lot of fun, and could merit detailed posts on their own (or more, if you know me). I've also been watching a series of recordings of a group that livestreams games using Skype and Roll20 to play an RPG set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Called "Rollplay: Dark Heresy", that group's fun antics almost lured me back into the grimdark dumb setting before a horrific boondoggle scared me right the heck off of the Games Workshop website (filmatleven on that).

But as much as these games have inspired me, they also leave me cold as a role-player and GM. Dark Heresy is based on the Inquisitor system which was my first love in the role-playing genre, but they add a rigid class system to it that makes me want to vomit in terror. The Rollplay group is fun, but also irreverent and obtuse towards the story in that power-gamey self-conscious way. I'm a thespy, snobby GM I guess, because as fun as it is to watch I know I would hate that in a campaign I was leading. Similarly, the Dragon Age episodes of Tabletop were a really entertaining watch, but the contrived elements of the class system is a turn-off to my gaming tastes. Fiasco is dramatically around my sweet-spot in terms of harrowing player characters without violence or fakey game progression being necessary, but it doesn't touch upon combat or traditional adventuring the way I would like.

What does? GURPS Myth, baby. Or at least the way I play GURPS Myth, it does. I'm actually in the process of returning to this campaign after more than a year off--I think we've played one game of it since my family and I moved to our current place. This synopsis is going to be focused on a fast summary of the story rather than highlighting the GURPS mechanics in action, though if any questions about the nitty-gritty come up, I'd be happy to answer them either in comments or future posts as appropriate.

Note that I'll be pretty careful to track dates, seasons, and holidays in my campaign. The passage of time is an important element of the game. Not only do I use time spent training in lieu of traditional game experience, but I try to keep world events on an independent timeline from player action--whether they dawdle or hasten towards their goals is up to them, but the forces of evil act out their own plans at the same time.

Also please keep in mind that I tend to run more R-rated or at least hard PG-13 games. You won't get too much bad language--at least not much bad contemporary language--but there is some more mature subject matter in the run of the plot. And I tend to cut loose with my descriptions of violence.

The twelfth of November, One hundred sixty-sixth year of the Sword Age. Here taken to script is the account of Alrid Hock, founding elder of Misty Downs, warrior of the The Legion. Tiernan Seithkarl, the Magistrate of Misty Downs for these past two years, has bid me record the dire goings of our village this past moon. Misty Downs is a small village of perhaps three score families in Umbra, the region immediately east of Tharsis, the great billowing mountain at the center of the Cloudspine. The Cath Bruig village is honorably distinguished in The Realm as furthest north and west in the region. To the north just past Lake Ywrmasr lies The Barrier, filled with Myrkridia and soil now damned for one hundred and sixty-five years. Founded a generation ago, Thom Etteryn, Ostler Farris, myself, and two other brothers in The Legion were awarded these lands for our years of service in Alric's Legion, fighting in the First Myrkridian Campaign. Having sheathed our swords, the five of us farmed the land and beat back the wolves and catamounts of the region. We have broken the earth and planted crops in the shadow of the last war, and as our families joined us we made the cursed soil fertile and built two generations in the fog dripping down from Tharsis. But every good Bruig knows that peace is fleeting, and the wolf waits for its prey to slumber. For Misty Downs, it began on the fourth eve of October. I awoke from the harvest mind to a cry raised in the center of the Downs. I stirred my house and summoned the rest of the council to join all in the village square, before the Flooded Downs tavern where we always held town meetings. "Giselbert Craw is gen missin'," the village crier reported. Giselbert was Laanor Craw's sister, daughter of Donovan Craw. Her father and brother stood by, eyes red and torches in hand. She was but a dozen and one years old. Thom, Ostler, and I seized upon the townsfolk there assembled to get their witness. She had disappeared from the pastureland along with her father's small herd of fourteen cattle. The last of our assembly to have seen her was a Gowerna from the east named Danlyra. She was known to me already, as any Bruig Elder worth his teeth would meet any horsemaster entering his village. We quickly put the test to her. She had not touched Giselbert nor shared many words with her but to take directions to our village tavern as she rode in on her fine Gowerna riding mare. That was least two hours and spare before the crier rose the alarum amongst the town, but Danlyra saw nought else. We mustered the men of the village to find Giselbert Craw. By this time, much of the entire village had put themselves under our cause, and so we parceled the men to range afield for her, while the women and children stayed close to home to keep fires lit for her swift return. Danlyra stayed at the tavern, tending to her horse and distracting my grandson Baith with her lilting words and strange expressions. Were her clothes less refined I'd have called the whore her true name, but she had the bearing of one beyond my station and all were pressed to find Giselbert. By Wyrd's sight, we had a Heron Guard tending our Temple of Wyrdras for that season. We called him Ten Green Gem Vine, a name strange to those who never served with the Heron Guard in The Legion. He was young, even measured by my short span, but he quickly divided us and led our group into the dark. Tall and strong as all his blessed brothers are, he donned the glittering armor and twin fangs of his station and sallied into the hills. The young Heron Guard selected a falconer from our village to lead the search, a huntress named Vera Wealwa. With her bird and bow, Vera led the men of the village to sign of young Giselbert. They found only a bloody patch of ground where someone had split ope one of the Craw farm's cattle and strewn its entrails about the field, knotting the gibs together here and there. The search parties ranged in small groups from there, forced together by darkness, fog, and wolf as the night deepened. Vera led the Heron Guard, following a trail of what she scryed to be a single cattle into the scrub to the west of our village. Joining him was Keagan Na Anyon, our village blacksmith. Soot-browed and meade-bearded, he could swing his fists like many men swing hammers, and were he less fond of drink and brawling he'd have left Misty Downs years ago. Indentured to our last smith as a boy, Keagan clung to Misty Downs, though, and he was blustering to find Giselbert at the first cries from Laanor Craw. Also joining their number was a wandering vagabond of perhaps thirty years. Named Crow, he carried himself unlike any beggar I've met in my two score and ten years. He held a stout quarterstaff, bound at the haft with leather strips, the mark of a staff used to striking more than leaning. A gourd hung from his belt, but his eyes were clear and acute. I saw him for a soldier even in the midst of the tavern, but on that night I thought to say nothing. The four moved through the dark for hours, scrabbling up slopes and gutters torn by Tharsis' great eruption two ages ago. While many of our hardiest villagers turned back in exhaustion, Ten Green Gem Vine urged them forward, making every clue Vera found into a certain promise of Giselbert's well-being and proximity. Then they were suddenly set upon. Stones in the darkness whistled to crack against the Heron Guard and torch-wielding blacksmith, breaking the redheaded smith's nose and tumbling him. Drawing his twin swords, the Emperor's Twin Fangs, Ten Green Gem Vine charged into the stygian hills and let his blades find the guts of a bandit with a sling while Vera's arrows hobbled another as he fled into the night. Two more highwaymen witnessed the slaughter and the armor of a Heron Guard and retreated into a cave nearby. As Keagan drew his sword and caught stride with the Heron, the group strode into the cave to find a nest of eight men waiting for them. Keagan, Ten Green Gem Vine, and Crow waded into the fight. Crow's staff broke bones and whistled teeth, but a spear threaded his ribs and he fell even as his cohorts' blades cut into the rest of them. The Emperor's Fangs gutted a man and twisted the leg off another, leaving the man screaming and bathing in a pool of his own blood. Keagan's sword threw a bandit down to ruin as well. While Ten Green Gem Vine tended to Crow's wound, Vera saw three more bandits returning to the cave, the one she'd earlier hobbled among them. Arrows answered stones, and the bandits tumbled into darkness and screams. Inside the cave, three of the villains had the strength left to scream and beg for their lives, but the party ignored them. Keagan followed the path of the cave deeper to find signs of an encampment of sorts. A fire and spit, bedrolls for a dozen men, and a gutted cattle close at hand. And a heavy foreign curtain draw across a smaller tunnel to create a room. With the Heron Guard stepping beside Keagan, the curtain was cast aside, and they found Giselbert.

Major events since Soulblighter's defeat, about fifty years ago: -Muirthemne and The Realm of the Cath Bruig are slowly being restored. -Emperor Alric orders the Myrkridian Campaigns, periodic assaults on The Barrier to try to weed out the Myrkridia infesting the ruins of the last age. -The Province in the west establishes its own king, beneath Emperor Alric. The Barrier The Barrier is a wild area, cursed by the gods. It fills the land north and west of Muirthemne, and is in turn teeming with beasts and foul creatures, the greatest of whom are the Myrkridia. A scorching desert filled with ruins nearly two centuries silent, every farmer knows that The Barrier’s soil radiates heat both night and day and will not permit seed to take root. The Barrier is the scorched remnant of the heart of the Cath Bruig Empire. When Balor sacked Muirthemne in the last year of the Wolf Age, the winds carried the sorcerous blaze across the rest of The Realm, hastening the death of the towns in that region as their crops withered and fell even before the Dark laid proper siege to their walls. After Soulblighter’s defeat, the hordes of leaderless Myrkridia he let loose upon the world swarmed to The Barrier, drawn to the sites of massive carnage. As Alric and his Circle of Mages have begun pushing back the curse of The Barrier, he has also installed a dozen forts along the edge of the wastes, each supporting a company or more of the Legion’s soldiers, helping to keep the monsters within at bay. Misty Downs Misty Downs is one of the smallest and most remote villages of the Umbrage region, consisting of perhaps a hundred families. The nearest settlement is a Legion border fort, nicknamed Foggy Bottom, about a day’s travel to the northeast. Misty Downs benefits from frequent rains and mountain streams rolling down from the Cloudspine, and so most of the farmers in the area have a goodly number of cattle. The area is named for its hilly area that frequently clots over with fog banks. The small, remote village of Misty Downs has roughly four hundred residents, most of whom rely on wheat and cattle farming. A day’s travel to the northeast is the Legion fort Cwmasr, nicknamed Foggy Bottom. Fog rolls into the hills around Misty Downs with regularity, especially in their wet autumns. Few travelers make their way into Misty Downs, due to the fact that it is so far from the roads and passes of the south. The nearest town is more than a day’s journey to the southeast, as is the Emperor’s Highway. The village, like many others in The Realm, was founded about forty years ago by retiring soldiers of the Legion. A few years ago, the veteran elders sold their holdings to an affluent noble named Tiernan. Council of Misty Downs: elders Alrid Hock, Thom Etteryn, and Ostler Farris; Magistrate Tiernan Seithkarl; Seeress Nara Pugh. This initial session was meant to turn the typical fantasy RPG on its head. Instead of everyone meeting inside a tavern before their call to adventure, the characters were scattered about the village as they experienced the village's building panic in their own ways. Then they were called to the tavern and asked to meet. Also, the concept of the men of the village meeting and pushing the female player characters out of the tavern to do so was a fun way of helping to establish that this would be a socially grounded medieval setting. Danlyra, Gowerna noblewoman Ten Green Gem Vine, Heron Guard Vera Wealwa the falconer Keagan Na Anyon, Blacksmith Crow, Wandering Adventurer

Cliffhanger, that's right! If you guys enjoy this, I'll post more. This first entry roughly summarizes the action of our first night's gaming session, but since this one involved so much exposition too I think future Shield Age articles will cover more than one session at a time.

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.

Movie Web Monday: Christian Bale

Movie Web Monday: Each week, I'll look at a specific actor's roles across three good movies. The third movie will in turn tie into the first movie of the next week's actor, whose third movie will continue the pattern. I will go through actors and movies at this rate, with the following limitations in mind: every movie(or television show) invoked will be one I either own, or wish to own; no movie or actor will be invoked twice. So sit back and enjoy as you fall into the nerdery's movie web. (Oh, and I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, telling you just enough to know if you'll enjoy the movie)

Today's actor is probably one of the first that I really started to movie-web consciously. Christian Bale, an infamously great-but-demanding actor, has starred in a whole slew of excellent movies dating back to Empire of the Sun and Henry V in the late 80s, with his mainstream attention ramped up in the past decade after his incomparable realization of Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. With Ben Affleck the mildly controversial replacement to don the cowl in the Superman vs Batman movie, it remains to be seen whether that stays Bale's most recognized role.

Not that there aren't tons of great under-exposed roles in his filmography. I don't feature them below, but I also highly recommend Rescue Dawn, where Bale plays an American fighter pilot shot down in Laos during the Vietnam War. It's brutal, raw, and psychologically draining, but an excellent film. Similarly, The Machinist is one of the greatest psychological films of all time, and Bale's star performance is engrossing in its mundane grotesqueness. The film's inspiration is pure Dostoyevsky, with heavy elements of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, so that comparison will go a long way to informing whether you might enjoy it or not.

Christian Bale: Unsung Underdog

Movie: Terminator Salvation (Own it)

In the first film to finally focus on the actual Machine War, Christian Bale takes up the role of John Connor, hero of humanity and walking target of the franchise. I'd been waiting to see the Machine War realized on the big screen ever since I saw Terminator as a five year-old (heavily censored by my big brother sitting on me during the objectionable bits). I wanted to see the all-out apocalyptic showdown, firefights in the concrete morass of long-nuked cities, and with John Connor orchestrating it all. Bale's John Connor steps into the grim struggle with the right amount of weight and exhaustion throughout his scenes, even though he's not yet the supreme commander of the human resistance. Action hero gunplay and fighting aside, I think it's the bag-eyed weariness, that drawn and haggard leader of men caught in the midst of successively worse decisions, that elevates the film for me. It's encapsulated in the beat before John broadcasts one of his machine-fighting tutorials over the radio:

The person being referred to is Kyle Reese, John Connor's deceased father and future subordinate thanks to the loopy paradox at the core of the franchise. Setting the causal stupidity of time travel plots aside, it's a superb small moment of Bale pulling back the seams of Connor's armor and showing what drives the exhausted resistance leader--the idea that his loved ones are out there, that he has a family that extends beyond his physical reach that he can't see but that he can protect. Coupled with his wife Kate Connor (played by mesmeric Bryce Dallas Howard) and her baby bump, Bale portrays a man in transition to a point where he is not only about to become a father, but that also his prophetic grasp on the future is catching up to him and he will soon be on his own. It's a chilling thought, in a franchise bound by time-traveling take-backs and cause-effect loops, to imagine being on the verge of true uncertainty once more. If only we could get there--but alas, rumor is that the next Terminator movie will return to the time-traveling format again, and almost certainly retconn this film's continuity.

Movie: Newsies (Own it, but gorram if I can ever find it)

This is the first movie I ever saw with Christian Bale in it, and it still gets trotted out for a viewing every  few months. Heck, as a music kid in high school I knew a lot of girls who liked nothing more than associating with guys able to sing "Santa Fe" soulfully, so this movie has made a lot of hay throughout my life. For those of you who don't know, Newsies is a period musical set in New York City at the close of the nineteenth century and follows the rousers of a strike of newsboys against the mongering gigantic newspapers controlling their fate. Christian Bale plays their charismatic leader, Jack Kelly, and accordingly spends much of the Disney flick brooding in a pop-musical style. Which means, unlike his future Batman brooding, there was a lot of dancing alone and smoldering on iron catwalks and fire escapes--okay, maybe that's a little like Batman, after all. The film is really well done and infectiously catchy if you're even remotely susceptible to the genre, and Bale's portrayal of Jack Kelly is a neat compromise of sort of popular pretty boy charm and self-serving gregariousness--something few actors could capture so easily between musical numbers, let alone a teenager, but Bale does it expertly. It plays so well in the moments where Jack squares off against sinister Joseph Pulitzer, played by Robert Duvall, or even in the scenes where the impoverished gnat rails against the corporate giant. One of my favorite examples of this:

In a movie full of great, energetic and upbeat performances in a really fairly dark plot, Bale stands out and carries his scenes like a veteran despite how incredibly early this was in his career. It's also a nice flick to watch to see a very different side of Bale--even his more artsy roles are still just in contrast to his action movie blockbusters, and there's very little to compare to a Disney lighthearted period musical.

Movie: 3:10 to Yuma (Own it. THE SPOILERS SHALL FLOW)

The 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma is one of my absolute favorite films. I mentioned it two years ago as a great Father's Day movie. A relatively cozy (in terms of plot analysis) western about a group of men from a small town trying to escort dangerous robber and gunman Ben Wade to a prison train, it contains great period action, great performances by the lead and supporting actors, and is an insane fatherhood tear-jerker. Christian Bale plays the protagonist Dan Evans, a one-legged rancher and family man on the verge of losing everything who decides to join the impromptu armed escort and try to stay one step ahead of Wade's ruthless gang hunting them. Wade, played by ember-eyed Russell Crowe, alternates between a happy rider and opportunistic murderer as they journey along, and the paradoxical role ends with Wade and Evans having an antagonistic but respectful bond at the end. As the rest of the escorts are killed or scared off, only the hobbled Evans has the courage and stubbornness to stay and try to see things through despite his terrible prospects. There's lots of great moments of ragged beauty in this film, but probably the greatest is the pathetic moment in which Evans explains what truly drives him in his suicidal-but-noble quest:

Oh, the sweet, sweet tragedy of this movie is so beautiful. In this moment, Dan Evans' disarming honesty and wounded nobility finally win Ben over, and in the final run of the two to the train station we see that he's also won over his son, William, making his final, sudden demise so much sadder and at the same time so much more admirable and inspiring. The movie's full of these dry bits of underplayed-but-poignant drama, with Bale the hero of the western without ever really trying too hard. Unique, masterful, and engrossing no matter how many times I man-cry through it.

Movie Web Monday will continue next week with a new actor, picking up with some other prolific player from the last movie listed above.

GM Tips: Scaring Your Players

GM Tips: It's easy to get into any number of RPGs as a new player, but getting started is a rocky, uphill battle for the Game Master, as he must wrangle player personalities, schedules, and the rules of the system in addition to developing his own plot. Hopefully, a few personal lessons will ease your GMing burden, or at least illustrate how one nerd shoulders the burden of the Game Master.

Last week I mentioned that I wanted to follow up on a search hit with GM tips for scaring one's players. With Halloween this weekend, now's as great a time as any to share my thoughts on the subject and impart a little advice. At first I had planned on sharing tactics to evoke a variety of emotions, but to keep this post focused I wanted to pare things down to scaring your RPG group. Fear is one of the harder emotions to evoke around the game table, so it's all the more important.

When players come together to play a tabletop RPG, they do so to entertain each other and socialize in a shared, imaginative experience. But that means that every role-player is interested in a certain amount of  goofing off and chit-chatting. That's fine, but it makes fear more elusive because your players' mindsets are in the wrong gear. Fear is about anxiety, and anxiety is an emotionally taxing state--it requires your constant attention and imagination. A horror movie or video game can cheat anxiety by throwing a grotesque image or gore at the audience, but in an RPG session this tack can be problematic--and smelly. The GM needs to be deliberate and reactive to his players to keep them afraid for their characters.

While I haven't led a lot of horror-focused games, all of my campaigns have featured fear and suspense as important factors. My current RPG campaign in particular--the one in the Myth setting--is thematically built on three pillars of tragedy, duty, and horror. I've also played and led a few games in a low-powered mortals campaign of World of Darkness, with all The X-Files creepy goodness that went with it. So I've stretched these GM muscles a bit in the past. There's a lot of interactivity in an RPGs, obviously, so anything you do needs to be tailored and responsive to your group. An easy shortcut to tailoring is to find out what other stories your players like. Do they like psychological horror? Throw thought puzzles and philosophical paradoxes at them. Do they like gory violent schlock? Give them a red-shirt or two and have them die in meticulously detailed scenes. Responding to your players is about two things: correcting wrong assumptions you made in the tailoring process and letting your players have a legitimate sway over the direction of the plot. This is the balancing act of fear in an RPG--your players want to exert control over the plot, and in so doing they are out to destroy any atmosphere of horror you might create.

Tell The Story

This is a fundamental issue for most RPG sessions. GMing a campaign involves a lot of work: mapping out locations; plotting out characters and adversaries; hammering out the mechanics of player options in-game. But once everyone is at the table, you're all involved in a storytelling experience, so don't forget to tell the story. Tell the frakking story. Don't give your players a mechanic or stat-value unless they have a description to justify it--and sometimes if you give your players a thorough description of the action, you can make some of the mechanics unnecessary. And don't fall into the trap of describing only the mechanically important elements of the story. It may be important that the room has a conveniently heavy desk near the only door, but does it have pictures on it? What about interior decoration? Do the drawers have paperwork that might entice the player characters to waste time investigating? These details help create a three-dimensional story that draws the players in and helps put them in a place where they're more likely to feel the tension and fear you're trying to create. Yeah, you need to do some legwork to get your players into the right mood for your fear-mongering to settle. Deal with it.

Don't Name It!

By this, I mean don't use the official rules-related name for your game's adversaries. This is especially important when your players might have a good idea of what a NPC is capable of once they get the monster's name (a particular problem for DnD groups), but it applies pretty much whenever that antagonist's name or title will give a hasty shorthand of their capabilities and/or motivations. Nothing kills the mystery of your average monster as much as seeing its Playboy spread. Sure, it might be convenient to refer to that level 3 Ghoul as such, but once your bring your monster into the light, you generally can't convince your players that it's a silhouette again. So don't name your monster unless it's absolutely necessary: that isn't a zombie--it's a twitching, pallid trucker in a torn plaid shirt and broken fingertips; that isn't a ghost--it's a flickering cloud of sighs and soft crunching of bones. This ties in with telling the story, as filling out archetypal NPCs with detailed, unique descriptions are a good way to add depth to your players' investment in the story.

Extending this principal beyond the monster's appearance and name, you can take this as a reminder not to give your players cozy answers to unsettling mysteries. Most serial killers and real-life horrors are scary because of the fickle, unfathomable motivations behind their acts. Only a GM, speaking with the voice of God, can give you that authoritative answer of firmly knowing that person X did for Y reason. Any person speaking with limited knowledge in your setting can only speculate what made your game's bogeyman don a slicker and go on a killing-spree, and that will make the thrill of hunting him down all the more tense for them.

Secret Dice Rolls

This is a simple one. I'm a firm believer in hiding things from players, especially to create a scary atmosphere. This dovetails with not sharing your monster's names with your players, as it's often important that your players don't know what certain dice results are. For example, if your players are making a check to detect whether that suspicious groundskeeper is telling the truth, it'd be pretty pointless if they got to see if their dice results yielded a success of failure in the 'detect lies' skill. Roll those dice in secret and then accordingly lie to the players about how charismatic and helpful the scraggly man is, and about how his offer of hospitality seems totally genuine. One of the potentially most immersion-breaking aspects of a tabletop RPG is getting to see how your dice fare--a meta-game indicator--rather than having to rely on the subjective report of actual effects--an in-game indicator.

I also like to sometimes extend this to making extra rolls in secret--that is, I roll the dice behind my GM screen for no point other than to make my players anxious. What was Ben rolling? Did we just spring a trap? If we did, why aren't we being attacked yet? What's following us? We should explore this room more. Maybe this NPC isn't everything he said he was. It's a way of subverting some of the mechanics of the tabletop experience to create a pavlovian response in your game group--secret rolls are a source of player-based tension, so it can be used to enhance the fear the characters should be exhibiting. Use sparingly--and not too much immediately after blogging about it.

Minimize Mechanics

Dice rolling and game mechanics are fun and deserve to form the lynchpin of your average RPG. But they're logical (hopefully), fair (most of the time), and balanced (somewhat), which are not really conducive to fear. When your players are thinking of game mechanics, they're thinking about modifiers, odds, and binary choices to narrow down the most likely route to success. They aren't thinking about mysteries or the mental image of the floating corpse with its lungs ripped out through his throat. And that's too bad. So do yourself a favor as a GM trying to scare your players by minimizing mechanics. Try not to look into your ten-pound gaming encyclopedia at the game table--if you can't remember a rule, wing it and double-check later. This won't work with some players without a good amount of persuasion, but I find it's a super helpful way to get players invested in the mood you're creating.

Add variety to the stakes

I hate saving the world. It seems like every movie, television show, comic, and game out there is interested in saving the world. Don't get me wrong, the world has some nice things to offer, but it's pretty boring to have stakes that are consistently raised to the max all the time. And it's also kind of hard to imagine what saving the world feels like, really. It ends up just being a ham-handed way for GMs to say that the players are now "Over 9,000!!!" How do they know they've reached the final boss? The GM gives them a narrative that it's all come down to this, the armies of the world are arrayed, and the final battle is about to begin. Then Shang Tsung descends and says "Fight!" and the players wade into a big arena fight with an over-powered yet obviously flawed boss character.

No thank you. How about a campaign to save only yourselves? That's a great horror objective. Or to save a loved one, if you have characters who aren't orphan-murder-hobos like those that are typically played in your average RPG? Or what about when the stakes are uncertain? Is this hostile trying to rob us, mug us, murder us, or kidnap us? Making the objective of the enemy uncertain throws a wrench into what retaliation is acceptable for the players, and that not only makes them hesitate but makes them internalize the details of the plot to digest the fearful elements better.

Also, the big bad doesn't need to be more powerful than the players. Making a threat boil down to someone who's simply more ruthless than everyone around him, or who has a better plan, or is more tactically cowardly, can be a lot more interesting than the huge thing that trades blows with the four champions of the free peoples of the world.

Control (or at least be mindful of) Ambience

I never GM a game without music in the background. I use it to set the mood of the game and also to fill in the silences in the action of game sessions. It's important to pick music that is spooky, scary, or terrifying and queue it up as needed to give your players the creeps, but I also think it's equally important to pick something that isn't too on the nose and overly popular. The Halloween theme is chilling, but everyone knows it and is inured to it, whether from seeing the movie too many times or from going to one too many Fright-Fests at Six Flags. Pick something relatively obscure and let it fine-tune your ambience. Also, remember that ambience is about more than just music. If you can, think about changing around your game room to make it spookier--dimmer lighting, closed doors, and even what's on your game shelf behind you can modify players' moods in your gaming space.



So those are my quick and dirty tips for GMs interested in scaring their players. Take your time to tell your story, go out of your way not to label your threats, use secret dice rolls, minimize the game and maximize the story, add variety to the stakes, and remember your ambience.

The SHIELD That Could Have Been

I think I've done a fair-to-decent job of confirming my status as a Marvel fan. I've now written detailed reviews of five of their movies (Thor, Captain America, X-men: First Class, Avengers, and Iron Man 3), and I've plugged their Marvel Unlimited online comic service. In my haul of swag from my C2E2 2013 roundup, you saw that I'd bought a half dozen pieces of Marvel art and literature, and that's only a modest addition to my collection of Marvel stuff that I haven't mentioned on the blog before. I have at least a dozen Marvel t-shirts, and I'm proud to say I have Captain America plates, coasters, and even boxer briefs. And if anything ever were to drive me to exhibitionism, I'm pretty sure it'd be my love for those Captain America undies. Except when I'm changing at the gym and I forget I wore the Cap skivvies that day--then it can be awkward. But you get the idea.

I love the Marvel characters, the major arcs (even when I don't), and I love what they're doing with the cinematic universe. But sometimes loving someone means caring enough when to tell them when they suck. Marvel made the movies Daredevil, Wolverine Origins, and Ghost Rider; there's no escaping that. But that's nothing compared to that one time they tried to make a SHIELD television series.

Yes, that's right. Agents of SHIELD is not the first attempt to bring the Marvel espionage organization onto the small screen. In 1998, Fox aired a made-for-television movie starring the director of SHIELD when he was but a mere agent. It's clear that the film was meant as a television pilot, but thankfully the world dodged that bullet and nothing more came of it. It did get released on DVD a decade later, becoming instant bargain bin fodder for Marvel nerds with $5.28 burning a hole in their pocket, and thereby allowing me to inflict it upon you.

"Except when I'm changing at the gym and I forget I wore the Cap skivvies that day--then it can be awkward. But you get the idea."

Let me stress that this DVD that I own is a total cheap cash-in on the success of Iron Man. How bad of a cash-in? Well, it goes right down to the fundamentals of SHIELD--an acronym that remains constant despite representing five or more titles over the years. In the plot of Iron Man, they established the current full title for SHIELD: the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. This is the full name that is dropped on the back of the DVD case. But, being made in the late 90s, this explanation for SHIELD hadn't been used yet, and in the very movie they drop that it stands for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-enforcement Division (and that was actually outdated in the comics as of 1991, too). So the people blurbing the back of my DVD of this little gem didn't even bother to pay attention to the movie, and that's assuming they had the cajones to actually sit through it.

Now before you think about how intensely critical I can be, let me give you a rundown of the movie. First we have a terrible call-to-action scene, in which it seems two SHIELD mooks--one of them a traitor working for Hydra--are the only guards for a detention facility that houses the cryogenically frozen remains of Baron Strucker, a Macguffin-cicle whose DNA is the secret to a biological holocaust weapon called the Death's Head. When the shady mook shoots the legitimate SHIELD guard, Hydra waltzes into the base and shows how this is the easiest key-to-doomsday in the history of the genre. Five minutes into the film, with no protagonists introduced, the villains already have everything they need to accomplish their terrible goals. Fortunately for Nick Fury, the bad guys want to dick around and showcase staggering incompetence on both sides for 80 minutes, which leads us to our hero...

Pick-axing in a cave. No one else around, no visible machinery to process whatever he might find. No explanation other than the hand-waved assumption that Cold War badass spies must find manual mining a therapeutic retirement hobby. Plus, Nick Fury is played by David Hasselhoff, and it's a great opportunity to establish one of the primary themes of the show: Nick Fury sweats pretty much all the time. At least by setting Fury's golden years (hehehe, see what I did there?) in the Yukon, this movie departs from bad television form by at least having one scene filmed in the right country. Everything is clearly Toronto forests and studios, whether it's the European op or the eventual attack on New York--or generic American city with buildings up to three stories high and a really fuzzy New York skyline dropped in.

In case you've never seen rural Canada before, this is what it looks like.
Also a good substitute for every television location ever...

Fury also gets to show off his remarkably-adroit-but-toothless combat skills. Angry at having his daily communion with the rock interrupted, good ol' Nick runs out into blinding daylight and proceeds to kick the keester of the poor prissy schmuck standing there: British agent Alexander Pierce. Nick kicks the guy in the low chest for an opener, lays a fist across the face of the dry-skinned buffoon, and then flips him hard onto the rock-strewn ground. Pierce gets up and has not a mark to show for it. And besides a slight pant that may be from getting the faintest drubbing of all time or may simple be British indignance, Pierce is able to then hold up a conversation perfectly fine.

Our titular hero wastes no time in establishing that this Fury is so badass he isn't afraid to sound stupid, provided he confines his language to a hard-G or soft-PG rating. "You're gonna have to tell SHIELD to shove one up their collective end-zones," in response to Pierce letting Fury know he's been reactivated. He uses the classy term "sexpionage" to introduce female lead Contessa Fontaine to the audience and establish that he is too masculine to think that using that sort of terminology might inhibit his chances to suck the beauty mark off her face by film's end. Later, to mock the over-accredited Pierce he chest-kicked as a d-bag howdy-doody, Fury cracks, "How's your needlepoint?" Or "When the Iron Curtain was sent to the cleaners I was suddenly out of style." And when he's in the scariest MRI machine envisioned by man:

So...much...chest hair.

And, best of all, when he's introduced to the team's completely useless psychic and she mentions that her powers are heightened by implants, he conspicuously checks out her mammalian bits so that she has to specify that her telepathy is heightened by neural implants. Oh well, if the setting has Jean Grey, Emma Frost, and Betsy Braddock, you could understand how he might think bra size might correlate to ESP potential.

Also let me take a moment to mock the realization of the helicarrier in this boondoggle. The SHIELD mobile headquarters looks like that of an helicarrier-via-erector-set, or more accurately like a model badly cobbled together from sets of two or more different scales. It's dumb, ugly, bulky, and gives no sense whatsoever of how big the helicarrier actually is since no useful details can really be discerned.

Anyways, back to the plot, as it stands. About forty minutes after the baddies waltzed in to secure their Death's Head freezer pop, they issue a demand for one billion dollars or they will unleash their super-virus on Manhattan. Now, I don't know how money transfers of this scale work--I never worked that high up in banking--but I do know that the national deficit of the US at the time was around five trillion dollars. So in my mind a one billion dollar demand is fairly easy when you're threatening to kill off about three percent of the nation's people in one blow (later they suddenly inflate the bad guys' scheme to imperil forty million people, so that's more like one-sixth of the US population at the time). Nobody talks about paying the amount anyways, and they immediately have their psychic Agent Obvious tell them that the crazy blonde daughter of Baron Strucker has no intention of accepting the ransom anyways. So they give a ransom demand only to immediately invalidate it as irrelevant to the plot in the same scene. Well, at least they padded the movie with another two minutes while giving the bad guys a chance to tip their hand to their enemies.

The good guys follow the recommendation of Nick Fury, their dunce-in-the-hole, and seek out Arnim Zola so the bad guys can boost him under their noses and then give the Hoffster a poisoned kiss. Hitting all the bases here. Nick gets a terminal diagnosis that conveniently has no cure but Madame Hydra's blood and on a deadline that neatly coincides with Hydra's doomsday plot anyways.

Hot on the heels of Nick's bad judgement getting him sally-straddled by a one hundred-ten-pound blonde with poison lipstick, the rest of the protagonists still decide to follow his plan and split into two teams for the finale of this movie. Contessa "Do-these-lips-make-my-face-look-small" Fontaine leading a bunch of redshirts in a search for a deadly virus-carrying refrigerated garbage truck, while Nick, Irrelevant Psychic, and Agent British go after the enemy command center. Contessa's team basically owns by fiat after she surprises a Hydra goon playing wall-ball instead of guarding by substituting his ball with the world's weakest hand grenade. Seriously, the grenade barely disintegrates itself and does like no damage to the goon, but he and several adjacent guards go down anyways.

Nick's team gets all the excitement. First, the two junior agents watch as the ailing Fury takes out multiple guards with his fists while they have (apparently) silenced weapons handy that they use later on. Then the trio get held up by laser sensors for about two seconds before Agent British busts out his Laser Repellant and they slip through to meet a lone goon waiting for Fury to ask, "How's Hydra's dental plan?" A few more unexciting exchanges later, the eponymous hero is confronted with the dreaded does-the-doomsday-password-end-in-six-or-nine puzzle. As the final twenty seconds on the countdown burn through precious moments of my life that I'll never get back, Irrelevant Psychic is no help and allows Fury to heroically waffle on the six-nine decision until the timer hits maximum drama. The villainness is then caught, Arnim Zola shoots himself with the most fiddly booby-trapped gun ever, and Fury gets to drop a "pop-cicle" joke before Madame Hydra escapes with her father in the world's slowest elevator.

Eat this, Adam West's Batman!!!

What's most amazing to me about Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD is how many recognizable names are in the credits of the movie. David S. Goyer wrote the script--about the same time he was doing the original Blade script and seven years before Batman Begins. Director Rod Hardy has captained episodes of The Mentalist, Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files, and JAG, so it's not like he hasn't met with televised success before or after this particular feature. And there are several forever-supporting actors that you're likely to recognize. Ron Canada, Tom McBeath, and Gary Chalk, for instance, all have significant television resumes that include Stargate SG-1, for whatever nerd-cred that presents in your opinion. And yet this movie blows so completely that no one thought to make it a DVD until ten years after the fact when it was certainly forgotten and could cleanly trade on the name established by the first Iron Man movie. Does the Hoff really drag a production down that much? Specifically, does chest hair and peculiar sweat scenes drag a production down that much?

I doubt it. As much as I want to pan Hasselhoff specifically, I can't. This movie/pilot was a conceptual failure from the start. SHIELD exists as the interconnecting web of global plots in the Marvel universe, and trying to make a story about SHIELD when there was no established greater Marvel universe to connect was inherently dumb. Like trying to interior decorate a house that's under construction, SHIELD has no place without a stable of superheroes hedging them in. With one very irrelevant exception, Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD had no superpowers whatsoever, and made no references to any superhumans of either good or bad moral persuasion.

"Fortunately for Nick Fury, the bad guys want to dick around and showcase staggering incompetence on both sides for 80 minutes..."

But I'm thankful for Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, and I'm glad I own it. As a fan of the Fox-aborted television series Space: Above and Beyond, Firefly, and Drive, it's nice to see that at least one decision to pan a new television series was not only justified, but may have saved the free world. Consider: if this show had been allowed to continue instead of purged with fire, the mainstream Marvel movies that would be coming out in the next few years, X-Men and Spider-Man, would've had to cater to the show's creative decisions in some way. Those movies would have suffered for it, Marvel's comic-distribution wouldn't have gotten the boost it did from those movies' popularity, and they never would have been in a position to take a risk to the tune of $50 million on Iron Man or any of the other Avengers-related films. Robert Downey Jr. wouldn't have been thrown into the public light as an all around awesome human being and nerd despite his Hollywood chops. Samuel L. Jackson's highest profile nerdy role would remain Mace Windu. Hugh Jackman would still be kicking around the Australian stage. And Scarlett Johansson would be flitting around art movies getting paired up with creepy old men for romantic interests instead of becoming a genre-crossing meta-hottie.

My goodness, I am thankful for Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD. And I'm thankful for David Hasselhoff--without him, somebody might've decided the show was worth picking up, and that would be an evil too dark and terrible to imagine.