And, of course, the iPad. For this, we go to video…
Moon (2009)
Starring Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligott, Rosie Shaw, Kaya Scodelario, Sam Rockwell, Benedict Wong and Matt Berry
Written and Directed by Duncan Jones
Music by Clint Mansell
If there’s one movie from 2009 that I regret missing during its theatrical run, that movie would have to be G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra, because director Stephen Sommers clearly subscribes to the Michael Bay school of filmmaking: lots of things moving very quickly (often in slow motion, which may or may not be ironic) and oh, the explosions. G.I. JOE is just the sort of spectacle movie theaters—with their digitally-projected images on forty-foot screens and their booming surround sound—are designed for.
Moon, on the other hand, is a quiet movie. Sure, there’s a robot (GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey), and there are giant, futuristic machines; there’s even a moon base with artificial gravity and lots of sexy control panels. But nothing—absolutely nothing—explodes. A lunar rover crashes, yes. But it doesn’t explode. There is a fight that results in a character bleeding, to be sure. But neither character involved in the fracas is a mute ninja (or any other kind of ninja, for that matter) and not once does the action slip into slo-mo to emphasize how incredibly awesome that fight is. Oh, and the giant, futuristic machines don’t turn into robots, nor is the robot (which remains a robot at all times) an unstoppable killing machine.
[This gets a bit spoilery.]
What Moon has instead of explosions and ninja fights is Sam Rockwell, who is an acting ninja. Rockwell’s character, Sam Bell, is nearing the end of a three-year contract with Lunar Industries, a company that harvests Helium-3—a vital energy source—from the moon’s surface and packs it up in canisters which are then shipped to Earth. Sam has spent two weeks shy of three years alone on the far side of the moon, tending the Helium-3 harvesters—giant, roving machines mildly reminiscent of the spice harvesters in Dune. Sam’s only companion in the moon base is a robot named GERTY and, due to a malfunctioning satellite, live communication with Earth has been impossible for nearly the entire length of his contract; the only way he can communicate with other human beings is through recorded messages that are bounced off a relay satellite orbiting Jupiter. With only two weeks remaining in his contract, Sam is eager to return to Earth, his wife, and a daughter he has never met.
Unfortunately, Sam is going a bit stir crazy. He has begun to see things that aren’t there, and it’s becoming a bit of a distraction; so much so that he crashes his lunar rover into the back of a Helium-3 harvester. Injured and trapped, the last thing Sam sees is the lunar regolith kicked up by the harvester covering the rover’s cracked viewport.
Sam awakens in the moon base’s infirmary with no recollection of the crash. GERTY informs him that there was a minor incident with one of the harvesters, and in a recorded message Sam’s superiors at Lunar Industries order him to remain in the base to recover; a rescue team is en route to handle the stalled harvester. Restless, Sam convinces GERTY to let him out of the base to check the outer shell for meteorite damage, then hops in another rover and drives out to the scene of the accident.
As expected, Sam finds the crashed rover and the stalled harvester. He also finds himself, injured but still alive, trapped inside the rover. That’s when things get interesting.
In all honesty, I really do wish that I’d seen Moon on the big screen. It doesn’t have the flash and bang that makes me forget I’m in an auditorium surrounded by chatty people with cell phones, but there’s a visual depth that my poor, old 27″ RCA television doesn’t quite manage to bring across. Watching Moon a second time on my PC (with commentary by director Duncan Jones and producer Stuart Fenegan—totally worth watching, by the way) I noticed a lot of little details that I missed on my first viewing.
It’s entirely possible, though, that some of the little visual details were overlooked because I was watching Sam Rockwell, who delivers an excellent performance, which then turns into two excellent performances after Sam Bell quite literally finds himself. Rockwell is utterly convincing in his portrayal of two men who are identical—apart from the fact that they’re separated by three years of loneliness, three years of being physically and technologically unable to interact with another human being, three years of learning to come to grips with one’s own frailties, and three years of living a colossal, cruel lie.
Rockwell’s ninja acting is aided by visual effects and trickery that are nearly flawless—whether the trick is convincing the eye, ear and mind of the audience that there are two Sams interacting with one another or painting a believable portrait of the barren and desolate lunar landscape—and a beautiful, haunting musical score by Clint Mansell. All the elements—story, performance, visuals and music—are blended into a single original, thought-provoking and heartbreaking film that manages to be an entirely different kind of spectacle; one without explosions or car chases or the need to check your brain at the door.
Rating: 5 out 5 Sam Rockwells.
Guest post by Matt Perrin
For years now, I have been eagerly following the development of Star Trek Online and gleaning whatever news I could gather. From its awkward, failed start at P2 Entertainment to the license’s transition to Cryptic Studios in early 2008 I have been hoping not for a “Warcraft-Killer”, but for something new and exciting in the MMO genre. Could Cryptic actually deliver a compelling Star Trek game where players take part in galaxy sized events? Could Cryptic get past the grind heavy mechanics of its previous games like City of Heroes? Would Cryptic’s obligations to deliver Champions Online in 2009 hinder Star Trek Online’s development?
What Cryptic finally delivered with Star Trek Online is essentially two games in one heavily stylized package. Star Trek Online gives the player a very authentic Star Trek setting with all the special effects, computer displays and sounds that bring you into the experience. If the thought of LCARS displays or Okudagrams gets you fired up then you will feel right at home in the User Interface. The game itself is primarily divided between a planetary Ground component lifted from Cryptic’s Champions Online engine and a Space component that evokes memories of the venerable Starfleet Command series of games. But that duality between a player’s avatar and ship causes the game to feel disjointed and I found the Space-based game play to be significantly more polished than the Ground-based missions.
I just want to take a moment to comment on the overall state of the Open Beta. I am here writing this the morning of January 23, 2010, during the last weekend of the Open Beta, and I still have random disconnects during zoning. For days now, when I attempt to zone between sectors, beam between my ship and a planet or starbase or even take a turbolift to new zone there’s a chance you will be disconnected. I have seen the screen below way more than I should at this late stage of Beta.
It seems to be rather late in the development cycle to be dealing with what I consider to be a critical issue for players. By Cryptic’s own admission, they got slammed unexpectedly by the number of players participating in the Open Beta and did not plan their server infrastructure accordingly. What makes me raise a skeptical eyebrow at this is that Cryptic are the ones controlling the number of Beta keys in circulation as well as having all the metrics on the keys being activated or requested through Beta Applications. And even with crushing server problems and players unable to login or maintain a connection, Cryptic is still handing out Beta Keys on their Twitter feed this morning!
I am sure that Cryptic is sitting on a super-server cluster for Star Trek Online’s launch day but promises of ordering additional hardware for the Open Beta appear to have never been fulfilled. And even with a limit on the number of active players and instanced zones, lag and dropped connections is still a very serious problem in the game, especially during ground missions.
I am going to jump right in and discuss the Ground missions within Star Trek Online as I feel this is the weakest point of the gameplay experience. Star Trek Online’s Ground missions are typical MMO fare and if you have played Champions Online you will notice the similarities immediately. Other than the Star Trek reskinning of the User Interface, every other facet is essentially the Champions Online engine and game play mechanics being reused. Some of the new additions are the ability to flank enemies, deliver extra damage or even the ability to incapacitate or expose enemies to a coup de grace attack which can immediately vaporize them. Players may also include their bridge officers in the away team and allow them to use their special Ground classified attacks and abilities during the missions. For example, bringing a Science class bridge officer on an away team may offer an ability to recharge shields faster or heal physical damage.
All players and NPCs on the mission have the typical MMO slots for armor, weapons and personal shields but one interesting option is to equip the player with special Kits. Essentially, Kits are super-abilities on a lengthy timer. For engineer Players, Kits include the ability to beam down phaser turrets or shield generators. For Tactical player Kits include area of effect weapons like photon grenades and devastating charged shots. For Science players, Kits include buff and debuff abilities that can strip away enemy shields & resistances. As your character advances in rank, Kits will include more than one ability, but with a limitation that only one can be activate at any given time.
All of this sounds pretty good, and as a player beaming down with yourself and a small contingent of officers on a mission to wipe out a Klingon listening post can be fun but whether you are solo or in a team with other players, there is crippling lag constantly affecting the gameplay. I would not expect this at all given the fact that only a handful of players (5 at the most) are in an instance at any given time and that walking through the corridors of a space station versus a large expansive outdoor setting should barely tax the engine. But time and time again, I found myself at the mercy of lag and sudden bursts of activity from the game where I would be near death or running into a wall or mob of enemies that appeared from nowhere. I recently played Champions Online and even in an instance with 20 players running around simultaneously, beating up thugs in the distance, I never saw performance this poor. And given that its essentially the same engine, I expected a far better experience than I had. This is almost a complete polar opposite to what I have found in the Fleet Action space battles, where I’ve flown with 20 allies against swarms of Klingon ships or engaged Naussican raiders in a dense asteroid field and had a rock solid frame rate and experience.
In comparison to the Ground campaign, I found the Space campaign to be an absolute thrill to play. Players start off with a fairly basic ship and can choose from three styles of hull; the Miranda-class vessel that was introduced in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the Centaur and ShiKahr hulls. As your first ship, all three hulls are the same and give the player the ability to customize 2 fore weapon hard points, 1 aft weapon hard point, and a selection of ship components including shields, engines and consoles. As part of the load out, players are also allowed to assign 3 bridge officers, one of each class (Engineering, Tactical and Science) to their bridge crew and use their special abilities during combat. This ability to swap out bridge officers is a critical component to the space combat and I found myself keeping several officers on standby when I would change tactics or weapons and need specific abilities to knock out enemy shields or overload my torpedoes.
Space combat itself is fairly straightforward. Move into 10 kilometers of range, target the enemy and press the Spacebar to fire all energy based weapons that can hit the target or press Ctrl and Spacebar together to fire torpedoes or mines. The UI also features buttons for Fire All or firing weapons individually but going to keyboard route or assigning the firing buttons to extra buttons on your mouse is the best way to go. Sounds simple enough but where the game goes from boring to tactical splendor is that the player must keep the enemy within the firing arc of their weapons, watch their energy usage and perform maneuvers in space that keep their damaged shields away from enemy fire so that the stronger ones can absorb their hits. Pulling off this “dance” takes a fair bit of practice but Star Trek Online doesn’t shy away from giving you opportunities to destroy pesky Borg or Klingon foes. The game features a random mission generator and players are able to quickly find quests and wandering enemies to keep themselves busy without the need to visit a quest giver on some far flung starbase.
As players level up through the ranks, they will unlock new tiers of starship hulls (including the Defiant, the Galaxy, the Sovereign and the Constellation hulls) that allow them to specialize into damage dealing roles (tactical escorts), tank roles (engineering cruisers) or status affecting buff/debuff roles (science vessels). Players aren’t pigeon holed into one branch though, and I’ve seen my fair share of science vessels cutting apart enemy ships with disruptor cannons and quantum torpedoes. As well as new ships, players also have the ability to improve their Ground- and Space-based abilities by assigning skill points to improving their stats and promoting and assigning skill points to their bridge officers as well. This becomes extremely interesting as bridge officers unlock new abilities as they increase in rank as well.
All of this customization means that no ship, no crew and no captain will ever be exactly the same and that there is literally a universe of options to consider in both the Ground and Space portions of the game. All of this uniqueness, though, carries a cost…
There is, unfortunately, a big problem understanding exactly how all the little customization pieces in Star Trek Online actually work together. As you progress through the game, especially during the space missions, you’ll be rewarded with new items and weapons that have stats with no explanations as to what they do. It’s the Techno-babble problem that made some of the newer Star Trek series a mess to watch and now Cryptic has created a game where bonuses and attributes have no explanation.
For example, here’s two items I found during combat. The item on the left is what I have currently equipped on my starship but I recently found this “better” version on the right. The item on the right is worth more, is a “Mark 2” but there is no in game documentation about what effect “Starship Emitters” are or what the difference is between “Starship Sensors” or the “Starship Sensor Array”. And since I have no bridge officer abilities that use the Tractor Beam option, the item on the right appears to actually weaken my ship’s abilities overall.
Here’s another example. Again, the item on the left is the one I have equipped. Both weapons are “Energy” based but is there a difference between the Phaser and Disruptor weapon types? I assumed the firing arc and damage rate were the only differences but there are undocumented bonuses for all of the energy based weapons. Some inflict extra damage to shields, some penetrate shields better, some disable subsystems better and some have damage over time capability.
While the tutorial mission performs admirably in getting players up to speed on the basics, there is a strata of intermediate game play and techniques that are never taught to players. Simple tricks like right-clicking to set one fore and one aft weapon hard point to auto-fire are found by digging through the message board forums. Learning how to drop missions (Press J, then click Drop) or even assign bridge officers is never covered and can be found by asking for help in the chat room. A popular meme throughout the Beta has been “Where’s Sulu?” in reference to Akira Sulu, a patrol quest giver located in the Admiral’s office in the Sol starbase that new players have been consistently unable to find due to poor or inadequate text descriptions. Perhaps it’s a by-product of Star Trek Online’s rapid development cycle but it appears that a lot of corners were cut on the end product to get it shipped out in early 2010 ahead of the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm, and Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO in 2011.
And for all of its problems, the bugs, the crashes, the broken quests… I can’t stop playing STO. I am absolutely hooked on the space combat and how solo friendly Cryptic has made the game. It seems sort of strange to be playing an MMO and staying isolated but Star Trek Online’s automatic instance grouping means that you rally into a mission with a few other humans and without the endless “LFG” text messages. Just play the game and as you go you’ll find yourself working with other to take down Klingon battleships or pursuing Undine infiltrators. It’s a social abstraction that lets Star Trek Online almost become a casual game and lets people not interested in huge guilds or party planning participate in those galactic events I was hoping Cryptic could handle.
So, it’s not a perfect game and it’s not going to scratch every itch but I have confidence in Cryptic to make this something special. The ground missions might be rather pedestrian but if you’ve ever wanted to take command of the Defiant and blast quantum torpedoes into the side of a Borg cube or remember the Starfleet Command series then this might just be the game for you. But for $15 a month on top of the $50 – $60 initial purchase, there could be a point where a player becomes bored with what the game can offer in its current state if Cryptic flounders on the promised episodic style content.
I think it’s safe to say that Overlord Miller is not a fan of the horror genre, though he does make the occasional exception where suave nosferatu and earthbound seraphim are concerned. By and large, his tolerance (or perhaps appetite) for grisly death and gore is significantly lower than mine. Despite this, I often suspect that Overlord Miller’s latent capacity for violence is greater than mine. I have neither anecdotal nor empirical evidence to bolster this suspicion, but there’s a reason I make a point of walking behind Overlord Miller whenever possible:1 I don’t want to be the first thing he sees when he eventually snaps and goes on a convention-wide killing spree.
Whereas Overlord Miller is a seething cauldron of barely-contained fury and does not enjoy a good on-screen splatterfest, I have all the pent-up rage of a two-week-old kitten and likes me some cinematic blood and guts. It ought not surprise anyone, therefore, to learn that it was I—and not Overlord Miller—who watched three Friday the 13th films in the last four days.
I don’t claim to be a connoisseur of horror films in general, nor of the Friday the 13th franchise specifically, but I do enjoy watching Jason Voorhees dispatch a camp of college students from time to time.2 The machete-wielding giant in the hockey mask, more than any of his ilk (Leatherface, Michael Meyers, Freddy Krueger), fascinates me. To me, Jason Voorhees is the bipedal equivalent of a giant crocodile, and we all know how I feel about giant crocodiles.
Or rather, Jason Voorhees was the bipedal equivalent of a giant crocodile until he got rebooted.3 In Friday the 13th (2009), Jason is pretty much the deformed love child of Alan “Dutch” Schaefer and Angus MacGyver; instead of an implacable, lumbering, unstoppable murder machine, the new Voorhees is a nimble, stealthy survivalist whose lair at Camp Crystal Lake is rigged with traps, an elaborate alarm system and a guest suite.4
While I could hardly argue that New Jason5 fails to get the job done (where “the job” is killing camps of horny, pot-smoking college kids), the way he goes about it lacks a certain je nais se quoi. Okay, that’s not true; I know exactly what New Jason lacks: inevitability. There’s something about the way Old Jason6 moves that speaks of a deadly inevitability; it doesn’t matter how fast you can run or how clever you are, he’s going to get you eventually. Old Jason lumbers tortoise-like, where New Jason dashes to and fro like a hare. Granted, New Jason is a hare with a machete, but the simple fact of the matter is that he doesn’t evoke the sense that he’s simply not going to stop until he crosses that finish line.7
My personal favorite performance by Kane Hodder as Old Jason is probably the least-popular Friday the 13th installment among those who are true connoisseurs of the series: Jason X (2001). Also known as “Jason in Space”, the film begins in the far-flung future of 2010,8 when a captured Jason Voorhees is cryogenically frozen, and continues more than 400 years later when a group of students returns to a now-dead Earth (presumably on an archaeological field trip), finds the chilly killer and brings him back aboard their spaceship. Upon thawing him out, the students learn why Jason was put on ice in the first place: he’s pretty much impossible to kill. To make matters worse, Jason gets an “upgrade” about two-thirds of the way through the movie; down for the count after facing off against an ass-kicking android (Lisa Ryder), Jason is revived by a malfunctioning medical bay that uses nanobots to turn him into a nigh-invincible cyborg. Nothing but trouble, those nanobots.
Jason X may not be as gritty as some of its predecessors—I’ve dubbed it “novelty horror”—but Hodder’s Voorhees is perfect. He moves slowly with an occasional lethal burst of speed; he is an unrelenting, brutal killer, and he’s always turning up where his hapless victims least expect to find him. Jason Voorhees doesn’t need agility, cleverness or traps to do what he does. He’s not a cat or a spider; he’s a giant crocodile. And above all, he is inevitable.
Just in case you’ve been under a rock, author Neil Gaiman and singer/songwriter Amanda Palmer announced their engagement last week.
This is only tangentially related to the best picture I’ve seen in the last week, which must be shared. By astonishing coincidence, Gaiman and Palmer are also the subjects of the photo. What are the chances?
My fellow Overlord is all frothy about the new A-Team movie.
I’m sure the bromance between those four soldiers of fortune and their van might cause a few dedicated folks to seek out their local movie screens. For my part, I have only one thing to say.
Screw the A-Team. Where the hell is my Rockford Files movie?
Yes, I’m serious. The final moments of the trailer show just how asinine the A-Team movie is going to be: they are in a tank, which is falling from a blown-up airplane, and one of the merry band manages to shoot down the oncoming fighter jet with the tank-mounted machine guns. Really? I mean…REALLY? I’ve not seen anything so unbelievable since my brother had Optimus Prime fight Darth Vader back in 1982 on our bedroom floor.
That’s the problem with the remakes today: they are conceived of and written by twelve-year-olds. If we can find some adults, some people with both the skill to write a proper mystery AND have an appreciation for the studliness of Jim Rockford, we might have a blockbuster on our hands.
Jim Rockford was to the 1970s what Thomas Magnum was to the 1980s which was what Philip Marlowe was to the 1940s: the quintessential bachelor sleuth of his generation. Resourceful, witty, surviving on little more than charm and dogged perseverance, Jim Rockford was a real guy. He had a cool car, he wasn’t tied down. He lived out of a trailer in Malibu and preferred to talk his way out of trouble instead of meeting with with fists and a gun.
James Garner, when creating the role, said they he took his con-man character from Maverick and mixed it with a bit of Philip Marlowe. Fast-talking, wise-cracking, often confused and befuddled by the twists the cases took, Rockford was THE private eye many of my generation remember, usually from reruns on the local UHF station’s Sunday afternoon lineup.1.
From the Museum of Broadcast Communications:
The Rockford Files is generally regarded (along with Harry O) as one of the finest private eye series of the 1970s, and indeed of all time, consistently ranked at or near the top in polls of viewers, critics, and mystery writers. The series offered superbly-plotted mysteries, with the requisite amounts of action, yet it was also something of a revisionist take on the hard-boiled detective genre, grounded more in character than crime, and infused with humor and realistic relationships. Driven by brilliant writing, an ensemble of winning characters, and the charm of its star, James Garner, the series went from prime-time Nielsen hit in the seventies, to a syndication staple with a loyal cult following in the eighties, spawning a series of made-for-TV movie sequels beginning in 1994.
Rockford leaves an impression, and in this Overlord’s not-so-humble opinion, he deserves a revival. The franchise could be pure gold.
Assuming they get someone decent to write it.
And direct it.
And…
*pause*
Maybe I’m better off with my memories.
Each week, Overlord Johnson and I take a little time out of our day to review the surveillance footage of our minions. Here’s what we’ve found interesting this week:
I would like to submit for your consideration a card game that I have played for the majority of my life. It is a game that can and has been played with regular decks of playing cards, though it is more fun, in my humble opinion, with the cards made specifically for the game.
What is this game that has had such longevity that it hasn’t changed at all over the decades, whether you are referring to the rules or even the box it comes in?
As the back of the box says:
Dutch Blitz is such vonderful goot fun
For young folks – and old vones too.
Vhy you should see the vones who plays:
They gets in such a stew.Easy to learn – exciting to play.
For two or three or four.
And this for sure is vone such game,
That ain’t gonna be no bore.So now, sit down with your friend or kin,
And try this game to play.
Chust bet that vhen you get started vonc’t,
You’ll play for most the day!
As I said earlier, this game hasn’t changed at all over the years.1 The box is the same. The art is the same. The rules are the same. It’s a perfectly formed game, and one that I’ve enjoyed immensely. When I was at my FLGS,2 I was extremely excited to see this game sitting on the counter and immediately snatched up two boxes so I could introduce it to my kids.3 My lovely wife had already played this a few times with my parents, so she was as happy as I when I brought this home and slapped it on the table. We were playing in minutes.
“What’s this game all about?” you might say. It’s actually very simple. Each player has a deck of cards, consisting of four colors, and each color has 10 cards, numbering 1 – 10. The back of the decks are also differentiated by differently colored designs (green pump, red carriage, yellow bucket, and blue plow), so that each player can easily tell which cards are his or hers on the table.
“Why would you need to do that?” Well, because you’re all going to be building Dutch piles in the middle of the table. Have you ever played SkipBo? It’s very similar, but there’s no limit to the amount of Dutch piles that are being built. And, everyone is building off of everyone else’s. At the same time!
There are no turns in this game! Everyone is playing at the same time, as quickly as they can.
When you set up the game, you’re going to shuffle your individual deck. You’ll then deal onto the table three cards (five if it’s only a two player game), side by side, to form your Post piles. These are used to help move cards around. Then, you’ll deal out ten cards, face down, until you have your Blitz pile. Top card you’ll turn face up. This Blitz pile is the key to the game, in that this is the pile you’re trying to get rid of, whether by playing out on the Dutch piles in the middle of the table or by moving them onto your Post piles.4 What’s left in your hand is the Wood pile.
Now, you just wait for your opponent is ready, then someone counts down5 and you begin. At this point it’s similar to Solitaire, as you count out three cards from your Wood pile, flip them over, and see if the card plays. Do this as fast as you can, and when you’ve finally moved that tenth card off your Blitz pile, yell “BLITZ!” And believe me, you’ll yell it.
This is a frantic, fun game!
As for the number of players. While you can play with two, and it’s still fun, you can on occasion become “stuck,” where neither one can make a play. This never happens when 3 or 4 are playing. Also, you can play with more than four. Just get another set of Dutch Blitz cards, mark the back of the new set with X’s to differentiate from the other sets, and you’re off. Play with six or eight people is even more fun.
You can also play this game with regular decks of cards. Just make sure the backs are different and that you take out the Jacks through the Kings. This is harder, though, since you have to look at the symbols instead of just the color of the card. This is one huge advantage of the Blitz cards themselves.
The recommended age for this game is 8 and up, and for the most part I’d agree. It’s not that younger kids can’t count or tell the colors apart, it’s a question of whether they can move fast enough to get their cards out on the table. We’ve taught all the kids to play and have fun by handicapping ourselves, letting the kids put out only 5 cards in their Blitz pile, and then building up from their as they get used to the game.
I’d suggest this game to anyone who likes fast-paced, fun, and very competitive game play. When you say GO, you can’t stop. A single hand of this game usually lasts 5 minutes or so, with a full game6 lasting a half-hour at most.
Given that this is a card game, it’s also very handy and portable. Easy to take anywhere and pull out for a game.
Overlord Miller and I ventured out of the lair over the weekend to see Daybreakers at one of our local mega-theaters. While I enjoyed The Spierig Brothers’ take on contemporary vampires a bit more than Overlord Miller, I’m not going to expand upon his review of the film. Rather, I’m going to talk about one of the trailers we saw as the house lights were being dimmed. I don’t know if it’s technically possible to spoil a movie trailer, but I’m probably going to do just that.
The A-Team. What do you need to know about The A-Team trailer? Well, for starters, there’s the cast. Liam Neeson (Taken) plays Col. John “Hannibal” Smith, a role originated by the late, great George Peppard. In true Hannibal fashion, Neeson is sporting gray hair and he grins around a cigar when he delivers the line most associated with the leader of The A-Team, “I love it when a plan comes together.” Sharlto Copley (District 9) plays H. M. “Howling Mad” Murdock, and he has the best line in the trailer, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Ultimate Fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson plays B.A. “Bad Attitude” Baracus, and he’s got the Mister T look nailed, but nary a fool is proper pitied (though one acetylene torch is ignited). Oh, and some pretty boy plays Templeton “The Faceman” Peck, but who cares?1 Ladies, he’s shirtless and there’s an almost-kiss (with Jessica Biel, I think); not enough to completely ruin the trailer, though. There are plenty of explosions, a few wisecracks, a slow-pan reveal of B.A.’s mohawk, and a tender reunion with a certain GMC van, all with a voiceover nearly identical to that heard over the opening credits of the television show and orchestral strains of the instantly-recognizable theme song. There’s no real indication of the movie’s plot, nor are we really introduced to any characters other than the “elite commando unit” convicted of a crime they did not commit. As with any good trailer, the clincher is in the last few seconds: flying a heavy cargo plane and under fire from a hostile aircraft, Murdock twangs, “If you look out of the right-hand side of the aircraft, you’ll notice that the right wing is on fire.” A few seconds later, the plane explodinates, but all is not lost: The A-Team have escaped in a tank equipped with parachutes and a mounted machine gun, the latter of which is then used to shoot down the enemy plane. Sure, it’s outlandish, but it’s based on a television series in which thousands of rounds of spent ammunition and countless explosions rarely—if ever—resulted in a fatality; it would be silly to expect anything less.
The A-Team trailer hits all the right nostalgia buttons: the look of the characters, the iconic GMC van, the theme music and the promise that “if you need help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire…The A-Team.” The only thing missing is B.A. saying, “I ain’t gettin’ on no plane, Hannibal” and the bit where Faceman gets Murdock out of the VA hospital.
Rating: 4 out of 5 flipped military Jeeps.
Will Overlord Johnson see The A-Team in the theater? Almost certainly.
Will Overlord Miller? Somehow I doubt it.
Sony announced Monday that they’re scrapping plans for a Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man 4 and moving forward with a reboot of the franchise instead. It seems that there were some creative differences between Sam Raimi and the studio, which led to Raimi’s departure from the film and Sony’s decision to return the webslinger to high school, presumably to re-tell his origin story with another director and cast. That means saying farewell to Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson and hello to teen angst and acne.
I’m okay with that. I don’t think it’s too soon for a reboot, nor do I think that a Spider-Man movie with a new cast will have a hard time finding an audience. Here’s why:
Spider-Man 3 was terrible. Deny-its-existence terrible. Let us never speak of it again, as there are plenty of reasons to want a reboot that don’t involve Emo Peter and the Inappropriate Dance Number.
I watched Spider-Man (2002) with my son over the weekend, and I was surprised at how incredibly mediocre it is. Perhaps it’s these rose-colored glasses through which I look back in time, but I could have sworn that Spider-Man was made of awesome at one point. What happened? Well, for starters, I think I forgot to watch Spider-Man as a superhero movie.
See, there was a point in our dark history where Spider-Man was, indeed, awesome…for a superhero movie. I make the distinction because good superhero movies were few and far between, and as an audience we were bound to make certain allowances. Movies featuring costumed heroes were subject to a slightly different (read: lower) set of standards than most other films. We were in the midst of a decade-plus-long drought. The most recent installment in the Batman franchise had completely undone what Tim Burton had accomplished in 1989. Then along came X-Men, and by Kirby it was damn good for a superhero movie! But one film does not correct a decade of abuse, and while our hopes were high for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, we still held it to that somewhat less stringent set of standards reserved for movies about men running around in Spandex. By that measure, we were not disappointed, and it seemed as though the superhero genre in film was at the beginning of a Renaissance.
And what Renaissance it’s been! Hellboy! The Incredibles! X-Men 2! Iron Man! Batman Begins and (to a lesser degree)1 The Dark Knight! Heck, I’ll even throw Watchmen and The Incredible Hulk in there, though I understand I’m probably in the minority on those. Sure, for every good superhero movie there’s a mediocre (Ghost Rider) or just downright bad one (The Spirit), but there have been enough good ones in the past ten years that the distinction between watching a superhero movie and just watching a movie started to get blurry. Iron Man isn’t just good “for a superhero movie”, it’s a great action/adventure film that just happens to center around a guy who wears a shiny red-and-yellow computerized battlesuit. It’s also got a dash of romantic comedy, a bit of drama, and did I mention the explosions?
Therein lies the problem: Spider-Man was damn good for a superhero movie in 2002, but it kinda sucks as anything else. Sure, it’s decent action/adventure flick,2 even with Willem Dafoe’s campy turn as Norman Osborne/The Green Goblin, but everything that goes on when the fists aren’t flying is a bit off the mark. It doesn’t work as a romance because Maguire and Dunst have about as much chemistry on-screen as Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, which is to say almost none. It doesn’t work as a drama for almost the same reason: Tobey Maguire just doesn’t have any real emotional range.3 I had no idea that Sony was going to announce their reboot when I was watching Spider-Man this past weekend, but I do remember wishing for another Peter Parker and Mary Jane.
Dropping Maguire and Dunst most likely means getting rid of Cliff Robertson (Uncle Ben), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May) and J.K. Simmons (Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson) as well, which is unfortunate as I thought they each exemplified the roles. But change is change, and Sony seems to be wielding a pretty big broom, so I expect the cast to be replaced entirely.
Peter Parker’s transformation into Spider-Man has been told and re-told in the comics numerous times, but my favorite by far is the version written by Brian Michael Bendis for the Ultimate Spider-Man series,4 and if Sony is wise they’ll take a long, hard look at those early issues when they’re rebooting the movie version of the wallcrawler. And perhaps that’s just what they’re planning; after all, the Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) that appears in Iron Man and will appear in several upcoming Marvel movies was taken directly from the Ultimate Universe, and if that means an opportunity for the new Spider-Man to make an appearance in other Marvel films, well, I’m all for it.5
Episode 0048: The Great Old Pumpkin
