Please Let There Not Be a Mass Effect Movie
I don’t think they’re making one just yet, but given how successful the series is, I often fear that they will someday. And when that day comes, I will cry softly.
First thing, allow me to make it absolutely clear how much I love and adore the Mass Effect series. The third game isn’t even out yet and I already know that it’s one of the best video game series of all time, bar none. By the way, this is coming from someone who usually gravitates towards fantasy over sci-fi and is way too obsessed with a series of ancient computer games based on Dungeons & Dragons. Space operas are not usually my bread and butter. But Mass Effect is just that good. It resonates with me in emotional places I didn’t even know I had, it has utterly masterful plotting and characters, it’s visually stunning, and it’s even making its creators bushels and bushels of money.
That said, here are three reasons why nobody should ever, ever make movie versions.
1. They Won’t Be Any Good
It’s no secret that video game movies are bad. They just are. We all know it. Somewhere between the fun of watching a hero have adventures, and the fun of guiding an avatar through adventures, is an unfun wasteland of lame where all movies based on video games dwell in misery.
Why, we all are! We're all video game movies, and I am your king.
Many of the problems here are obvious. A person playing a game finds it fun to do certain repetitive tasks, but that same person watching a movie would get bored and frustrated if the film’s hero did the same. I wouldn’t watch an action movie where the hero just hides behind cover and spends their time alternately shooting at people and throwing glowing things at them, but I’ll spend hours doing that myself in Mass Effect. Which is as it should be, because the fun of the game is that you’re doing it.
Time is another stumbling block. A movie is designed to take up about two hours, while a game is designed to take up weeks of real time. No movie could cover the same ground a game does. Bioware games have excellent stories and rich characters, which might seem to make them suited to cinematic adaptation. However, the problem is that they have too much of both for a single movie to handle. Sure, if Hollywood made it they’d probably make it a trilogy, but the game’s already a trilogy, so you’re still stuck trying to stuff dozens of hour’s worth of content into a tiny two-hour thimble. You can, of course, cut out a lot of the game’s filler (Mako, anyone?), but the fact remains that the plot and characters were designed with the intention that they would have plenty of time and space to grow. Movies don’t have that luxury, and trying to shoehorn in a story originally created for a longer-running medium almost always results in a mess.
Case in point.
I just don’t have faith in Hollywood to make a video game adaptation that doesn’t fundamentally misunderstand what people liked about the original franchise. They just don’t get video games, they don’t want to, and as long as the people who make games and the people who make movies exist in two entirely different camps, there won’t be much of a marriage of the mediums.
2. Canon Shepard is a Dumpster-Faced Lunkhead
This reason could technically be part of the first one, but I’ve singled it out as it’s likely the most important. I know Bioware constantly insists that there’s no “canon” Shepard, but that’s bull. We all know that if they make a movie we’re going to end up with this guy, probably played by Christian Bale:
See what I mean? The bald head, the five o’clock shadow, the dead eyes, the neck like a ham haunch? He’s a Space Marine. Invented specifically so that 14-year-old white boys can pour themselves into him and vicariously shoot aliens and touch boobies, he has no personality. He is not my Shepard. He isn’t a lot of people’s Shepards.
It’s not just that I’m upset that there’s no way they’d make a Shepard who resembled my female space warrior of justice, the Shepard who means so much to me. Well, that does really get to me. But it would also bother everyone else who has played the game. Because the beauty of the original game, something lost in film, is the fact that each of us gets the opportunity to make Shepard our own. Every person who has played Mass Effect has played a Shepard who was the true reflection of their inner hero, whether male or female, white or black, subtle or forceful, kind or ruthless. Make Shepard “officially” someone else and you take that away from us. It taints our experience of this story to paint some meathead in the place of the person we chose to represent us.
While I didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant about how much I hate Space Marine protagonists, it does apply here, as movie Shepard would indeed be a dumpster-faced lunkhead. You know they’d do it. They’ve been doing it to everybody lately. But applied to a video game hero who was initially customizable, it would be egregious.
3. It’s Just Not the Right Choice
I don’t count myself among the naysayers who proclaim that no good video game movie will ever exist under any circumstances (although I find myself inching closer to them on a regular basis). I think that there are some video games that could lend themselves well to film interpretation.
A story of deep conflict and tragic loss. --NY Times Film Review
Mass Effect, however, was already created to have a cinematic feel to it. The cut scenes, the dialogue, the way the camera moves during character conversations-–all of it was supposed to invoke a feeling of a seamless story like that of a film. It makes the games great, immersive to play and incredibly fun. It’s also the same thing that makes a movie adaptation pointless. What could a film version hope to bring to a story that was already told with all the style a movie would have, plus the player choice and interactivity a game needs? It could only possibly take away excellence from the story as it was told before.
People are excited about the Bioshock movie, and you know what? That could actually work. From the original game, you have a story that’s simple enough to fit a movie’s running time, but unique enough to hold interest. You have a fantastic world chock-full of iconic imagery and great opportunities for characterization. There are places where a movie could tell you more, where the game left some blank space that a film interpretation could expand on. It’s a good choice.
Not that I’m convinced it will be good. The history of video game movies is a history of failed ideas, whether or not those ideas could have worked in theory. But enough about the Max Payne movie. I really need to get lunch.
Stupid Max Payne Movie
It was too much to hope that this movie would be good. But dammit, if any video game movie was going to be good, this one would have been it. Coming from the original, there’s actually a story friendly to the cinematic format, and angles left to be explored that the game left up to the imagination. The movie could have really expanded on the juicy concepts from the game itself, as well as reliving all the cool noir pulp that Max Payne always heaped on with a spoon.
Instead, the movie had a formulaic action film plot in which everything creative about the game it was based on was very carefully avoided (Danger: Spoilers Ahead). Max Payne, our rugged everyman hero, is a good cop thrust into a bad situation, trying to root out the corruption that seems to have seeped into every corner of his life. In this, they stuck to parts of the original story. You still have a dangerous psychotropic drug, Valkyr, circling the streets. It’s still connected to the deaths of Max Payne’s wife and child, and is still being circulated for all the wrong reasons after being covertly developed as a super-soldier drug for the military. But the movie only touches on these plot points as though it’s obligated to, rather than have Max Payne slowly discover the pieces one by one as he goes on his journey of revenge. Sure, he shoots a bunch of bad guys, fights an intimidating super-soldier villain, and discovers that his boss and old friend was the one responsible for his family’s death all those years ago. But that’s all there is to it: good man fights bad people. It’s just boring as hell.
It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but that’s the problem. What bothers me is that anyone watching this film will think that the game has exactly the same theme. It can line up with all the other reasons people think games are an inferior storytelling medium. You can enjoy the story if you have the right mindset, but in the end you’ll just say, “Oh, our hero goes out and shoots everyone who ever wronged him. What a childish fantasy.” And as far as the movie is concerned, that would be correct. Making the bad guys so eeeeeevil that you can then kill them with impunity is indeed a childish fantasy. But without playing the original, a viewer watching the film would have no way of knowing how ironically the game makers portrayed that idea.
In the original Max Payne, you, the player, indeed step into the shoes of a tough-as-nails cop out for revenge. You mow down hordes of faceless thugs, all in the service of discovering the next clue that will lead to the people behind the cover-ups and dirty, dirty corruption. You fill bodies with bullets and you smash faces with baseball bats, and by God you enjoy every minute of it. But the game is made in such a way that, in between each of your raging bloodbaths, you are forced to question your own motives. With every drug-fueled dream sequence and every vanquished enemy pleading for his life, the game drives a little nail further and further into the back of your mind. A voice appears, while you kill and kill and kill, a voice that seems to keep getting louder, always whispering: Maybe you’re not a hero exacting righteous vengeance. Maybe you’re just a psychopath.
Please, Max! No! No, Max, I'm sorry!
Hear your dead wife, begging you to stop doing…something? Hear your crying baby? Who killed your family again? It was those guys, right? Those guys you’re going to shoot and maim and beat to a bloody pulp. Who are they again? Oh, right, they killed your family. At least, you think they did. But they did, right? I’m going to kill those bastards. I’m going to kill them! I’m going to kill all of them!
And that’s video game Max Payne. That would have made for a kick-ass movie. And the one good thing about the Max Payne film was the way they portrayed the effects of Valkyr, so I know they could have done Max’s self-questioning dream sequences to great, maybe even iconic, effect.
But as usual, the chance was squandered. I honestly believe that Hollywood purposely half-asses its video game movies because it has no respect for them and wants video games to stay in the gutter where they belong. They’re okay with making money off their franchises, mind you, but they’ll never put any effort into truly adapting the spirit of a great game into what can be a great film. Instead, we just have Max Payne, another lackluster entry in the hall of shame that is video game movies. Games are never going to drag themselves up at this rate.
A Fantasy Movie I Liked For A Change
I spend a lot of time complaining about fantasy on this blog, and it probably looks like I hate the stuff. Of course, I love the fantasy genre, I just hate most of what’s in it (because I love the fantasy genre). Recently I sat down and watched a fantasy movie that did a lot of things right, so I figured I’d better yak about it here, just to add some balance. Oh, and this post has plenty of spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
The film I watched? Dragonslayer. Sure, it takes a few too many cues from Star Wars, but what do you expect? It was the eighties, and those movies had just finished blowing everyone’s mind. And sure, the subject matter is inherently cheesy, but the story is well-told and even the dialogue, often bad in this sort of film, is generally cleverer than you would expect. Okay, maybe the hero is a weenie-bitch whose gains in confidence only make him into more and more of an annoying jerk, but…well, I’m not really going to defend him. He’s the worst thing about this movie.
There he is on the right.
Despite everything I’ve said, I still like this movie, goddammit. There are just so many perfect little fantasy touches that make it all worthwhile. The setting is, to me, what every fantasy setting should be: stunning natural beauty plus acute human misery. The peasants work their asses off in their fields and shops, while their King, wearing gold-embroidered robes, sits in a drafty castle next to a dwarf dressed as a jester and a freaking wolfhound. This isn’t a world of kind, just rulers and gaily singing serfs. This world is one where the common folk live in fear of terrible wild beasts on one side and tyrannical bureaucratic governments on the other. A world in which people are cold, hungry and dirty, a world of greasy fires and woolen clothing and crumbling stone towers. A proper fantasy world without a Calvin Klein model in sight. This is how you do medieval fantasy, kids.
There are so many things about this movie where they just had the right idea. The plot is a cross between the “Saint George and the Dragon” and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” legends, a naturally awesome mix. There’s a sacrificial virgin who actually tries really hard to get away before getting made into barbecue, and a princess who is noble, pure, and beautiful, but gets her feet gnawed off by baby dragons anyway. The hero’s dragon-slaying weapon is not a sword, but a supremely bad-ass lance forged by the local blacksmith. It’s really nice to see a fantasy avoid the whole “speshikal magical god-sword” trope for something that’s more down to earth, but is all the cooler for it.
Not to mention that his dragon-slaying weapon actually fails to slay the dragon. What does work is to turn his dead mentor into a freaking wizard-bomb and blow the dragon apart in mid-flight. Then, while its bloody, smoking corpse is laying on the ground, the jerk of a King shows up and takes credit for all of it while the heroes say “fuck this shit” and ride off in a random direction, letting him have his petty empire with his fascist monarchial propaganda. This definitely qualifies as one of my favorite endings to any fantasy film, ever. Not everyone is saved. The dragon is dead, but that isn’t the end to all problems. People are just going to have to do the best they can in this unfair world–an unfair world with awesome pulley-based technology and stunning vistas.
It almost makes all this social oppression and backbreaking labor worthwhile.
So while Dragonslayer may be only vaguely remembered as a minor fantasy classic that people enjoyed for the cool visuals and little else, I would like to give it props for its gritty, troubled world. If adopted, that trope alone would be a vast improvement to so many of the bland and whiny fantasies of today. I wish I’d seen this movie a long time ago.
Why Fantasy Keeps Going Nowhere
I would kill for a good fantasy TV show. I have often argued, and I still maintain, that fantasy as a genre has as much potential for creativity as science fiction. The people who make it are just much, much lazier. The history of fantasy on television reflects this, as all fantasy television shows are bad. Even the good ones are bad (forgive me, Xena). The thing is, fantasy has what sci-fi doesn’t: a collection of tropes so well-known, so recognizable, so easy to plug and play that they tempt the slothfulness of any writer, whether that writer is talented or not. Everybody who writes fantasy knows at the back of their minds that if they throw together a Dark Lord, a Beautiful Maiden, a Simple Farm Lad and a Prophecy involving a Magic Sword, they can just call it a day and no one will think twice about it. We just expect it at this point.
Something got me on this kick, of course. I checked out Legend of the Seeker, a relatively new show with a very impressive budget, considering its genre.1 Lots of hope to be had here, although I didn’t let my hopes get that high. There wasn’t much of a chance for that to happen, though, as the pilot consisted of the exact plot of A New Hope run through some sort of medieval fantasy translator. We’re talking a show where a person can literally watch the scenes go by, say in their head “I bet Simple Farm Lad here will find his parents dead and his cottage on fire in exactly five minutes,” and be right on the money. There was literally not a single thing in the pilot that could not have been randomly generated by a mildly retarded AI after it finished absorbing every paperback in the world to feature a sword, rose, castle or dragon on the cover.
Chronicles of Moronia, Book One.
Our hero, the Simple Farm Lad, is brash but stupid (of course). He runs into a Beautiful Maiden with the personality of a grapefruit who is annoyed by yet intrigued with him (naturally). He’s the long-lost object of some kind of Prophecy even though he’s a complete dunce, she’s far more skilled than he is but somehow can’t just go defeat the bad guy herself, the maguffins multiply and we all drown in seas of explanatory dialogue. The show’s best characters by far are the Wise Old Mage, who is at his heart also a cliché but played by a delightfully competent actor, and the main villain, who doesn’t have much to him beyond “dark and brooding” but looks a lot like the Prince of Persia. These two guys I enjoy watching, when the story centers on them.
As for the other characters on the show, I have a theory. A bus of Calvin Klein models, on its way to an underwear exhibition or something, overturned and crashed. The survivors, having gone feral, were discovered months later by a traveling Renaissance Faire, which clothed and fed them (well, clothed them anyway) and returned them to humanity. This not only explains why the characters spend most of their time standing around looking equally bored and confused, but also why they must constantly narrate their own lives through a stream of simplistic dialogue as though they would otherwise forget what they were doing mid-action. They wear quasi-medieval clothing and jaw about poor peasant’s tasks, but their body language suggests that they were never taught how to do anything but lean half-naked against things and glare intensely. At least Lucy Lawless always seemed at home plunging weapons into people’s vital organs.
It might seem like I’m being too harsh, but it’s hard to understate how much efforts like this disappoint me. This one has a budget, for god’s sake–-there are great sets and props and special effects that don’t look like someone drew on a filmstrip with a crayon. But none of this saves the tired, tired story and the Keanu Reeves-esque characters. Here’s the big secret seemingly kept from TV producers: great characters are what make or break a show. Programs like Star Trek and my still-beloved Xena had silly costumes, crappy props and often ludicrous storylines, but the characters were what made us want to watch. Their feelings, and the actions that resulted from them, seemed real to us. It’s on these kinds of connections that true fandoms are built. I know fantasy could do more of this if it wanted to. Just stop taking the easy way out.
- I know it’s based on a series of books by Terry Goodkind, but fantasy writers of both prose and live action share the same originality problems, so my complaints still apply. Besides, I didn’t want to read the damn books. [↩]
I Get to Rant About Avatar, Too
I didn’t want to watch Avatar. I knew I wasn’t going to like it. But too many people insisted I should, and I can’t properly criticize something I haven’t seen, anyway. And I must admit, there were aspects about it that I greatly enjoyed. Very rarely these days can visual effects be truthfully referred to as “groundbreaking,” but Avatar earns that compliment and then some. This film is the future of computer animation in cinema. It’s majestic to watch.
Visually, I mean. The story pisses me off.
This has already been pointed out more than once, but I have to say it in my own voice. Anyone who thinks this movie is a credit to Native American cultural portrayals is failing to grasp what it’s really about. I have no tolerance for Noble Savage bullshit, and neither should anyone else. In this day and age, the person who creates it usually means well by it, and so everyone joins in the cheering and people don’t realize that it’s just another form of dehumanization. But Avatar isn’t just a story about perfect people with a perfect culture, who sing with all the voices of the mountain and paint with all the colors of the wind, oh no. Enter the Essential White Hero, who will of course become their greatest warrior and wed the Chief’s Daughter and BLAH BLAH BLAH, even though he’s presumably never heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon or anything. This guy is a device to assuage the guilt of white people, and absolutely nothing more than that.
Have no fear, woodland creatures!
My problems with the script aren’t all ideological. Simply speaking to strength of narrative, this film had sucky characters (“sucky” being the professional term describing characters whose personalities consist only of a single trait, if that). Our hero appears to have no connection to humanity whatsoever, even though he’s, like, 26 and has presumably kissed someone and shared a candy bar with someone and played Mario Kart with someone and otherwise been privy to the nicer bits of the human race. This isn’t a Last of the Mohicans scenario, where the man has been raised by the natives and sees them as his family. He just literally stumbles into their world and is not only able to sever his previous identity without any difficulty, but will later become the perfect embodiment of their cultural ideal. Yeah, right.
The other characters are even worse. The Na’vi are a collection of various stereotypes, even down to the Young Brave who is already betrothed to the Chief’s Daughter, hates our white protagonist at first, finally recognizes him as his brother and leader, then dies valiantly in battle. You know, the guy who was probably supposed to be the actual hero of his people, but gets shunted aside to make room for a clumsy, clueless outsider, because we’re really more comfortable if the white guy does it. Then there’s Sigourney Weaver’s character, whose motivations are all over the map and whose sole purpose is to die, a collection of human buddies who are also only dimly defined, and a smattering of bad guys (pictured below) who I actually have no complaints about. Subtlety is the watchword here.
The script was obviously afraid that we’d have no idea what the movie was trying to tell us unless it held our hand the entire way, which is annoying in and of itself. But what got to me the most was that precisely zero of the human characters acted like humans. I’ve already mentioned how the hero appeared to have been raised in a sensory deprivation chamber judging by the emotional bonds he displayed towards the civilization that birthed him, bonds that, if possessed, might have actually created some tension for his character. The rest of the cast does no better–-the character played by Michelle Rodriguez, who understandably chokes when asked to commit genocide, later turns on the humans and kills dozens of them before going down. She’s a hardened marine, and many of these people were presumably her friends, whom she was willing to die beside the previous day. I just can’t buy her conflict-free turnaround. Finally, the part that really had me groaning was the very end, in which most of the remaining humans were herded onto their ships to return to Earth, never to be seen again. They will never, ever return to bother the Na’vi or bombard their planet with nuclear weapons against which they would have no defense, because it’s not like persistence is a major part of human nature or anything. We are, in fact, known galaxy-wide for our gracious acceptance of defeat.
I'm going home now.
All sarcasm aside, it’s true that there should only be one possible outcome to this plot: the flaming death of all the Na’vi. In many ways, that would actually be fitting. After all, the thing that makes white people’s history with Native Americans tragic, poignant and emotionally distressing is the fact that we succeeded in destroying them. That this movie insists on depicting a highly contrived victory, all made possible by a converted white dude no less, is just insult heaped upon insult. Avatar is not an homage to the beauty of Native American culture, but a white boy fantasy of living without guilt. Nobody should be inspired by this.
Look, I understand the desire to make the white guilt go away forever. I struggle with it myself. But indulging in daydreams about pure absolution, assimilation and acceptance into ethnic culture that is more than just acceptance, but complete and utter vindication: all this is a lie. The world isn’t fair, and if Native Americans have to watch their own culture slowly fade to nothing after centuries of abuse, then we can handle a little white guilt. We certainly aren’t going to redeem ourselves through pretending that we can just cast it off like an old, hole-ridden shirt because hey, we’re the best! We’ve got to accept this part of ourselves, because it will always be there. Life goes on, guys.
Nice Try, Disney
I’ve gone to see The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s new animated film, and I came back disappointed. Make no mistake, I’m grateful that this film exists and that it wasn’t half-assed. One thing I wouldn’t accuse the filmmakers of would be laziness. Every frame, each line of dialogue, sang of the hard work that went into this movie, and that’s a positive sign if nothing else. Many things about it, such as the voice acting, were superb. But it still wasn’t enough to rekindle my faith in Disney’s animation wing, or to challenge the notion that their Renaissance period is long dead.
For starters, the story was not as well told as in many previous Disney films. You might think it is because most Disney classics are based on fairy tales while Princess is a story Disney made up itself, but the reality is that Disney is essentially making up the story no matter what. In its basic form, a fairy tale is actually not cinematic at all. The raw story structure in most fairy tales is bizarre, dreamlike and rambling, and most of the impact of the story comes from symbolism rather than interpersonal drama. Disney’s “fairy tale” films are so heavily adapted as to be largely unique, as they have to add progression and focus to the plot and to flesh out the one-dimensional archetypical characters.
The story in Princess is not carelessly put together, but it lacks dynamic energy. It fulfills all its story needs in a paint-by-numbers sort of way, without giving the audience time to really get to know the characters or to become fully immersed in the setting. And this is the important part: the characters are interesting and likable and the setting is cool. But we are rushed from place to place and event to event so fast that we have no time to bond.
You spend about three seconds here.
What should be fascinating and evocative becomes a mushy blur, and we witness the actions of the characters while we’re still unclear as to what their motivations are. The villain especially suffers from this–he’s flavorful, unique, and badass, but we don’t know what he’s trying to accomplish until the middle of the film, and even then it doesn’t seem to make complete sense. “Surely such an interesting fellow must have more to him than that,” we think. Unfortunately, we never get to see any more.
Also, and this is key in a Disney animated feature, the music was generally uninteresting. Musical numbers, sex scenes, and fight sequences all suffer from the same form of misuse in a mediocre film: they are put in not to advance character or plot, but because the filmmaker figures “it’s about time we had one of these.” Many of the songs in Princess seem obligatory rather than sensational, seemingly cropping up whenever a new character is introduced, a plot development occurs, or the setting changes. The Cornerstone Disney Plot Songs are all present-–the heroine’s Longing Song, the Helper Song, the Love Song, and the Villain Song–-but too little character development is done to give them emotional weight. If you compare the use of music in Princess to something like The Little Mermaid, in which every song serves an important structural purpose (as well as being memorable and entertaining in its own right), it just can’t measure up.
Reading what I just wrote, it sounds as though I hated this movie, which actually isn’t true. It’s just that disappointment stings so much more than plain mediocrity. I was hoping for at least a Mulan level of quality, and I feel that The Princess and the Frog fell short. I was hoping, just as Disney was hoping, that this movie would be a needed shot in the arm for their flagging animation department, and help transfer Disney’s focus back to hand-drawn animation and away from awful 3-D and live-action treacle. Although I guess that the palpable effort they put into this film, and the somewhat underperforming result, matter less in that regard than its box-office returns. Perhaps Disney will release more traditional animated features in the future, and if this movie is the reason why, then it was all worth it.
I Review Dragon Age: Origins
Actually, I won’t. Because someone with exactly my opinion has already done so. This person is, of course, as big of a Baldur’s Gate fan as I am, was as excited about Dragon Age for the same reasons I am, and liked the new game just as much as I do. We even have more or less the same caveats about it, as well as the guilty reasoning that most of the issues we have regarding it are more related to our nostalgic obsession with Bioware’s first games than DA:O’s actual flaws.
But we can’t help it, you see. I, for one, have never played a game where the developers endeavored to inject as much atmospheric, entertaining content into every corner of their work as much as BG2. Here is one of my favorite examples. In most fantasy games, if there is an inn mechanic, the PC walks up to the innkeeper and initiates dialogue. The Standard Fantasy Innkeeper is invariably fat, bored, and boring. He asks for a few coppers and sends you up to bed, with nary a second glance. If you’re lucky, you can squeeze a rumor or two out of him. Whereas in BG2, this happens:
Vincenzo the Innkeep: ’Allo to you an’ a good day! I am Vincenzo and I offer you all the services of me humble l’il inn!
Willet the Stableboy: There’re a lot o’ things t’ be said about yer inn, Vince … but “humble” ain’t the one I would be pickin’, aye?
Vincenzo the Innkeep: Hush, boy! An’ keep callin’ me “Vince” an’ I’ll have ye strapped o’er a log! The name’s “Vincenzo!”
Willet the Stableboy: ‘At’s a lotta rot. Ye hears that name from a Sembian trader an’ suddenly yer puttin’ on airs. Pfeh!
Vincenzo the Innkeep: Never mind the boy. He’s an ignorant lout I took in out of pity. A simpleton who doesn’t know his place. Is there aught I can do for you, my good Lady?
This is what I mean. These NPCs, who continue to argue with one another every time the player interacts with them, serve no further use later in the plot. There is no purpose to their conversation other than to delight me, and the game is chock full of this stuff. And some people think a good RPG is about damage per second and item harvesting.
Do I think Dragon Age lives up to this game in sheer richness of detail? It doesn’t, but frankly, no modern game could. Nowadays developers have too much other stuff to worry about, like creating character models that don’t resemble Polly Pocket dolls. Making each and every NPC into a quirky character and creating fantasy cities that seem alive with real individuals would take time and energy that they simply don’t have.
Sexy.
And really, DA:O is still damn atmospheric, more than any RPG I’ve played for a long time. I still love you, Bioware. Call me.
I’ve Been Promoted
I am now the greatest weapon owls have against dislike.
See?
An Excuse for a Brave Little Toaster Rave
Today I came across this funny little rumor that Pixar might be considering remaking The Brave Little Toaster.
Like many of the commenters, I don’t believe a word of it. While Pixar is the only studio I can think of that I would trust to modernize a cartoon as stealthily profound as TBLT, and I would certainly go running to the theaters with great excitement were it to ever happen, I feel pretty safe categorizing such a notion as pure fantasy. For one thing, Pixar is far too fond of creating fresh ideas to bother remaking a cult classic, which is of course one of the things we all love about them. More importantly, however, the actual story content and mood of TBLT runs counter to Pixar’s modus operandi. I consider this to be neither a good nor a bad thing, as it should be obvious by now that I adore both these subjects, but I certainly think that they don’t belong together.
Pixar, like any maker of brilliant children’s media, is not afraid to touch on the dark and unsettling aspects of their stories. At the same time, each of their films is buoyed by a strong undercurrent of hope. Even their flagship Toy Story, which shares some thematic similarities with The Brave Little Toaster and clearly has said movie as one of its influences, is an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity. TBLT, on the other hand, is a surrealist tragedy that has a happy ending only in the barest sense of the term–it is a veneer, a requirement because it is a kid’s movie, but really only a thin disguise that does nothing to change the fact that the main themes of the film are sacrifice, abandonment and despair.
Onward to futility!
Most people I know have one of two opinions about The Brave Little Toaster. Either it scared them when they were children, so they hate it, or it scared them when they were children, so they adore it. The former often cite this particular piece of nightmare fuel, and it’s no surprise that such a sequence is certainly terrifying for young kids and would put a lot of them off liking the film.1 There are many more examples of frightening symbolism: mangled appliances sing about the ongoing horror that is their lives; the vacuum cleaner gets upset at one point and starts choking on his own cord; and I hope I’m not the only person who thought that the Blanket’s needy obsession with its Master was kind of creepy.2
But some of us, for whatever reason, were not driven away by TBLT’s dark undertones, instead finding ourselves drawn in by its at times heartbreaking poignancy. For instance, the highest point of hopefulness in the film is followed almost immediately by this:
The infamous Air Conditioner scene, extremely stylized and even a little silly, is nonetheless a perfect blend of the film’s frightening aspects and tragic themes:
For my money, though, the best sequence in The Brave Little Toaster is the song “Worthless.” This occurs right before the climax of the movie and is the part that sums up its message. Various junked cars sing about their invariably sad lives as they are, one by one, crushed into tiny cubes by an emotionless machine:
This is, in my opinion, one of the most affecting scenes in children’s cinema, and can be attested to by the numerous YouTube commenters discussing which car they personally think has the saddest story.3 This scene is promptly followed by a very disturbing climax, in which the Toaster has to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to save his Master, mangling his metal body in the cruel gears of fate for the sake of someone whom he has always deemed to have far greater value than himself. Then the Master repairs him and adopts him once more into his shelter of usefulness and love, but I ignore that part because, as I said waaaaaay back at the beginning of this post, it fails to convince me (dramatically speaking). The rest of the movie is just too goddamned sad.
So here ends my rave about why TBLT is awesome, and secondarily why Pixar will never remake it because they are awesome in an entirely different and less depressing way. If anyone has actually made it this far, I’m glad I got to share my obsession with the underlying dark themes of children’s movies with you. I’m only one of the many people that this film has made a permanent impression on, and I think it deserves to be lauded for what it is. However, as it grows dated, I doubt it will be resurrected anytime soon even by the magnificent Pixar. It’s actually quite fitting that this little movie about the doom of obsolescence should suffer that fate itself, but at the very least it will live on in the hearts of many children born in the 1980s, and perhaps even those of future generations will find something to appreciate in it. Some things never lose their worth.
- My younger sister has told me that she saw the movie when she was young and then saw it again as an older child with the “clown” scene removed for the television version, and for a long time didn’t know whether the scene had actually existed or whether she had simply made it up–which would make it all the scarier. [↩]
- The part that especially sticks in my memory runs from 1:43 to 2:11 in that video. [↩]
- For me it goes either to the pink convertible who has given up on life but is unsure how or why, or to the pickup from a reservation that served loyally only to be rewarded with a thankless abandonment–I also find it interesting that he is the only car to drive himself to the crusher rather than being dragged there by the magnet. [↩]
I Can’t Believe It’s She-Ra.
I found it. Deep in the primordial ooze of my infant memories, right next to Land Before Time, The Last Unicorn and The Brave Little Toaster, I always knew there was a cartoon blonde woman who rode a pegasus and wielded a sparkling, identity-switching greatsword. And like them, she was stamped indelibly in my subconscious. That’s right, there’s no telling how much influence She-Ra: Princess of Power has had over the person who is now me. We’re not talking about something I obsessed over when I was nine. This is no Power Rangers or Captain Planet. I must have been four or five when I encountered this thing.
I don’t know how I ended up watching it on the internet. But from the first few scenes, I was convinced I’d found her. I didn’t remember the name of the character or even much about the cartoon itself, but I’ve always remembered how it made me feel. Even from the time I was very little, I noticed how unfair gender roles seemed in the entertainment I consumed. Women just never seemed to be doing anything. My favorite genre, fantasy, sparked my imagination and transported me to other worlds, but the main character was invariably a man who I didn’t identify with. This meant that the few times I did encounter an animated fantasy centered around a woman, I’d latch onto it and never let go. I’ve always carried a memory of that brightly colored VHS tape sitting on the lower level of a wooden rack in the tiny video rental store in Navajoland–we were still living on the Rez, which is how I know I must’ve been really young–and that I begged my mother to take it out for me again.
Now, I know it was She-Ra.
After watching a few episodes, I also know why I remember my mother rolling her eyes and sighing when I went up to her, clutching the video. It’s literally the most unsubtle thing I’ve ever watched, and I watch Walker, Texas Ranger.
Later he'll stare down a bear.
There are some things from our foggy childhood memory-ooze that deserve to be enjoyed again as we grow up (the three films I mentioned in the second sentence of this post are excellent examples), but even as I watch this cartoon and torment my poor husband with the horrible voice acting, I know that the thrill I’m getting from it is entirely related to my memories and not the show itself. It’s just an animated advertisement for some toys, after all, with utterly ridiculous characters1 and cludgy moral messages. But I can take comfort in the fact that what it helped me to believe when I was very young, that it’s possible for female characters to ride around on horses swinging swords and being the main focus of a story, is worthwhile. Sometimes, something doesn’t have to be good in order to matter.
It’s also very gratifying whenever I discover that a piece of media I remember from long ago actually exists and isn’t just a figment of my imagination. I’m still holding out hope that that weird Alice in Wonderland ripoff that has mind control in it and a villain who lives in a bowling ball house wasn’t just a dream I had once. I mean, the kangaroo ninjas turned out to be from a real movie, and they were a much stupider idea! If anybody ever watches something that has a guy who lives in a bowling ball, they need to let me know.
- My favorite character description from the Wikipedia page is this: “Sweet Bee is a bee-woman from an intergalactic bee colony who came to Etheria seeking Bees and a new home when her race of Bee’s homeworld is destroyed by Wasps.” [↩]
