Alan Wake review

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Above: Memo to prospective Alan Wake players: Hope you like woods.

I was quite looking forward to Alan Wake, partly because of my admiration for the Max Payne noir-shooter diptych by the same creators, and partly because it promised to borrow narrative inspiration from pulp thriller novels and TV rather than the standard video game muses (respectively: Aliens and other video games). Briefly, Alan Wake is an action game in which you play a famous author who retreats to a hermetic community in the Pacific Northwest to cope with a chronic case of writer's block. Shortly after his arrival, his wife is kidnapped under mysterious circumstances, and he blacks out for a week. When he comes to, he finds that he has written a manuscript that he has no recollection of composing, and further discovers that the town has been taken over by a shadowy presence that possesses people and objects and imbues them with murderous intent. As you might guess, the player's role is to take control of Alan Wake, confront these people/objects, and shoot your way to the truth.

The gameplay hook in Alan Wake is that the possessing force renders the enemies impervious to injury, so you can't just shoot them outright. You first have to use a flashlight or other light source to burn away the darkness that protects them. This isn't the most mindblowingly original conceit, but it's a clever way of fulfilling several gameplay functions. Most significantly, it amps up the tension by increasing the amount of time between spotting an enemy and being able to kill it, and does so without gimping the controls, which is the route that most other horror-shooters take. It also allows your flashlight beam to double as a crosshairs, which goes a long way toward minimizing the HUD. Thirdly, it gives a gameplay excuse for the constant showcasing of Alan Wake's lighting graphics, which are quite impressive.

The thing about Alan Wake is that it's such a solid and well-crafted game that the few shortcomings it has seem all the more nagging as a result. Gameplay-wise, there isn't a whole lot to be mad at: the balance between burning away shadows with your flashlight, shooting, and keeping track of multiple enemies is fun and challenging, and the controls are very solid. The dodge button, which needs to be combined with a directional press, is very well implemented - when you pull off a successful dodge, which takes enough skill that you can't just spam the button, the game shifts into slow-mo for a second to showcase just how close you were to getting nailed by an axe aimed at your head or what have you, which leads to any number of memorable close-call moments. The graphics are great and do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of creating a spooky atmosphere. It's an enjoyable game, and has a lot to recommend it on that level.

Alan Wake, however, has set its sights a bit higher than "enjoyable game." This much is clear from the unique structure that divides the game into six episodes, which being with 'previously on' recaps and end with cliffhangers. This is a narratively-focused affair that wants to be a bold statement of purpose for gaming as a storytelling medium. And it's actually fairly effective in doing so; I liked playing the game half-an-episode at a time, and the plot twists and wanting to find out what happened next was a big part of what kept me engaged. It is refreshing to see a game put a clear emphasis on story and pacing.

The problem with Alan Wake as a narrative is that it can't balance its aspirations toward originality with its desire to pay homage to its influences, and the latter too often overwhelms the former. As reviews of Alan Wake never fail to note, the game is heavily inspired by the works of Stephen King and David Lynch. The Stephen King angle isn't really so bad, even though King is actually mentioned by name at least twice in the game's dialogue, but the constant cribbing from David Lynch in general and Twin Peaks in particular becomes actively distracting very early on in the game. Now if this were limited to the 'unsettling things happening in a bucolic Northwestern town' aspect, I'd say fair play and leave it at that. However, Alan Wake has the gall to deploy naked facsimiles of the characters of Shelly Johnson and the Log Lady from Twin Peaks. It uses coffee thermoses as hidden collectable items, with the inevitable associated Achievement being titled Damn Good Cup of Coffee. There was a part early in the game where a character told me to go to a lodge that made me groan audibly, although fortunately the lodge in question proved more concrete than the one from the show. The game's boner for David Lynch is such that the song soundtracking the first end-of-episode title is "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison, and although I'm sure I probably don't need to jog your memory as to why that's relevant, I'd be seriously remiss if I didn't take the chance to embed:


This is probably substantially less of an issue for the vast majority of Alan Wake players, who likely don't care about the subtle line between a deft professional homage and a vaguely embarrassing fanboyish one. My issue with it is less about Alan Wake trying to punch above its weight class and more about a serious missed opportunity to incorporate its influences on a deeper level. The brilliance of Twin Peaks was the way that it placed its unsettling and avante-garde elements within a wholehearted embrace of the formal strictures of the primetime soap opera format. Given the fact that video games live and die by convention, there was a huge opening for Alan Wake to do the same thing within the milieu of third-person shooters. However, instead of balancing the base gameplay against sometime more experimental that takes advantage of the interactive form, Alan Wake too often opts to cut-and-paste David Lynch. The only point in which I felt Alan Wake was really doing something truly different comes in a playable sequence that closes out the game, and that's tucked safely away after the final boss fight, causing it to feel set apart from the "real" game.

To be fair, there's a lot to applaud about the way Alan Wake approaches the narrative-gameplay fusion; for one, the game actually works a subtle, non-superfluous rationale for the existence of scattered ammo and supplies into the narrative as it progresses. There's actually a significant aspect of the plot which struck me as inspired by Diary, one of Chuck Palahniuk's best novels; if this is intentional, it's carried out with the kind of grace I wish had been used in incorporating the influences I mentioned above. Secondly, although the final boss is rather limp, Alan Wake has one of the better endings to a game story I've seen in a while; it goes out on an ambiguous note without skimping on a sense of resolution. Granted, the former has probably more than a little to do with the impeding DLC bonus episodes (of which the first is free to retail buyers who keep the voucher packed in to the box, classy move there) but it still works within the context of the core game.

All told, Alan Wake is a worthy game. Given the focus on story and atmosphere, it seems like it might be one of those games that's fun to watch as well as play. Despite my quibbles with some of the choices, I'm looking forward to checking out the downloadable bonus episodes later this year, and I do hope that it does well enough to fund a sequel where the designers can hopefully broaden their palette some more.

Mel Gibson Just Doesn't Give A Fuck

Above: Good to see that Mel Gibson's ability to glower ponderously hasn't been dulled by his hiatus from acting

Since the explosion of celebrity "news" has radically expanded our collective capacity to follow the lives of professional entertainers in something like real time, the idea of the comeback role has taken on a lot more importance. For instance: remember when everybody was upset at Tom Cruise because he jumped on a couch on the Oprah Winfrey show and then was mean to Matt Lauer? Then he had that funny cameo in Tropic Thunder and everybody laughed and forgave him, because nobody who would put on a fat suit and use hip-hop slang in a movie part could be a humorless, delusional prick in real life. The notion is that as long as an actor can convincingly pull off a role that counters whatever negative image he or she managed to acquire in the course of the preceding scandal, the damage can be minimized or even reversed.

With that in mind, as you might recall, a few years back Mel Gibson was arrested for driving drunk, which wouldn't be that big of a deal had he not used the procedure as an opportunity to sexually harass one of the arresting officers and to expound upon his belief that Jews are responsible for all the world's problems. As his first starring role since this event, Edge of Darkness is Mel Gibson's shot to change the public's perception of him as an unhinged paranoiac. So naturally, he chooses a role where he portrays an revenge-crazed police officer pitted against some sort of high-level conspiracy. My original intention was to do one of my traditional Saturday evening liveblogs while watching Edge of Darkness, which I in fact did for about the first hour of the movie. However, this isn't really one of those films that lends itself to that sort of off-the-cuff analysis, and rather than post something that would be little more than a summary of the onscreen action, I decided it would be better to write a post speculating on what could have possible gone into Mel Gibson's decision to take this role.

Sitting down to the movie with a post-scandal mindset is a fascinating exercise, because once I started down that road, it became pretty much all I could think about. Consider the following (obviously, spoilers for Edge of Darkness ensue, possibly slightly diminishing some future afternoon for you in which it is on cable):

1.) Mel Gibson is constantly in or around cars in this movie. Not only are there several scenes with him driving recklessly or actually causing an auto accident, there's also at least three scenes of him violently accosting people who are in their own cars, and another one where he takes on the driver of a car speeding toward him with his gun and causes a rather spectacular crash. I'd venture to say that Edge of Darkness contains the maximum amount of vehicle-based mayhem possible within the logical confines of the plot. Now, if I were Mel Gibson, which I am clearly not, I'd likely seek to avoid further associating my image with cars or driving for a bit, maybe by picking another one of my famed bloodthirsty period pieces for a return to acting. The fact that he actually appears to have sought out a movie that outright requires him to be doing crazy shit in cars seems telling. Of what, I don't quite know.

2.) This is a conspiracy movie that spends almost no effort in making the conspiracy make any type of sense. The basic outline is that Mel Gibson's daughter is killed at the beginning of the movie, and everyone assumes that the killers were targeting Mel, because he's a cop and missed, even though they were using a shotgun. But actually, Mel Gibson's daughter was the real intended target, because she was interning at a research company with a federal contract that was secretly producing nuclear weapons made to look like they were constructed in foreign countries. She tries to blow the whistle on the company, but no one will listen to her, so she hooks up with some eco-radical group and helps them break into the lab so they can steal the proof, but the company catches the eco-radicals in the act and kills them with 'irradiated steam' which is apparently a thing, and then kills Mel's daughter so she won't talk. There's also some angle with the federal government being in on the plot to kill Mel's daughter, as well as a character played by Ray Winstone, who's some sort of assassin hired by the government to kill Mel Gibson, but he doesn't because he's dying of cancer and he decides he likes Mel Gibson, possibly because of his ability to hold his own in a gruff-off.

So this is a standard "shadowy conspiracy kills everyone" plot, but the thing about it is that Mel Gibson's character never really seems to question anything of the conspiracy tidbits he's given, even when it's outlandish stuff, being told to him by clearly unreliable people. In a more than one case, he straightforwardly accepts information from people who just got done trying to kill him. The consipiracy aspect actually seems to be toned down considerably from the British miniseries that the movie is based on, which according to the synopsis on Wikipedia, diverges into some sort of batshit insane shadow war between man and nature in the final third of the story. However, Mel Gibson's character is still the type that just sort of assumes that of course there's a high level conspiracy at play here, rather than maintaining the sort of skepticism you might expect from a police detective. This is another thing that you would think is sort of at odds with drawing attention away from Mel's image as a paranoid lunatic, and yet, here he is. Did I mention that he's periodically hallucinating about his dead daughter as a young girl throughout the movie, and that there's a scene where he pretends to teach her to shave?

3.) At the climax of the movie, Mel's poisoned or something, and he's staggering around shooting people in a very convincing simulacrum of a drunken rage. Yes, really. There are no words.

The upside to all this is that there aren't any characters that are Jewish or thinly veiled Jewish-like stereotypes (e.g. no scenes of Mel beating up a banker or anything like that), but that aside, my take-away from Edge of Darkness is that Mel Gibson doesn't care that people look at him as an unstable loon. In fact, he might actually get off on it. I guess it makes a certain kind of sense, seeing as he could live comfortable off of royalties for The Passion of the Christ for the rest of his life and never work again. Still, you'd think he might consider toning it down a bit.

Is Unitasking A Forgotten Ideal?

Yesterday's New York Times had a lengthy and interesting article about the possible detrimental cognitive effects of hardcore computer usage. Appropriately enough, I read this article on the Internet while I should have been polishing off a report for work. This is a topic that's been floating around for a while, and has picked up recently with Nick Carr's book-length expansion of his widely-circulated 2008 Atlantic article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Although the Times article focuses heavily on a man who appears to have one of the worst possible cases of technological dependence on record, which I think weakened the core argument a bit for me with regard to how widespread the problem is, its publication came at a good time, because this is a matter that's been on my mind quite a bit recently.

There's really no way to phrase this without making it sound banal, but I've always been a huge consumer of written information. When I was a kid, I'd read books by my nightlight when I was supposed to be sleeping. My parents were semi-wise to this and would sometimes come in to check and make sure I wasn't doing this; I'd have to shove the book under my covers or drop it on the floor as noiselessly as possible to avoid getting caught, with varying levels of success depending on how quick on the draw I was. So it's always been very hard for me to avoid reading something new or interesting, even when I really ought to be doing something else instead.

You can guess how this character trait can turn into a weakness when combined with the vast information reserves of the Internet. I've liked Web-surfing from the beginning, but I don't think my life and the Internet really became inextricable until early 2007, when I started consolidating most of my online activity through Google Reader, which not only gave me a one-stop place for checking for updates of sites and blogs I liked, it gave me a quick way to add new stuff to my daily browsing regimen.

I can't imagine life without Google Reader, but it's an immense distraction that's incredibly easy to fall into. A lot of times, I click over to take a quick break from whatever I'm doing and end up reading three or four articles before I even realize how off-track I'm getting. It's not uncommon for me to give myself a 5 minute break that winds up as a 30 minute break because I see a handful of things I can't resist reading.

Whereas the guy in the Times article's computer usage seemed to really affect his productivity and ability to function socially, I don't think that the problem is as severe for me (NB: other people's opinions may vary. I won't pretend that I haven't been busted for reading the Internet when I should have been engaging in a conversation). If there's something important I need to get done, it gets done 95%-plus of the time with what I think is a respectable minimum of procrastination. Where I've acquired this skill is somewhat of a mystery to me, as my formal organizational skills have always been mediocre to non-existent; my best guess is that a solid decade of relentless academic deadlines have hardwired some reflexive planning capacity into me. Anyhow, since that's pretty well intact, I don't think that the Internet is ruining my life or my functioning by any means.

What I've increasingly come to question is whether my Internet habits are interfering with my happiness. One thing that I've found to be indisputably true is that the Web in general (and Google Reader in particular) is really effective at breaking up the flow of attention and prolonged engagement in doing something. This is an issue for me because while I find it hard to resist having a constant inflow of information, I also really value the subjective experience of being engrossed in one particular task. I find that when I've been concentrating all or most of my attention on one thing, not only does it get done more effectively, but I feel more relaxed, calm, and alert in a way that's just not possible to achieve when browsing RSS feeds. At its best, I begin to see myself as putting all of my capacities to work and reaching a level of performance that's deeper and better than the day-to-day. The book by Nick Carr that I mentioned above is called The Shallows, and I get why he entitled it that, because I really do think that Web surfing and computer multitasking are fairly shallow endeavors, cognitively speaking.

Luckily, a decent part of my workday involves face to face contacts with patients for therapy or assessment, which I find to be very conducive to focusing, probably in large part because it's interesting and challenging and I'm not in front of a computer while doing it. I'm extremely fortunate in that regard; if my job required me to be at a desk in front of a computer all the time (as opposed to just part of the time, since I do a fairly substantial amount of entering notes and reports into medical records) I'd probably have a lot more difficulty with staying on task. Still, I've made it somewhat of a pet project to consciously decrease my tendencies toward distraction and multitasking and increase my ability to focus on one thing at a time. My inspirations for doing this were this old Lifehacker interview with an author of a book critical of multitasking, which solidified some of the observations I had made of myself, and another recent New York Times piece on people who collect and track data about their daily lives, which gave me some ideas on how to go about an endeavor like this.

Although it may seem bitterly ironic, my approach to this is actually extremely reliant on technology - specifically, my iPhone. I mainly use two programs, the first of which is Evernote, a very cool application that lets me enter and sync notes, photos, and web clips between my computer and my phone. Each day, I start a note specifically dedicated to that day's activities, which I update every hour or so with very basic information about what I'm doing and how well I feel like I'm focusing on a 1-10 scale, with 5 being my baseline and 7-8 being the sweet spot. I only update my note when it's convenient to do so to avoid the monitoring interfering with the activity, which isn't hard to do. This gives me a semi-quantitative account of how my day is going as well as a place to jot down ideas on the fly about how to reduce distractions. Right now, I'm not tracking anywhere near as much data as some of the people in the Times article do, basically just level of focus and number of hours of sleep per night, but I may add more in the future if it becomes useful to do so.

The second thing I use is Google Tasks, which is actually an integrated part of Gmail. It's fairly basic - there's a lot more elaborate things out there - but it's free and has a nice mobile interface that makes it easy to check off and add new things on the go. I've started separating my tasks out into separate lists, one for work, one for home, one for things I need to get at the store, etc. I do this partially for a reminder of things I need to get done and partially because I find it really rewarding to be able to cross things off of my list. One of the nice things about Google Tasks is that it gives you a checkbox and a line through items you check off until you clear out your completed tasks, which lets you bask in your accomplishments a little bit. Here's an example of my work-related task list right now:

I've also started playing around with some other ideas, like allowing myself 5-10 minute distraction breaks but enforcing them by turning on the stopwatch in my phone and having it visible so as to not let myself run over. I'm sure there's a lot of other things I could be doing, too. It's still early, but I'm excited about this project and I think it's going to be very valuable in the long run if I can stick with it. I'd appreciate any other tips or strategies that other people have found helpful in doing something like this. Also, I'd like to note that for the hour-plus I've been composing this entry, I didn't check my Google Reader once, despite it being open in the browser tab adjacent to this one, which is the sort of small victory I'm gunning for here...

Jennifer's Body liveblog

In something of a departure from my usual way of doing this, i.e. pick the worst movie I can find and mock it mercilessly, this week I'm watching Jennifer's Body, which was basically a critical and commercial failure, but never stuck out to me as an obvious misfire based on the previews. Actually, it seemed like it had several pretty smart ideas. In a lot of ways, horror is one of the more prominent movie genres in terms of utilizing female protagonists, so the concept of introducing a female antagonist and possibly subverting the retrograde sexual politics that are a more regrettable horror touchstone is a promising one. The fact that it was written by Diablo Cody of Juno fame seemed like it could either be a big strength or a big weakness depending on the whether the dialogue stays on the right line of "clever" versus "too clever by half." I know most of the critics felt that it was the latter, but I'm not going to rule out the possibility that I might actually like this movie.

0:00: Then again, the only quote on the back of the DVD box is from horror.com, and it reads "Sexy... and chilling!" which gives me pause, because what the hell could they have left out of that sentence with the ellipses? I looked up the actual review out of curiosity (it's positive) and the full quote is "Some of the lines in the film are probably better-read than said, but if you pay close attention to what's being said, you'll be much enriched by this very sexy, over-the-top and sometimes even chilling horror comedy." Does the fact that they left out the "very" on the box make up for leaving out the "sometimes?"


0:00: An early point in this movie's favor: it's only 102 minutes long. My rule of thumb is that a horror movie ought to be 90 plus-or-minus 10 minutes.


1:00: We open on a Halloween ripoff POV shot outside of Megan Fox's house, and a voiceover line "Hell is a teenage girl." If you're going to steal from The Virgin Suicides, might as well not make it subtle.


2:15: We find out that the VO belongs to Amanda Seyfried, who always kind of looked like a space alien to me. She's in a mental institution acting like a badass. "I wasn't always this cracked." Unnecessary framing device alert!


5:34: We're gradually getting to the actual story. There's some silly tidbit about how the town's waterfall has some sort of extradimensional vortex. 


6:45: This movie doesn't waste any time making the lesbian undertones between the lead characters ragingly explicit. Now Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend is saying "You do everything Jennifer says." Also, Amanda Seyfried's character is named Needy. They're going to a rock show in the sticks so Megan Fox can try to fuck the lead singer.


12:00: Megan Fox to Amanda Seyfried, re: breasts: "These things are like smart bombs. Point them in the right direction and shit gets real." Score one point for too clever by half.


14:00: Amanda Seyfried is salty because she overheard the lead singer talking about how he wants to fuck Megan Fox and tells him off.


15:00: I don't agree with the decision to have the fake band, who combines the look of Interpol with the sound of generic early 2000s pop-punk, play a song. More lesbian undertones ensure. Then the bar lights on fire a la the infamous Deep Purple incident of 2002. Megan Fox is in some sort of trance and the band guys haul her off to their van while the bar explodes in the background.


21:00: This is actually kind of boring so far. Isn't the point of being thuddingly obvious with character development that it lets you bypass this sort of gradual story development.


22:05: Now Amanda Seyfried is back at home and walking around the house in generic slow-burn horror mode when Megan Fox sneaks up on her, all bloody and evil looking, which almost looks creepy. Then she pukes out a bunch of black oil, which is kind of ridiculous-looking. After that, Megan Fox throws Amanda Seyfried against a wall and feels her up, then leaves. 


26:00: Now it's the next day in school, and Megan Fox appears to be back to normal, but we can tell she's not because slightly more of a bitch than usual.


26:45: J.K. Simmons is in this as kind of a hippie-ish teacher who's missing a hand. He's wearing a comical looking curly wig.


30:15: Did Diablo Cody actually go to high school? Based on these scenes, which make The Faculty look like a Fredrick Wiseman documentary, I'd say no.


32:05: Now Megan Fox is luring a lunkhead football player, who's grieving the loss of his friend in the fire last night, into the woods to make out. CGI wildlife surrounds them, because otherwise this scene might acquire a bit of tension. Megan Fox takes off her shirt and gives the football player a handjob, then her mouth splits open to reveal fangs and she bites him to death.


35:45: The problem with this movie is that it wants to be a horror comedy, but the comedy aspects completely undermine the horror part because there's no effort made to make the characters coherent or realistic and the movie pretty openly mocks the gravity of the deaths.


41:35: This movie is supposed to be set in Minnesota? And no funny accents? That's a missed opportunity.


46:15: Now Amanda Seyfried and her boyfriend are going to fuck as part of a montage set to a pop-punk cover of Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now. " Movie soundtracks tend to date the films they're attached to, but rarely do they date them to several fucking years before the film was actually produced. Also, Megan Fox is luring in her next high school stereotype, a Goth kid, into a boarded-up house. This is intercut with a joke about Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend fumbling to put on a condom, again because this movie would hate to build or sustain any sort of tension.


52:14: I should point out that Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried are actually nailing their roles here. It's the writing, directing, and editing that's sinking this movie.


53:22: Now Amanda Seyfried realizes, mid-coitus, that Megan Fox is the killer, through some sort of lesbian psychic hallucination link. She gets in her car to drive home and Megan Fox appears in the road and attacks her for some reason.


58:30: Amanda Seyfried gets home and walks around a little bit before going to bed. Megan Fox is waiting there! They make out, because Diablo Cody probably hasn't heard of Internet porn and thought that would be enough to get every horny man in America to see this underwhelming movie. 

1:00:32: Then Megan Fox reveals that the band from the burned down club were actually a Satanic cult of some sort, as if we hadn't figured that out 45 minutes ago. There's a lengthy cutaway dramatizing these events, which are apparently undertaken as a sacrifice to make the band famous "like Maroon 5." LOL! Megan Fox actually gives a really convincing portrayal of distress and violation. Unfortunately, everybody else in the scene is in a completely different movie, one where they're singing Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny." Yes, really.


1:08:23: Well, that was an unnecessary ten minutes that basically served to retroactively undo the lone element of subtlety contained in this movie to date!

1:09:15: Now Amanda Seyfried's doing paranormal research in the high-school library. I have a feeling that there's going to be a knowing ironic reference to this coming up.


1:12:35: Disco.


1:12:50: The climax is going to be at the school formal, because inviting comparison to Carrie is a great idea.


1:14:30: The woman who played Dylan Baker's wife in Happiness is in this shit!


1:17:43: Now Megan Fox is stalking Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend, who didn't believe her earlier when she warned him that Megan Fox was actually a demonic succubus. Also, the Satanic band is playing at the school formal. 

1:21:40: Amanda Seyfried realizes that Megan Fox is probably trying to kill her boyfriend. Instead, she's lured him into an indoor swimming pool that's overgrown with trees on the inside for some reason. Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend decides he doesn't want to kiss Megan Fox because he's still in love with Amanda Seyfried, so she gets pissed and uses her succubus teeth to bite him just before Amanda Seyfried arrives.


1:25:09: Now Amanda Seyfried maces Megan Fox, who does the vomiting thing again and starts to levitate. Then the two of them get into some sort of dialogue about insecurity and female friendship, which I guess was inevitable. Then Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend impales Megan Fox with the back end of a pool skimmer, but instead of dying, she asks Amanda Seyfried for a tampon and then leaves. Amanda Seyfried's boyfriend dies but tells her he loves her first, which I guess is going to restore her self-esteem to the superpower levels that she'll need to take on Megan Fox.


1:30:00: Now we're back to where we were at the beginning of the movie for the climactic showdown, which is sort of an quasi-Exorcist levitation deal over Megan Fox's bed, where Amanda Seyfried rips off Megan Fox's BFF necklace and stabs her in the heart with box cutters, which I guess she read about as being the way to kill a succubus in the school library.


1:33:25: Now we're back to the pointless framing device in the insane asylum, where we learn that Amanda Seyfried "absorbed some of the demon's abilities."  She levitates herself out of the insane asylum, in what would be a logical ending to the movie. It does not, in fact, end.


1:35:35: Now Amanda Seyfried's hitchhiking out to take her revenge on the Satanic rock band, the aftermath of which is shown in flashes over the closing credits, Dawn of the Dead remake style. Remarkably, this movie hadn't used a Hole song on the soundtrack until this point. 


Final thoughts: Jesus, what a misfire. The shame of this is that, like I said before, the basic idea of this movie is really strong. Also, the leads are just about perfect - I think that Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried would absolutely still be the stars of this movie if it were done right. The problem is the writing, which never really seems to aspire to be creepy or scary and instead goes for wall to wall exaggerated quipping. If you rolled your eyes at the "Honest to blog" line in Juno, you'll probably want to throw your DVD player out of the window by the time you get to the point in Jennifer's Body where Megan Fox tells Amanda Seyfried to "move on dot org." Compounding the problem is the direction, which borrows camera moves and staging from other and better horror movies but never really tries to wrestle the script into anything resembling a tone. I could always be wrong about this, but I'd be surprised if this movie finds the cult audience that it's so obviously going for (speaking of which, do these prefab cult movies ever actually wind up working out in that way?)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: The Movie, or An Object Lesson In Why Hollywood Can't Make A Decent Video Game Adaptation

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Above: The hands on hips pose makes Jake Gyllenhaal look like less like a fearsome 'Persian warrior and more like he's waiting impatiently for bar service at a leather club. Who does a boy have to blow to get a vodka and Red Bull in this place?

Over last weekend, when I was visiting my family and girlfriend in St. Louis, we all went out to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. My sister was the main person who was interested in seeing it, but I was kind of curious myself, seeing as this is probably the highest-profile and most expensive video game to movie adaptation to date, having been midwifed by blockbuster merchant du jour Jerry Bruckheimer in a thinly veiled attempt to replicate the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Plus, I've played the 2003 Xbox/PS2 game, which I enjoyed and is widely regarded as a minor classic to boot, so I had a pretty good point of comparison against which to judge it.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time reviewing the movie itself - it sucked, but if you saw the ads, you probably guessed that already. I would like to point out that while I admire Jake Gyllenhaal's ability to Bowflex himself into the $10 million dollar abs you see on display above, he's really not right for this type of part. Gyllenhaal works best when he can break out that look of slight naive confusion that he employed to such good effect in Donnie Darko and most-underrated-movie-evar Zodiac. He can't really conjure the mocking insouciance that his character in Prince of Persia is clearly intended to have. Come to think of it, most of the under-40 A-list male crowd in Hollywood these days is lacking in the smart-ass factor - that was always the weakest part of Tobey Maguire's performance as Spider-Man as well.

Anyhow, the point I want to raise is that adapting a video game into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster shouldn't be nearly as hard as the dismal results of the many attempts to do so would seem to indicate. As I see it, this is a classic Hollywood problem: lack of respect for the source material. Check out this trailer for the original Sands of Time game:

 
You can basically summarize what the game's like from it: you play as a prince who performs amazing acrobatic feats and can rewind time with a dagger powered by magical sand. He spends a lot of time swordfighting with monsters possessed by the same magical sand that powers his dagger. This is kind of a stupid plot, but the plot isn't really the point. The cool stuff you can do in the game is the point, and the plot is a means to that end.

The Prince of Persia movie, by contrast (I'd embed the trailer below for comparison, if it weren't for the fact that the trailer is pretty misleading about the actual content of the movie) does away with the idea of possessed monsters, barely has any time rewinding at all, and stages the action scenes mostly in spatially confusing medium-close shots stitched together with quick-cut editing. Most of the movie is divided between watching Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton walking through the desert and engaging in limply-written bickering, and listening to various characters spout boring expository dialogue about court intrigue and the rules for protecting the dagger. To add insult to injury, whereas the game was renowned for its lighthearted storybook aesthetic, the tone of the movie veers erratically between goofiness and self-seriousness. 

Prince of Persia would have been a much better movie if it had been built around the same stuff that went into the game instead of all the superfluous crap thrown in as a desperate attempt to have a story to focus on. Summer blockbusters get a lot of crap for being overly reliant on action set pieces, but I think that criticism speaks more to mediocrity of action set pieces these days rather than the basic template. Put it this way: Raiders of the Lost Ark is just a bunch of set pieces with the barest minimum of exposition connecting them, and everybody in the world loves that movie. Prince of Persia was obviously never gonna come close to that, but why not try? Why not hire some parkour experts to try and top the foot chase sequences in Casino Royale or District B-13? Why not keep the sand monsters idea and turn the swordfights into a PG-13 friendly version of the battles in 300? Who decided that this movie needed to be a slow-witted homage to Romancing the Stone? Making a video-game based blockbuster movie doesn't entail re-inventing the wheel, but it ought to entail a careful consideration of how to keep whatever made the game appealing in the first place in the film.