Blue Man Sings The Whites

This stuff makes me angry. Then it makes me sad. Then I read the comments and it makes me angry again.

Looking at the story with an ignorant outsider’s eye, the first second and third paragraphs seem to sit uncomfortably together. One of the jurors states that the convicted man should be put to death because the Bible tells us that’s what should happen to murderers. But the juror also says that he believes in the death penalty over life imprisonment because locking someone up is too expensive. Doesn’t that seem a little bit… I don’t know, like he’s trying to have it both ways? In my experience, doing what’s morally right is very rarely the easiest solution to a problem. Generally that’s what morals are for, aren’t they? To stop us taking the most ruthlessly expedient road? Don’t know. Obviously the writer is quoting the juror selectively, perhaps his position isn’t as suspiciously self-supporting as it seems in the story. Perhaps I’m just looking for a problem, looking to pick a fight, seeing self-deception where it isn’t there because the notion of state-sponsored murder based on a selective reading of a 2500-year old text is so utterly incomprehensible to me. It’s repugnance squared.

I appreciate that it’s monumental arrogance for a staunch atheist to try and interpret the Bible for a believer but hey, monumental arrogance is a close personal friend. So: wasn’t this “eye for an eye” stuff supposed go out when Jesus arrived with Bible 2.0? Wasn’t love, forgiveness and turning the other cheek his MO? How is it that headbanging fundamentalists go out of their way to dig up obscure parts of the Old Testament to take to their hearts but miss the really big, really important, really cool stuff that’s said over and over and over in the Gospels? Why do people fixate on, f’rinstance, what folk choose to do with their reproductive organs rather than the notion that the only way into heaven is to love your neighbour?

To put it bluntly, why is it that people who believe that the Bible is the literal truth, the literal word of God, always seem to choose the wrong literal words to believe? Yes, the Bible is the product of many writers over a long period of time and is somewhat self-contradictory in places but the overall tone and message of the New Testament is pretty consistent. So why do so many people pick out the nastiest, most close-minded, most spiteful and stupid parts of a book that in the main asserts that your first and most important duty to God is to be excellent to each other? What am I missing? Can somebody explain to me how it works, because I honestly don’t understand. Particularly given that I can barely think of a single Christian I’ve ever personally known that I wouldn’t describe as a good person. Faith is a good thing. Yes, it needs to be kept out of science classes and public health policies but it’s brought far more light and beauty into the world than stupidity and ugliness – you only need to look at the Sistine Chapel or read Paradise Lost or hear Bird In God’s Garden to realise that. I’m just having problems squaring the circle here.

The answer, of course, is that the idiots and hatemongers are a tiny albeit loud minority. But then I read a story like this which states that 80% of a sentencing jury on a murder case “introduced biblical notions into the jury discussion”, and I start to wonder if “biblical notions” is a phrase that does not mean what I’ve always thought it meant.

Man, it’s going to be tough to get through this post while maintaining the BMStW IV paradigm of swearinesslessness. If ever a game called for a stream of joyfully employed base vernacular, it’s Batman: Arkham Asylum. Or, as it should properly have been called, Batman: (Funking – Ed) People’s (Suit – Ed) UP.

Batman is the coolest superhero. That’s not an opinion, it’s an empirical fact. Batman’s got the coolest logo. Batman’s got the coolest kit. Batman’s got the coolest alter-ego. Batman’s got the coolest base. Batman’s got the coolest power – namely the power to ROCK YOUR FACE. I love the Adam West camp-as-Christmas Some-Days-You-Just-Can’t-Get-Rid-Of-A-Bomb Batman as much as the next man. But my favourite take on the character is the dour, uncompromising, ferociously intelligent and utterly terrifying bad(bottom – Ed) from Grant Morrison’s run on JLA. The Batman who can kick the alien (donkeys – Ed) of a team of incredibly powerful superbeings who’d already defeated Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman and the Flash. Arkham Asylum’s Batman (scripted by Paul Dini, one of the guiding forces behind the excellent Batman: The Animated Series) isn’t quite in that league (aha. Aha. Aha.) but at least he’s in the right sport.

Generally speaking, I don’t have the guts or the patience for stealth games. My character’s vulnerability and the necessity to spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for the right moment to move leads to a undesirable combination of tension, boredom and frustration. The last sneak-em-up I really enjoyed was Tenchu on the PS1, which for all its faults did a wonderful job of making me feel like a ninja in Feudal Japan, darting across the rooftops over the heads of the dull-witted foreign invaders, making the shadows into a weapon, not a shield. You snuck around to make yourself more powerful, not because you were powerless if you didn’t. You weren’t an intruder, you were a predator. Arkham Asylum’s stealth sections give the exact same sort of thrill, the anticipation of isolating some poor (hugger – Ed) followed by the brutal satisfaction of the takedown. I found myself taking my time over the last opponent or two in each room, letting them run around freaking out with their status readout indicating “Terrified” before finally swooping in to put them out of their misery.

If anything, the brawling sections are even better. Combat is simple, relying almost exclusively on two face buttons, but never gets stale over the course of the game largely thanks to absolutely exemplary animation. The fighting in Arkham Asylum reminds me of the Paul Greengrass-directed Bourne movies – strings of fluid moves which are carried out almost too quickly to be consciously registered and yet you’re somehow never confused as to what’s going on. That smoothness is combined with a convincing sense of weight and impact, and as a result the feeling of controlling a hyper-competent, hyper-trained fighting machine is both convincing and satisfying. When Batman hits you, brother you STAY (FORKING – Ed) HIT. My personal favourite move is the finisher where Bats delivers a WWE-style flying fist-drop on a fallen opponent – generally the animation shows you punching the enemy in the face, but if he’s unfortunate enough to be lying with his feet pointing away from you the blow looks for all the world like it’s landing right in his (Michael Ballacks – Ed) instead. Walking up to groups of (buzzards – Ed) and calmly and ruthlessly cleaning their (firkin – Ed) clocks never, ever got dull. Batman: Handing You Your (Derriere – Ed) Since 1939. Batman: Over One Million Customers Served. Batman: When You Absolutely, Positively Have To Deck Every (Mummykisser – Ed) In The Room, Accept No Substitute.

Deep down, I suspect that it’s not actually that great a game, that it’s too repetitive, that it’s too easy, that it’s too Grey Generic Xbox Action Game Space Marine-O-Vision, that the stealth and fighting mechanics while fun are too shallow, and that anyone who didn’t have such a strong emotional attachment to Batman as a character would find it a bit bland and annoying. That doesn’t matter, because anyone who doesn’t have a strong emotional attachment to Batman as a character can (cuddle – Ed) right off. Arkham Asylum lets you “be” Batman, in the same way that (the good bits of) Jedi Academy let you “be” Luke Skywalker. If that notion doesn’t appeal that’s your fault, not the game’s. Also, you smell. RANK: A

Punch my Peggle and call me a casual gamer, but I think I might have hated Mirror’s Edge.

From the wide-eyed ousider’s perspective Parkour is fascinating, both on a practical and abstract level. It seems to be the natural evolution of martial arts for our increasingly dangerous cities, a physical discipline that equips someone to deal with armed confrontation in the most effective possible way – by running the hell away from it. The Mirror’s Edge demo seemed to capture the utter wicked-coolness of Parkour very nicely with its gorgeous bright clean cityscapes and its focus, pretty much unique in the annals of first-person games, on movement and terrain over enemies and fighting. Adversaries were dangerous and largely to be avoided rather than defeated, so the clunky combat controls didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was in it for the running, jumping, climbing trees, the sense of exploration and agility and pell-mell momentum.

Instead, what I got was a stop-start first-person platformer / puzzle game which was made more artificially difficult by having you repeatedly shot at while you were trying to work out your path through the game’s too-often confusing and bland environments. Chances to free-run through the pristine city with its gleaming white skyscrapers were too few and clichéd grey corridors and service tunnels were too many. And whoever decided to set three-quarters of the last level in the pitch dark needs a slap to the chops and a good hard think about what they’ve done. Because if there’s one thing that always improves the experience of finicky platform nonsense, it’s not being able to see what the hug you’re doing. See also: whoever decided that the best way to showcase the acrobatic but imprecise combat was repeatedly locking you in a room with a bunch of heavily-armed motherhuggers and not letting you out till they were all defeated. Grrr.

Mirror’s Edge isn’t totally without merit. When it gets out of its own way there are some nice set-pieces here and there – most memorably, racing down the central staircase of a towering corporate headquarters to escape a squad of armed police – but those moments are swamped by the amount of time spent standing around trying to suss where you’re supposed to go next and how in God’s name you’re meant to achieve that.  Chuck in a nonsensical story, diabolical voice-acting and, in a videogame first, cutscenes that are significantly uglier than the game itself and you’ve got one of the most disappointing games of recent years. RANK: D

Here’s the problem with Mark Wahlberg – he’s got exactly no ability to elevate the material he’s working with.

That’s not the worst problem in the world to have. It’s not that he’s a bad actor, it’s just that he hasn’t got the charisma to carry a film on his own the way, f’rinstance, George Clooney or Bruce Willis or Will Smith can. But neither is he a Keanu Reeves who’ll drag anything he’s involved with down to his level. He’s a safe pair of hands, a decent complimentary piece. Give Marky Mark a great script, a great director and a great supporting cast and you end up with Boogie Nights or Three Kings. Give him a mediocre script, a mediocre director and a mediocre supporting cast and you end up with The Italian Job. Give him one of the worst scripts in the history of motion pictures, a toweringly awful director and a helpless supporting cast and you end up with The Happening.

The Happening opens with hundreds of people in and around New York’s Central Park abruptly deciding to commit suicide. This leads to a moderately eerie scene of construction workers throwing themselves from the top of the building they’re working from and hitting the ground like sacks of tomatoes. From there on, it’s downhill all the way.

The rest of the film follows Mark Wahlberg (for it is he), a high school science teacher in Philadelphia as he flees from the “terrorist attacks” that are hitting the north-east coast of the US with his wife (Zooey Deschanel and her enormous Manga eyes – they could have cast her in that bonkers new BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU anti-drugs ad and saved themselves a fortune in CGI). It’s vaguely reminiscent of the Spielberg version of War Of The Worlds, with the majority of the movie spent showing its main characters running away from an implacable, unbeatable enemy before an anticlimactic deus ex machina ending. The reasons why War Of The Worlds works while The Happening very much doesn’t are many but the two most important are the presence of Tom Cruise, who despite being a batpoo insane religious cultist has screen presence out the fundament, and the drama that develops between the Cruise character and his two children being at least as interesting as the wider conflict with the aliens. You empathise with those three people. You care about what happens to them. It’s hard to give a toss about anyone in The Happening because they’re all so brain-bludgeoningly boring you find yourself rooting for their bloody and violent death just to temporarily alleviate the monotony.

M. Night Shymalan’s second movie, Unbreakable, was a film about comics written by someone who’s never read a comic in his life. Without wishing to give too much away in case you’re still inclined to see this terrible, terrible movie The Happening is a film about the arrogance of science and humanity’s impact on the Earth’s ecosystem written by someone who’s never spoken to a scientist in his life. Although given that the film hardly contains a single line of dialogue that sounds like something a real person might conceivably say, it seems to have been written by someone who’s never spoken to a human, either.

The first time we’re introduced to Marky Mark he’s telling a roomful of students about how millions of bees have suddenly vanished and inviting them to speculate as to what might have caused it. “A disease?” “But there are no bodies.” “Global warming?” “Could be. The temperature goes up a fraction of a degree, the bees can’t tolerate it any more and die.” EH? For a kickoff, wouldn’t that leave just as many bodies as a virus? And if bees were so sensitive that they couldn’t withstand a minute temperature fluctuation, wouldn’t they all die every time the sun went down? Plus, it’s stated this is happening all over the country, so presumably the bees in Arizona are being killed by an increase from 30 to 30.2 degrees centigrade at the same time that bees in Seattle are being killed by an increase from 18 to 18.2 degrees. Really? That’s your best guess? That’s your theory, is it?

Of course not! He’s got a much better answer than that. “They’ll come up with an explanation to put in a book but the truth is, it’s an act of nature. We’ll never know why it happened.”  Yes. Because that’s what science is, isn’t it? It’s basically just a load of hand-waving to fob people off. Really, science can’t hope to understand Nature in any significant way. And yes, it does deserve a capital N. You could write this attitude off as just being the wrong-headed attitude of one chump of a character, except that at the end of the movie another “scientific expert” repeats the line almost verbatim. They don’t say that there are various different theories. They don’t say that there hasn’t yet been sufficient study into the phenomenon to hazard a guess as to its cause. They don’t even say that we might never fully understand what happened. No, it’s stated as a hard fact – act of nature, we’ll never know why, end of discussion. Mark Wahlberg’s character and the TV talking head are presented as the face of enlightened science, they survive and thrive because they accept man’s place in the scheme of things. If that’s your attitude, fine. If that’s the message you want your film to convey, fine. But you can’t put those words in the mouth of your characters who’re meant to be flippin’ scientists because it makes them and you sound like cavemen cowering in fear at the sight of the giant golden ball of fire floating in the sky.

Beyond the heavy-handed fable it’s hard to work out what sort of film The Happening is trying to be. It’s not an action movie, because there’s sod-all action. Somehow, Shyamalan’s managed to make a film called The Happening and forgotten to include anything, well, happening. It’s not a twist thriller or a whatdunnit because the source of “the terrorist attacks” is made obvious half an hour in, explicitly stated about fifteen minutes later then repeated about three more times after that. It’s not the story of two people resolving their differences against the background of A World Gone Mad because the two protagonists barely have any differences. There’s not a single moment in their relationship or indeed the film as a whole that rings true intellectually or emotionally. There’s no character development. There’s no character depth. There’s no character conflict. To be honest, there are barely any characters. Instead, there’re just a bunch of cardboard cutouts riding the world’s least interesting ghost train trying not to step in the metaphor.

If you feel it’s been too long since you’ve properly hated something, The Happening might be just what you’re looking for.

Hello you! Sorry I’ve not posted in a couple of months. I appear to have completely forgotten how to write.

This appears to be a combination of two intermeshing and not terribly interesting causes. The urge to write generally comes from stuff that evokes passion in me one way or the other – things I really love or things I really hate. I’ve now spent some time in a vague background state of general listless mopey fedupness that’s kind’ve turning down the volume on everything. It’s a bit like being a character in Battlestar Galactica.

Compounding the problem is my Godawful writing process. A regrettable combination of nitpicky perfectionism and mediocre talent means that my writing is incredibly stop-start. I have an enormously hard time moving past a sentence or a paragraph I’m not 100% happy with. I’ve just spent five minutes deleting and re-writing that last one, f’rinstance. Yeah, I know.

The result of this is that I’ll often start an entry, hit a problem and instead of moving it and coming back when the rest of the piece is done it ends up being a road-block that stops me dead, particularly – and here we hit where my general ennui enters the equation – if the idea I’m writing isn’t one that’s burning in my brain and won’t rest till it’s escaped. Above this entry in the Word doc I use for drafting blog posts I’ve currently got 10-50% complete musings on Civ 4, mental list weirdness, the Rock Band games, Once, fat stroke fat acceptance, Escape To Victory and parkour. In each case I’ve clonked into a roadblock and been unable to get around it.

So anyway. Sorry so long no content, and sorry that I’m breaking my duck with sorry-for-myself limp lettuce-leafery. Hopefully (ir)regular service will be resumed soon.

Good result for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow there against a scrappy Vegas team.

A semi-tactical real-world soldier sim in which you’re in charge of a three-man elite anti-terrorist team running around the Las Vegas strip meeting interesting people and shooting them in the head. Even though it’s considerably streamlined and simplified since the old Rainbow 6 games on the PC (where you’d be controlling a squad of six and often spent more time planning your team’s movements on the level map beforehand than you did actually first-person-shootering) this is still something of a thinking person’s frag-fest.

I found R6V2 (he was the astromech droid on Wedge’s X-Wing) a bit of an uncomfortable experience. The game doesn’t seem sure if it wants to be a slow-paced tactical shooter or something more akin to Gears Of War, where use of cover is absolutely vital but it’s still completely clear that you’re in an arcade free-for-all. As a result, there are some jarring changes of tone and the odd moment that feels completely out of place in a game that’s largely a semi-hardcore soldier-sim. Goons pouring out of side-doors when I reach a certain point I can just about forgive. Goons that only pour out of side-doors when I reach a certain point, having totally ignored the two squad members that I sent ahead are a complete immersion-breaker. Don’t get me started on the blokes lugging around indestructible metal shields. The airport level, with its multiple unavoidable chokepoints that you have to navigate sans squad, can get to fecking feck. And the hugging game ends with a hugging BOSS BATTLE. Seriously. A combat sim that throws in an old-skool shmup-style memorise-the-pattern trial-and-error boss battle. For crying. Out. Loud.

My discomfort wasn’t entirely due to the schizoid level design, however. Call me a muesli-munching bleeding-heart liberal, but all the way through the game I was faintly bothered by the nagging awareness that I was playing a right-wing wet dream. Dozens and dozens of highly-armed fanatical terrorists are going to BLOW UP THE MOON or something so we now need to open up a dialogue. And by “a dialogue” we mean “their chest cavities”. Yes, of course it’s only a game, yes of course it’s not remotely unique in demonising and dehumanising the pop-up shooting-gallery targets that provide an obstacle to victory. Nonetheless, there’s just a slight distasteful air to proceedings, a bit of a whiff of the palpable excitement that a certain sort of person displays when something ghastly happens because now they’ve got moral justification to let slip the dogs of war, crack open the shiny high-tech explode-o-toys and protect the values of civilization by being absolute barbarians. However, Ubisoft should be given credit for subtly undercutting the game’s fascist undertone by casting your squadmates as a pair of bumbling pacifists who’ll do anything in their power to prevent you harming anyone. They repeatedly refuse to follow your orders because they’re unable to work out how to get around, for example, a knee-high coffee table and on occasion they’ll even attempt to bring a halt to the bloodshed via non-violent direct action, heroically throwing themselves in front of your gun in the midst of a firefight. The voice-acting for your team isn’t just them endlessly singing Blowin’ In The Wind but it flipping well ought to be.

For all its frustrations and dodgy ideology, I had a pretty good time with R6V2 (or “Community Policing Sim: The Met Edition” as it swiftly became known in these parts). When Stan and Ollie aren’t being flummoxed by furniture or the functionality of the common corridor they do give several very cool moments where you can send them in through one door to draw the enemy fire (“Iron Duke, Iron Duke, this is Pawn Sacrifice…”) while you nip around the side and slaughter the oppo with impunity. The combat is intense but still somewhat tactical, and the experience-point system that rewards you with goodies for massacring folk in interesting ways (killing someone from behind f’rinstance, or at long range, or with explosives) encourages you to plan and experiment even if the kit you’re given actually isn’t any more effective than the default stuff. And I liked being able to use the EggBox camera to import my massive baldy heed onto my character.

Rainbow 6 Vegas 2, then. It’s annoying and it’s for people who’re a bit too keen on the word “ordnance”, but it’s not bad. RANK: C

Not being remotely patriotic has its advantages. No, you don’t get to feel unearned and unjustifiable pride in those achievements of your fellow countrypeople with which you had nothing whatsoever to do. However, you also don’t have to feel ashamed when the other folks crammed onto a slightly shabby island in the North Atlantic with you do something deeply stupid and nasty. Thus, valuable emotional energy that would have been taken up with misplaced guilt and shame can instead be used for working up appropriate levels of embarrassment and contempt.

Here’s part of the problem, though: if you’re an average, reasonably rational human being who’s naturally concerned about the current political, social and economic climate but doesn’t believe the solution is to lock up all paediatricians  and to Send Back Where They Came From anyone darker-skinned than David Dickenson, exactly who is there for you to vote for? With the three main political parties melting together into a centrist mass of well-scrubbed near-indistinguishable charisma-free talking heads who’ll say absolutely anything to get elected it’s hard to generate much enthusiasm for any of them. And that’s assuming you don’t share the general understandable yet ever-so-slightly hypocritical outrage at the state of MPs’ expenses.

(After all, you could take the opinion that everyone was doing it, that it was basically an accepted perk of the job. And I don’t know about you, but the sort of person who’s got the chutzpah to claim for having their moat cleaned or a wooden duck house on expenses is precisely who I want representing my interests. Scruples are all very well, but when it comes right down to getting things done give me the devious git with the nerve of a burglar over the choirboy. Not meaning to excuse or play down the general shabbiness of the whole expenses scandal, but some of the weeping and wailing that’s followed it seems just a little hysterical and fundamentalist. After all, Let He Who Is Without A Purloined Pad Of Post-It Notes Cast The First Stone.)

The Green Party have always been the traditional beneficiaries of the middle-class protest vote, but personally I can’t in all good conscience put my cross next to a party who veer dangerously close to being anti-rationalism. Banning animal testing, banning stem-cell research and throwing more NHS money at alternative and complimentary therapies are policies that speak of a mistrust of science, of a worrying degree of influence from headbanging hardcore ley-line botherers. Which they make no bones about of course, and is absolutely fine if that’s your bag but for me it’s a complete deal-breaker (ladies). Making sure the current ecosphere survives is a Good Thing to believe in, absolutely, but the only way that’s going to happen is by applying our wonderful, miraculous evolved monkey brains to the problem.

Being able to turn up at the polling booth and place our cross for None Of The Above would be nice, but doesn’t address the major issue that somewhere, somehow, we do actually need to find some people to run the country. So what we need is a Fourth Way. We need a party without the Flash Harry sliminess of the career politician, but also without the baggage or true-believer scariness that comes with the one-issue candidates.

Friends, Britons, countrymen – what we need is the Nerd Party.

The advantages of electing nerds to office are many. If you accept that power is inevitably going to corrupt, it’s a good idea to vote for folk who’re only going to be corrupted in ways that are a) harmless (No Child Left Behind The Current Generation Of Consoles, changing the national anthem to Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley) or b) entertaining (several hundred million quid of taxpayers’ money blown on a Boeing 747 and a giant conveyer belt to settle things once and for all). Having computer-literate politicians would go a long way toward preventing the habitual costly chaos that results every time a government department tries something IT-related that’s more complicated than reading its email. And it would mean an end to having to doll out a second-house allowance to facilitate MPs attending the House of Commons, because the Nerd Party would be entirely happy to telecommute. In our pants, most likely.

In fact, we could likely ditch the Palace Of Westminster altogether in favour of an entirely web-based solution. The Forum Of Commons has a nice ring about it, n’est-ce pas? It’d be a far more efficient way of debating the issues of the day than the current one-subject-at-a-time, one-person-talking-six-hundred-sitting-there-waving-pieces-of-paper system. And just think how much more difficult it would be for a government to backtrack from its positions or promises if the opposition had instant access to everything that had ever been said plus a “Quote This Post” button.

The more I think about this, the more I’m convinced it’s the way forward. After all, so long as you keep clear of their pet subjects nerds are generally clear-thinking folk who don’t attach any stigma to seeking the counsel of the better-informed, which is exactly the sort of attitude that we want from our leaders. Of course, if any major policy decision hinges on which Terminator film is the best we’re looking at weeks of increasingly long-winded and vicious infighting followed by the collapse of Western civilisation, but that’s a chance we’ll have to take.

Vote Nerd in 2010. Together we can be made of win!

Re: The darkly hilarious interview on Radio 4 this morning in which BNP leader, holocaust denier, new Member of the European Parliament and all-terrain tosspot Nick Griffin declared straight-faced that white folk are now second-class citizens in Britain:

“Alright, apart from the House of Commons, the banks, the police, the European Parliament, the media, the Cabinet, the armed forces, the Civil Service, teaching, the House of Lords, the City, the social services, journalism, the Church and 94% of all management positions – what is there left that white British people still control?”

I’m not a huge fan of Star Trek. The original series was camp fun, and the movies that embraced that (primarily Wrath Of Khan, The One With The Whales and The One With Shakespeare In The Original Klingon*) were thoroughly enjoyable. Next Gen was largely “meh” with only a few flirtations with REALLY ANNOYINGNESS (So-called empath Deanna Troi and her ability to state the stupefying obvious – green guys with weird foreheads are blasting away at the Enterprise with a battery of Kill-O-Death Cannon, at which point Troi helpfully interjects “I sense… anger”. Come to think of it, what IS the ship’s councillor doing sitting on the bridge anyway? Also: Troi’s relationship with Riker. Also: Riker. No wonder Picard kept sending the fatuous git on every possible away team. “Captain, our sensors detect millions of ten-foot tall heavily-armed warrior-lizards whose society appears to be entirely based around the loathing of trombones, stupid beards and self-satisfaction.” “Number One, report to the transporter room.”). Deep Space 9 I actually quite liked, despite it being a poor man’s Babylon 5 and featuring the most wooden commanding officer in Trek history. Voyager was nearly unbearable, it’s only saving grace being the holographic doctor who seemed to hate every other character on the ship nearly as much as I did. And Enterprise was actually unbearable.

This disclosure isn’t coming from the sneery “Trekkie? Me? No, I Have Known The Touch Of A Woman Haw Haw Haw” place that seems in rather pathetic vogue at the moment (I really must get round to writing that post on The Cult Of Nerd that’s been kicking around in the back of my mind for the last few weeks). It’s just that a person’s reaction to the new Trek film is inevitably going to be coloured by their feelings about the franchise so I feel I should get my cards on the table right from the off. I wouldn’t want you thinking it’s just nostalgia talking when I tell you that the film’s really, really good.

The film’s really, really good.

Going in, I had some trepidation. Classic Trek given a smirky noughties shakey-cam makeover sounded like something that was potentially smug enough to provoke me to gouge my own eyes out with a spoon. Particularly seeing as it was being directed by the bloke who made the really not terribly good at all Mission Impossible 3.

Any lingering doubts were quickly dismissed. Within the first ten minutes I’d laughed, I’d cried and I’d seen the vehicle that I now want a go on more than any other in movie history. Sorry, Dark Knight-era Batmobile. Sorry, Speeder Bike. Sorry, hoverboard thingamy out of Back To The Future 2. For all the flashy whizz-bangery and unnecessary wobblycam this film looks and sounds and feels like Star Trek. More importantly, it looks and sounds and feels like a massive, epic, sweeping space-opera. There’s derring-do and a remarkable but mis-matched group of misfits battling against impossible odds with The Fate Of The World Itself At Stake. It’s as close as (almost) anyone’s come to recreating the fun and wide-eyed excitement of the first Star Wars film. Certainly closer than George Lucas has managed since 1983.

One of the big reasons Star Trek works as well as it does is the casting. Central to the original series was the Freudian relationship between Bones the irascible, emotional humanist id, Spock the cold, rational ego and Kirk’s (heh) superego resolving the two. In this film you can see that dynamic shaking into place via the three terrific central turns from Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban.  The film usually remembers that the lasers and splodes aren’t the point, they’re just there to dress up what’s fundamentally a story about people. And, importantly, they’re people you really enjoy spending a couple of hours with. For the most part the performances are pitched to evoke the original cast without impersonating them, something that’s done through little mannerisms such as Kirk’s smirk and command-chair slouch, Chekov’s wide-eyed enthusiasm or Spock’s patented “Hmm, you’re right, I hadn’t considered that” expression. It’s a difficult trick but it’s pulled off immaculately give or take a dodgy Scottish accent or so.

It’s not perfect by any means. It’s pretty relentlessly white-male-centric: Uhura is set up as an interesting character then given next to nothing to do for the last half of the film. I’d have preferred a plot resolution that relied a bit more on outwitting the enemy and a bit less on peace through superior firepower. However, my only major issue we’re probably going to have to break the old spoiler warning out for:

CAUTION! SPOILERS AHEAD!

The whole baggy, slightly tedious section with the (slippy-slidey) ice world needed to go. Really? There was no more elegant and cohesive way you could have woven in the time-travel plot and Old Spock than that? A massive Exposition Dump and an even more massive coincidence that Kirk got marooned on the same world that Nero stuck Old Spock on? I’m not even sure which of the two was more of a stretch of logic. Wouldn’t New Spock just have chucked Kirk in the brig? Wouldn’t Nero have just kept Old Spock on the Death Star for fun, torture and maybe more? Couldn’t he have shown Old Spock the destruction of Vulcan from there? Hmmm and ahem and come on now.

I know cohesive water-tight plotting is hardly Star Trek’s raison d’etre, but in this case it was abusing the privilege. Thing is, the whole alternate universe, time-travel thing was such a clever and brave idea it really did deserve an awful lot better.

CAUTION! SPOILERS BEHIND!

That’s being just a fraction nit-picky, though. To reiterate: the film’s really, really good. Comfortably the best Star Trek film ever, comfortably the best sci-fi movie since Serenity. Between this and Iron Man we now have two unexpectedly terrific summer blockbuster franchises that are ready to follow the path well-trod by Pirates Of The Carribbean 2 and Matrix Reloaded right over the quality cliff.

Which’ll be something to look forward to.

* – Actually, just go here, they’re all great.

Tom Clancy Presents Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. By Tom Clancy (Xbox 360)

It’s an arcade flight sim in a contemporary setting. And it wants to be Ace Combat 6 so badly it hurts, right down to the pre-mission target-percentage breakdown, the post-mission cinematic replay and the three camera view options, each practically identical to its equivalent in AC6.

Here are the things H.A.W.(ks – Ed) does better than Ace Combat 6: more planes (although they all feel pretty much exactly the same to fly), external fly-by “assistance off” view that looks hugely cool (but is completely unnecessary and massively difficult to control), your plane carries anti-missile flares (not that you’ll have any left when you need them because some idiot mapped “deploy flares” to a click of the control stick, something that’s incredibly easy to do accidentally when engaged in intense flight manoeuvres) no portentous and jarring cut-scenes about the hideousness of war (instead there’s a staggeringly nonsensical plot about a corporation as lacking in business-sense as they are in morals), moderately groovy R6: Vegas/CoD4 XP-O-Gain level system (which mostly only unlocks new planes which, as previously stated, aren’t much more than re-skins), looks hugely pretty in places (but extremely ropy in others – the Chicago level with the skyscrapers jarringly plonked down on what looks like a perfectly flat Google Earth map will take you back to the worst sins of mid-nineties flight-simmmery) and its whole campaign is playable in co-op (actually, that one’s pretty much an unreserved yay).

Here are the things it does worse than AC6: smaller maps with smaller, almost linear missions. One of my favourite levels in Ace Combat sees you asked to assist a massive amphibious assault on a coastal town. There are three different allied forces landing in three different places facing different compositions of enemy, and who you choose to primarily support in what way is up to you. Fly a mud-moving A-10 Warthog with iron bombs to easily take out enemy tank formations? Or air-to-ground missles for knocking out priority targets from a safe distance? Either way, you’ll be vulnerable to enemy interceptors and too slow to effectively support all three fronts. Go with a multi-role plane like the F-16 or the Mirage 2000 which’ll let you carve through enemy close air support bombers like a multimillion dollar supersonic knife through butter but is somewhat brittle in the face of ground fire? Should you take the risk of attacking the well-defended town in order to secure its airfield, giving you a base near the front-line where you can land to get repaired and re-armed?

All that light tactical layer is absent from H.A.W.(ks. – Ed). In your first playthough, you’ll have a lot of planes to choose from but generally only one weapons load and one approach to any given scenario. There’s no landing at carriers or airbases, no chance to change your payload mid-mission, no trading off effectiveness against X sort of target with effectiveness against Y. It’s pretty much just a shooting-gallery – hostile unit appears in front of you, press A to fire a missile, done, done and I’m onto the next one.

There are tons of smaller niggles. Hard mode is too easy (so I presume you could finish Normal mode without actually looking at the screen) while Elite mode doesn’t, y’know, make the enemy AI any more dangerous it just artificially and unfairly limits the number of weapons you can carry (which wouldn’t be as much of an issue except that, as previously mentioned, there’s no way of re-arming mid-mission). The targeting system is fiddly and thoughtless – if I’ve got AAMs armed, why on Earth does it let me lock onto ground targets that I can’t hit? And why oh why oh why is “change weapon” mapped to the D-pad? Did nobody twig that when you want to switch to, say, dogfighting missles you might possibly be in, f’rinstance, a dogfight and so not really be overly keen to LET GO OF THE HUGGING CONTROLS?

If the flight scenes in Top Gun mildly arouse you, you’ll have some fun with H.A.W.(ks – Ed). Me? They do and I did. It’s not a bad game by any means, it’s just shallow, workmanlike, a bit bland and lacking in charm. It’s like a tribute band – the songs are still good but the magic’s not quite there. H.A.W.(ks – Ed) is the Bootleg Ace. It’s the Counterfeit Combat. It’s the Tesco Value Ace Combat 6.

With an unnecessarily silly name.

John Woo Presents John Woo’s Stranglehold By John Woo (Xbox 360)

The graphics are ropy, the controls are slightly worse, its difficulty is up and down more than a manically depressed junkie kangaroo on a space hopper and it’s a pony that barely manages one trick. And that’s the exact same trick as Max Payne’s, only – and I appreciate this will be hard to believe – with a worse story. If I’d paid full price at release I’d have been a) insane and b) furious. But as a cheap, throwaway b-movie title it hits the spot. Stranglehold is the first game in history where the stuff you can do in-game is cooler than the stuff you’re shown doing in cut-scenes. The first time I slid down a banister, shot a sign that fell on a mook’s head, blew up a second mook by taking out the barrel of propane he was slightly foolishly hiding behind, then dove onto a wheelie-trolley and rolled across a courtyard shooting two more mooks in the face I’d pretty much had enough fun for the fiver the game set me back. And the massively over-the-top spinny-around-with-doves-flying-up-everywhere special move made me laugh every single time I did it. For that, I’m willing to forgive semi-frequent moments of frustration brought on by the lack of a Left 4 Dead-style “Spin 180 Degrees” button and insufficient information as to the location of the THOUSANDS OF ENEMIES currently shooting your wanger off.

Stranglehold is rubbish. But it’s extravagant, operatic, cheerfully stupid, generally good fun rubbish. It’s rubbish with the courage to be rubbish as loudly and forcefully as it can. Much like Face/Off, actually.

Russell T. Davis Presents Russell T. Davis’ Doctor Who Easter Special By Russell T. Davis (Alright, you can stop now – Ed) (Telly)

It was alright, wasn’t it? The Lara Croft wannabe pseudo-assistant was good fun, the visual of a London bus crashed in the middle of a desert wilderness was cool to the point that you strongly suspect that RTD started with that image and worked back to find a story that semi-justified it, I liked that the ugly menacing-looking aliens actually turned out to be innocent bystanders and the story rollocked along at a decent old pace even if it didn’t make a lot of sense and fell apart a bit in the final third. No change there, then. So not a boundary, but a controlled single that keeps the scoreboard ticking over. Still looking forward to seeing what Who will turn into in fresh hands, mind.

Nobody Presents Nobody’s Empire: Total War By Nobody (You’re fired – Ed) (PC)

Medieval: Total War is one of my favourite games ever, I’ve read every Sharpe book ever written (they are, after all, Mills And Boon for boys), and there’s nothing I like more in movies than some buckles being suitably swashed. So why oh why oh why hasn’t this game clicked with me? Am I just a bit Total Warred out? The real-time battles have a very different feel to Rome or either of the Medievals. Those games depended on you winning the scissors-paper-stone-lizard-Spock matchups (archers beat everything at range, everything beats archers up close, spears beat cavalry, cavalry beats swords, swords beat spears) and making practical use of flank and rear attacks on already-engaged units. Outflanking remains important in Empire, but its battles seem to primarily hinge on your ability to concentrate fire. Almost everyone’s got guns, so all things being equal what you’re trying to do is get two of your units shooting at one of the enemy’s. If you can do that, the opposition will rout before you and your freed-up soldiers can then start shooting at the next enemy unit, continuing a virtuous circle that will eventually see you “rolling up” the other fellow’s battle-line. It’s a different tactical challenge, and an interesting one, but for some reason the whole package isn’t quite grabbing me.
 
There are lots of little problems with it, but nothing I can see as being The Sticking Point. The naval battles are fiddly but easily-skipped. The battlefields seem a lot more varied than they used to be, with buildings that you can garrison, but occupied buildings are such easy prey for enemy artillery that they’re not remotely worth the bother 90% of the time. In the strategic layer, I don’t feel like I’m getting enough feedback on the socio-economic situation in my territories making it hard to determine which cities are performing well and which are on the brink of anarchy, although this may simply be down to not yet having spent enough time learning the nuances of the game.

Can’t put my finger on it. All I know is that this weekend I spent nine hours fiddling with a game I’ve had for six months and three quid’s worth of tower defence shenanigans rather than bestriding the nations of the Earth like a colossus. That can’t be right, can it?

Werner Herzog Presents Werner He… (*gunshot*) Grizzly Man (DVD)
 
Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who spent 13 summers living among bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were killed by a bear.

(Much as with Steve “Man Who Teases Dangerous Animals For A Living Killed By Dangerous Animal He Was Teasing” Irwin it’s such a horribly predictable fate I’m not even sure that it counts as ironic.)

It’s fascinating stuff with some beautiful footage of the Alaskan wilderness in general and bears in particular. The opening scene, with Treadwell talking the camera, describing himself as a “gentle warrior” who’s “earned the trust” of the bears and will never be hurt by them leads you to think that he’s going to be portrayed as an absolutely colossal tool. In fact the film gives a much more nuanced, interesting picture of a divisive, remarkable, quixotic and thoroughly tragic figure.

A few of the interviews seem weirdly forced, even staged – every time the guy who did the autopsy on what was left of Timothy Treadwell’s body is on camera for instance, or the scene where Herzog listens to the audio recording of Treadwell’s last moments. But that aside, it’s a terrific film that I’d thoroughly recommend.