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So, I finally watched Transformers Revenge of the Fallen … what the hell was that mess?

The plot, what there was of it, was just beyond silly, and since it has already been ravaged just about everywhere you could think of, I thought I would just address the total disconnects from logic that happened.

Demolisher was destroyed in China

It seems that there were at least two of each Constructicon, which makes absolutely no sense.  Demolisher was the name of the big Decepticon destroyed in China, yet he shows up in Egypt to help form Devestator.

During the Devestator fight, there are also Constructicons in the foot battle in the village.  Mix Master (cement truck), Long Haul (green dump truck) and Rampage (bulldozer) are in both places at the same time.  Either there were two of each Constructicon (which nothing like that has ever happened anywhere in Transformers history with the exception of Generation 1 Decepticon planes, but each of them had different names and color schemes), or it is a total continuity error.  Yes, I realize it costs money for each new computer model, but come on, this was a bit obvious.

What happened to Wheelie?

Wheelie, the little blue RC truck, is with everyone when Jetfire forms the Space Bridge to Egypt.  You see him in Egypt when they arrive … and then he is never seen or mentioned again.  He plays an important part through the first two acts of the film, and then in the third act he is just dropped like a hot potato to never be heard from again.  Nice.

Okay … I lied … lets look at some of the script issues.

Does Leo Spitz serve any purpose?

Near as I can figure the character of Leo Spitz served only as comic relief and an excuse to get Sam and Mikaela back together with Simmons.  This could have been accomplished with Sam looking up info on the Web and stumbling across Simmons’ Web site.  Leo could have been completely eliminated from the script and you wouldn’t have missed a minute of plot development.

The National Security Agency character was totally unneeded.

Theodore Galloway, the American National Security Advisor, is another character that could have been totally eliminated. Replace him with General Morshower reluctantly conveying messages from the White House and you gain even more script space.  I think Michael Bay just always likes to have an annoying government character around to aggravate people.

Was I supposed to fear The Fallen?

He ran around for a few minutes, said some menacing things … got his ass kicked.  The whole movie was named for him and he was a total joke.

Why did the Twins change vehicle modes in the opening minutes?

Skids and Mudflap were the combined ice cream truck in China, they get home and immediately scan into new vehicle modes … why?  If anything screamed “lets add some more toys to the movie!”, this was it.

Sam tells Bumblebee he no longer needs a guardian

Sam walks into the garage and tells Bumblebee he no longer needs a guardian … while fireman are still extinguishing the fires from the fight Bumblebee just had with several mini-Decepticons that Sam yelled for him to protect him from.  Yep … all the danger is gone … because the firemen are right outside … where Mikaela is changing clothes …

Michael Bay has the memory of a gnat

Oh, wait, it’s just that he thinks his audience has no capability to remember anything five seconds after it happened.

There really are an endless stream of things you can say negatively about this movie, but what’s the point?  It made over $800 million worldwide, pre-production has started on the third film with Mr. Bay still in charge, so what does it all matter?  It will just be another giant suckfest.

As I’ve said before, I don’t care if movies totally disconnect from reality so long as they don’t do stupid things that insult the audience’s intelligence.  Disappearing characters, jumps in a film’s own established logic, etc are what irk me, and that is Mr. Bay in just about everything he does.

So, yeah … I canceled my order for the Barnes & Noble nook.

Back in November I informed all of you that I ordered a nook and I was looking forward to reviewing it for all of you.  I knew I was going to have to wait a while before I got it, but that was fine with me, I was prepared for it, but I really couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

… then the reviews started coming in.

I read one fairly harsh review somewhere last week, but I laughed it off and still felt secure in my purchase.  Then the AP wrote a pretty harsh review, but I’m not a huge fan of the AP so I took it with a grain of salt.  What I wasn’t ready for was the absolutely scathing review from The New York Times.

The review was so scathing it almost felt over the top, and then I got to to this segment on the second page:

So O.K., the Nook is a mess, clearly rushed out the door in hopes of stealing some of the Kindle’s holiday cheer. “We want to optimize everything quite a bit,” a product manager concedes.

When a product manager is saying “we want to optimize…”, that’s when I go and hit the cancel button on an order.  If someone whose livelihood depends on the product, and they are saying that it needs to be “optimized”, they basically have just spoken code for, “Look, we know it sucks and we rushed its release, but it is what it is.”

I admit it, I got sucked into the hyperbole, and even with one friend warning me (Hi, F … feel free to say “I told you so” at lunch this week) to wait for the reviews, I jumped in feet first, and this is what I get.  At least I was able to cancel it and I’m out from under what appears to be a beast of a device.

Sorry Barnes & Noble, I thought you had won me over, but then people actually touched the device.  Perhaps you should have made no one got to play with it prior to shipping?

So, after a week of playing a game I waited so long for, what did I think?

Let me just say right up front that I have NO delusions about this post influencing anyone on this game. This thing is a juggernaut that I could say “It literally kills puppies”, and people would still buy it.  Also, considering how many millions of copies have already sold, no one is going to really care, but I figured I might as well express my thoughts since I talked it up so much pre-launch.

Single-Player Game

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had a fairly good single player mode, and a fairly coherent plot.

… what went wrong this time?

The plot felt like something that would fit better in a season of 24 with conspiracies, shadowy government plots, rogue military officers, double crosses and more.  At least in the first game you were working towards an actual enemy, and this one just felt like Infinity Ward, the makers of the game, had a bunch of random ideas for scenes and then went, “how do we string these together?”

There was also the issue that this had to be one of the shortest single player games i have ever gone through.  It only took me about 5 & 1/2 hours, and considering that I am not some hard core gamer, that is just ridiculously short.  The game play is solid with excellent controls, and the game is gorgeous to look at, but it is just way too short.

Significantly missing from this game was any sense of gravitas.  While the first game made me actually move to the edge of my seat a few times while in a firefight, this time I just felt like I was being led by the hand through an amusement park.  During one of the major chase scenes I was trying my hardest to catch the villain, only to realize at the end I was never going to be allowed to catch him so I could be led to the next scene.

Then there is “that” scene.  The scene that is causing the game to be pulled from shelves in Russia, and leading to talking heads wringing their hands on news shows.  While the ‘No Russian’ scene is essential to the “plot” (I use the term loosely), and there is a way to skip it, people are still freaking out over it.  Folks … it’s a video game, get over it.  The scene is not glamorized in any way if you actually bother to listen to the mission briefing before it.

In short, if you aren’t going to play online, I would skip the game, but as every one knows, Call of Duty games get their real value in the multi-player modes.

Multiplayer Game

Holy …

Infinity Ward basically took everything you loved about the last multi-player in CoD4, and turned the knobs up to 11.

Weapons – Better … really, that’s all you can say.  They are better.  They look better, they handle better, the sound effects are improved and in general they just seem like they are all around better.

The fact they also made your secondary weapons more broad helps a lot.  Instead of waiting for the perk that allows you to carry more than a pistol, you can carry machine pistols, shotguns or pistols from the outset.  It makes a lot more sense from a military perspective, being restricted to pistols never made much sense.

Play – The “Host Ended The Match” pain in the butt is a thing of the past as the host will now migrate to another player if the host should happen to leave.  The matchmaking also seems to be a bit quicker, but that could be chalked up to the millions of people currently playing.

Experience Points – This may be my one complaint about the multi-player.  There are so many ways to earn experience now that the screen always seems to be busy telling you the 500 ways you just earned some more XP.  ”+50 for ending a kill streak … + 100 for revenge … +100 for longshot …” you get the idea.

The XP just flows so fast it seems like Infinity Ward may have coddled the lower rung players a bit much in giving them faster ways to rank up.  I am not the best player, I admit it, but even I think they went a bit overboard in how many ways you can earn them now.

Grenades – Not too get too specific, but … oh thank you almighty Infinity Ward for getting rid of the rain of grenades we all suffered through various maps in the previous games.

Maps – The maps seem a bit more complex, and a bit “blind corner” happy, but they do seem a bit more balanced and “realistic”.  By that I mean you really do have to be aware of your complete surroundings from looking up at roof tops a lot more than you did in the last game, checking more balconies, preceding with a lot more caution through alleys and so on.  In short, these maps are not suited to people who just want to run without thought, there are consequences to just about all of your actions.

Perks – We now earn XP for using perks?  We even earn basically for just having a perk installed that has nothing to do with what you are doing … er, okay, that makes no sense, but whatever.

Multiplayer Conclusion – If you liked CoD4, don’t worry, you’ll still love this one.

Conclusion

It basically depends on what you want from the game.  If you just want it for the single player, skip it.  If you are the least bit interested in the multiplayer aspects, it’s a must buy.

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

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The Batman was yet another series based on the Caped Crusader, but how does it measure up against other animated efforts to bring him to the small screen?

Following up on my overviews of Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond comes the early 21st century animated version of Batman, a series simply entitled The Batman.

Running from September 11, 2004 to March 8, 2008 on the Kids WB animation block for five seasons, The Batman was faithful to the source material while also finding a way to do a  re-imagninaing of the character all at the same time.

Confused?  Don’t worry, so was I.

While the series kept the basics of Bruce Wayne being Batman and Alfred as his butler, pretty much everything else was turned topsy-turvey by this series: The Joker was a barefooted wild man, the Riddler had numerous henchmen and a different origin, Clayface was a police detective that was a childhood friend of Bruce and so on.  There were also changes such as Batgirl appearing on the scene before Robin which threw me for a total loop as that is so outside of the normal timeline.

The animation style took some getting used to (example to the right), since I had come to love the slickness and stylized versions in Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond, this was by fat the most “cartoony” looking.  Does it mean it was bad?  Of course not, just had more of a “kid friendly” vibe to it, which is why I think a lot of people skipped it.

Of all the animated Batman series of the past two decades (not counting Brave & The Bold since I have seen a whopping one episode), this was my least favorite, but that isn’t to say it was bad, it was just the most inconsistent.  Characters came and went with no real rhyme or reason (Det. Yin had a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of season 2, and then we never saw her again, although she was mentioned in a “future” episode as being the new police commissioner), continuity seemed secondary and in general the writing was very uneven.  It was still watchable despite these nitpicks, but if you have to pick just one series to watch, I think it will always be Batman: The Animated Series coming out on top.

Disclosure: Hey, FTC, no one gave me a flippin’ thing to write this up, and I paid for the DVDs out of my own pocket.  To my readers, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can read about it here.

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

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What happens when not-so-smart aliens end up on Earth with no way to leave? You get humans at their finest, of course.

District 9 is the story of an alien ship that arrived over Johannesburg, South Africa in 1982, and then went on to just hover over the city for three months with no indication of life on board.  Humans, being a curious lot, decided to finally fly up to the ship and cut their way in.  What they found was over 1 million aliens living in squalor, rife with malnutrition and slowly dying.  In short, they found a ship full of refugees.

The humans, so well known for being a caring group of souls, set up a camp for them named “District 9″.  As time progressed, and people grew more fearful of these visitors and their powerful weapons, the camp turned more into a prison with a shanty town interior.  Nigerian gangsters also moved in, taking advantage of the aliens by selling them over-priced cat food, their favorite snack, and setting up inter-species prostitution.

Now some 20 years have passed, and the MNU (Multinational United), a private military contractor, which has overseen District 9 from the start, has been told to relocate the aliens to an encampment some 240 kms outside of Johannesburg.  The citizens of the city are thrilled, but the aliens don’t seem to even understand what is being said to them.

Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), an obviously not-so-intelligent worker for MNU, is put in charge of the operation due to his being married to the bosses daughter (daddy denies this, but it’s fairly clear), and on his first day he gets infected by an alien virus.

Beyond that story point you’ll have to watch the movie, but don’t be fooled, this movie isn’t about the science fiction as much as it is about themes: themes of segregation, xenophobia, the good will of humanity, treating those different than yourself as equals and so on.

This move is overflowing with themes, and it actually handles them all rather deftly, but then you get to the third act of the film, and it seems like the decision was made, “Okay, everyone learned their lessons about humanity, start blowing stuff up!”  While it was still enjoyable, the third act of the film is so different from the previous two that it is almost jarring.  There is still a little bit of closure to the story arc of van de Merwe, but it really is all about blowing stuff up and setting up a potential sequel.

Let me say there were two stand out things about this film beyond the story, and that was Sharlto Copley and the special effects.  Mr. Copley has been involved in the South African film industry for some time, but this is the first time he has ever gotten attention on a world wide scale.  His performance as the initially unlikable Wikus van de Merwe really carries you through this film.  There is one scene I don’t want to give to say too much about it and ruin it for you (it’s the scene with the “eggs”), that his performance is so believable, so filled with glee at what he is doing, that you feel like you are actually watching a documentary and you detest this man.

The second thing, the special effects, were phenomenal.  For a film with a $30 million budget, it looked as good as anything coming out of Hollywood in the $175 million budget range nowadays.  A lot of studios could take a lesson from this film and how to scale back on their budgets and still look utterly fantastic.

Lastly, director Neill Blomkamp is going to have a very long career in front of him judging by this project.  He has a fresh, gritty style that is engrossing and quickly transports you into the story.

Overall an entertaining film, even with the run-of-the-mill third act, that I will gladly watch again many times over the coming years.

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

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***MAJOR SPOILERS***

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***MAJOR SPOILERS***

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